Help us defend against VMS!

[Erland Sommarskog]

Barry Schein goes along flaming against VMS and closes:
>This is not a religious flame, I have presented myriad factual basis
>for my arguments. VMS people like to claim religious flame and
>"chocolate vs vanilla!" arguments. This is because they cannot deal

Some of the "facts" are not just true, but Barry goes on as they were
refutable. I shall comments some few points that I found wrong. (And,
actually, I think Barry could make a good televangelist. :-)

>Unix systems are relatively bundled, beyond mere hardware
>considerations most Unix systems right out of the box are completely
>useable. It can be supplemented in many significant ways with free or
>nearly free (eg.  ~$100 for an entire campus) software. VMS is heavily
>unbundled, from day one if you want so much as a compiler you begin
>layering heavy costs. And you'll pay a separate price for acquiring

Now, watch it here. A Unix system comes with a bunch of compilers
that's true. VMS does not. But what about the quality of the compilers?
My experience of Unix compilers restricts to the Fortran and Pascal
compiler that comes with 4.3 BSD on our VAX. The code they produce
have a speed which hardly is acceptable for procduction. And if you
want other languages, Ada for instance, you'll have to buy that
separately also for Unix.

>The claim that Unix is somehow less secure than VMS is a red herring.

Ah, good televangelist preaching!

>privilege you won't want to give to a user (I'm not sure I want to go
>into the whole mess of the zillions of VMS "privilege" bits which
>you'll never fully understand the implications of and will almost
>surely end up giving away the store because some reasonable thing can
>only be accomplished by giving a user some dangerous privilege bit,

But, hey, you argue for Unix for that yuo can keep the security because
you can have the source code. But with the same arguments you use against
the VMS privilieges, can be used against the code: Will you ever fully
understand it? Zillions of line of code. (Zillion seems to mean 30+ here.)

>Unix's single privilege scheme [root or not root] is much more secure,
>you just don't give out root privs and you know exactly what can and
>cannot be done by the two sets of users on your system, who wants to
>calculate the permutations of 30+ priv bits and what they might imply
>singly and in combination?.)

Sure. I also use one single screwdriver, no matter the size of the screws.
Some of the screws get damaged, so what? It's much simpler that way.

Seriuosly: The VMS privilieges makes it possible to just use those
you need at the moment. And for giving away: Very few students ever
need more than NETMBX and TMPMBX. They should have *very* good reasons
for getting any other.

>VMS. There's some on-line help in VMS but it's designed to sell
>manuals or supplement them, the details are always missing
>(purposely.)
>
>Most Unix systems come with on-line, complete manual sets with the
>exact same text used to produce the printed manuals.  Thus, what's the
>cost to a student for Unix manuals? For $0 (zero) they can get

This is a damned lie!

If I look up the man-page for the Pascal compiler on our machine I
learn about the compiler, but for the langauge as such I am referred
to a separate document, which is not on the machine, at least the man-
page gives me no reference.

If you do HELP PASCAL on VAX machine you'll be able to get the most
of the language definition. OK, the complete definition is in the
orange binder, but you make it very good with the HELP facility.

And for the Unix with the on-line help exactly as the printed ones:
When you read from a terminal you're more likely to skim for certain
information. Plunging through a long man-page is no fun. VMS' hierarical
HELP is much better here.

And this brings us on to another issue which Barry does not mention:
Unix may have some clever tricks, but it's user interface is really
arcane. One-letter options is certainly not state-of-the-art.

I could continue, but I shall not. I think a campus should have
some Unix systems since they are quite frequent in the real world.
They should also have some non-Unix systems, since Unix systems
are so frequent in the real world. The student should get more than
one view.





-- 
Erland Sommarskog       
ENEA Data, Stockholm        
sommar at enea.UUCP           "Souvent pour s'amuser les hommes d'equipages
                            and it's like talking to a stranger" -- H&C.