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The NT Files
BUGS & HIGH PROFILE
FAILURES
Win
2000 beta dogged by application
incompatibilities
Roughly 40% of current Windows NT applications won't run on
the current beta release of Windows 2000, well below the
company's modest target goals. (PC Week, 5 Feb
99)
Bug
slows impeachment e-mail to House
members
A failure of a two Windows NT-based e-mail servers struck
the U.S. House of Representatives just as they began
debating an historic vote on the impeachment of the
President. E-mail sent by constituents was lost to a bug in
Microsoft Exchange which can produce a continuous loop and
undelivered mail. The failure left some Congressional
offices without e-mail services for most of the week. (CNN,
16 Dec 1998)
Extensive E-Mail Blackout
at Naval Postgraduate School Blamed on Windows NT
Directive
The Naval Postgraduate School's Windows NT Exchange e-mail
services failed during the last week of October 1998,
causing a week-long e-mail service outage and the
destruction of e-mail en route. The failure was due to
limitations inherent in Microsoft's Exchange software. The
failure came as NPS attempted to move to the Navy's IT-21
standards and in the same week that NPS Superintendent, RADM
Robert Chaplin declared that all Unix e-mail services would
be eliminated at NPS. (submitted anonymously by an NPS
official)
Virus Protection Software
Disables Windows NT System at
Boeing
On October 7, 1998 the routine process of running anti-virus
software on a Windows NT server at the Boeing Corporation
shut the system down. Evidently, the software identified
Windows NT itself as a virus and disabled it. (Various
Boeing e-mails)
NT
Service Pack 4 Hits a Few
Bumps
A "service pack" is Microsoft's corporate buzzword for "bug
fix." Service Pack 4 for Windows NT 4.0 does fix bugs -- an
amazing 600 of them. But according to ZDNET, installing this
"fix" can cause a plethora of other problems, including
"glitches that range from cosmetic to fatal." Perform a
complete backup of your system first, and keep your
emergency repair disc close at hand, the experts advise.
(ZDNET, 3 November 1998)
Windows NT Crashes U.S. Dept. of Labor
Nationwide Network
A major
network crash occurred on or
around September 15, 1998 permanently destroying much of the
Department of Labor's immigration records at the San
Francisco and New York offices. Other offices were out of
commission long enough to postpone many green card
applications and other labor/immigration processing.
According to the Office of the Inspector General's (OIG)
announcement,
this event was due to the selection of Microsoft's Windows
NT to run the system, a product that is not capable of
sustained, enterprise-level reliability. (Various Federal
government sources)
Software
glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the
water
The US Navy's so-call "Smart Ship technology" left the Aegis
missile cruiser USS Yorktown dead in the water off the coast
of Cape Charles, Va. for several hours. The shutdown of the
ship's propulsion was credited to a database overflow in a
Windows NT system. The crash was caused by the inability of
the OS to properly handle division by zero. Said Anthony
DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet
Technical Support Center, "Using Windows NT, which is known
to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to
hoping that luck will be in our favor." The Navy is still
expected to spend $138 million expanding the "Smart Ship"
program to the entire Aegis class, and to other ships in the
fleet. (Government Computer News, 13 July 1998)
Microsoft flies in
anti-bug team to aid NatWest [no link]
Serious computer failures plague the
UK bank NatWest, resulting in losses of ATM services and
other widespread disruptions. Bugs in Microsoft's Windows NT
technology are blamed. (Times, 8 July 1998)
Solaris
calls Hotmail shots for
Microsoft
Microsoft replaces Windows NT with Sun's Solaris operating
system to run the Hotmail web-based e-mail service it
purchased in December 1997, after Microsoft's efforts to run
the system on NT proved unsuccessful. Says an anonymous
source, "The engineering team did its best to run NT - and
failed." (VNU Business Publications, 22 April
1998)
Published: 21 July 1998; Last revised: 20
February 1999
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Microsoft is a company that is desperately
resisting change. Its strategy is two-tiered. One is to
desperately hang onto what it's got: making the operating
system important even though we're moving into a world where
the OS becomes steadily less important. At the same time, it
is desperately looking for the next high-growth field that
it'll make money on. So when the OS finally does start to
decline, it will find a new field. It's targeted two areas:
one is media and the other is services. Everything it's
doing is going into that. It is a classic case of a
change-hating company; it is desperately trying to retard
change.
PAUL SAFFO, Institute for the
Future
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