A New Microsoft Fellow
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A New Microsoft Fellow About 10 years ago that I attended a seminar on digging into NT 4.0. At the time there was some controvery about Windows 4.0 Workstation and Server and the differences. With a substantial cost difference, people wanted to determine if it was worth buying server for many tasks. There were some fundamental limits with Workstation like connection counts and more. One guy actually documented the differences between the products and how you could actually turn Workstation into Server by altering settings, digging into the registry and some other amazing things.
This guy was running the seminar and he showed us some interesting tools for digging into NT 4.0 and determining what was happening under the covers. Then he showed us how he figured some things out by connecting two laptops with a serial cable. He then started NT 4.0 on one and connected to it from the second machine with a debugger and could actually work through what was happening in NT 4.0. It was amazing to watch, even though I didn't understand much of what he explained.
The individual was Mark Russinovich, one of the founders or Winternals and SysInternals, two of the premier Windows utility sites in the world. Over the years I have seen almost every Windows adminstrator I've worked with use some tool from Mark and praise him for his work.
This week Microsoft acquired Sysinternals and Winternals and Mark, who will join the staff as a fellow. Over the years I've followed Mark's writing and blog, both of which have been valuable resources for better understanding what is happening on my systems. Now that Microsoft employs Mark, many people are worried, myself included, that the flow if information will be diminished, or worse, censored.
I think it's great for Mark and I hope that he got a nice payday for the company. He's certainly earned it. I just hope Microsoft will continue to allow him to publish as he has done in the past.
Steve Jones
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I'm truly shocked about this. I hope the supply of great material from Mark doesn't dry up.
Which of the two blokes in the above picture is he by the way?
Jamie Thomson
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson -
Ack!
There goes the neighborhood.
While I can see some of their tools finding their way into Microsoft O/Ses, I can't see most of them doing so. I worry that the free utilities, which I've used to save myself work and occasionally to wow a supervisor, may all become "registerware" or some other heavy-handed Microsoft "we must know who you are and that you are licensed" mechanism.
I'd really hate to see all of this wind up behind the Microsoft Genuine barrier.
Truly depressing.
Oh, and he's the guy on the right, I think.
-- J.T.
"I may not always know what I'm talking about, and you may not either."
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I too have used his utilities and have read with interest his work on rootkits, and I echo the concern that, having been assimilated into the borg, we may never hear from him again.
I have to admit I have always been puzzled and amazed at how he could come up with utilities for windows that should have been part of the OS, e.g. pskill, when MS only had them as part of a resource kit, or not at all.
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Steve,
You're actually concerned that you may have to pay for a product you're using?? Despite the animosity toward the Microsoft behemoth, Windows was not designed to be freeware. Ante up!
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Good for Mark and MS. I suspect both Mark and MS know what they are doing here. People love to rail against things they don't understand by dreaming up all sorts of consipiracy theories - witness the "vast right wing conspiracy" or "drive by media" from two of the leading political stalwarts on the left and right, respectively. In reality, life is just complex. Mark is one of those rare individuals who has managed to delve deeply into that complexity of the Windows NT kernel and make it understandable to us hoi polloi. Mark will keep his sincerity and develop tools that explore this complexity. MS will continue to market its products in the way that generates the most revenue (they are a business with shareholders - duh!). We may be have to pay a little more for them, but that's business. It's not in the MS business plan to gouge its customers. SQL Server is 1/2 the price of Oracle and Windows Server is vastly cheaper than Sun. Be happy that Mark shared his tools for the time that we had them.
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John, are you familiar with the sysinternals website? If not, please take a look. These are FREE tools that Winternals made available to the Windows community for troubleshooting, analysis and recovery. The shoehorn into their commercial (pay for) products. If you want all the bells and whistles and really need to recover your systems, protect your systems, etc... you have to buy their premium products.
What we are all worrying about is the disappearance of the free tools. Having to pay for them just seems alien after all this time (since 1996, I believe) that they have been free.
-- J.T.
"I may not always know what I'm talking about, and you may not either."
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He's the same guy that started the discovery of SONY's rootkit isn't it?
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I'm certainly not worried about paying for utilities. Not sure where you got that impression. I've purchased his admin toolkit before when I've been in a jam.
I'm more concerned he won't be allowed to publish tips, tricks, etc. The flow will not be free as in speech. Free or not free as in beer is fine.
Mark's on the right.
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I think you're right. This is typical Microsoft style... if somebody is a threat to your trade secrets... purchase them.
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While I am sure Microsoft has done just that to keep trade secrets or market leadership, I'm disappointed in Microsoft's "Buy-and-integrate" approach.
Rather than buying good products and technologies for the current user base they buy them to add, usually changed drastically, to their own products. By the time they get around to doing that there is usually someone else on the market with a third party product that does better or Microsoft has so completely integrated it into another product that many of the original users are left out in the cold looking for a new solution.
Look at what happened to Lookoutsoft. Lookout is great product for indexing Outlook and documents. While their old app is still available it is no longer being developed. Microsoft bought them and is adding the technology to MSN Search or something like that. Luckily, the original is still available.
I wonder if tools like some of Sysinternals, should they be implemented in a Microsoft O/S, would be available independently at all or if we'd all have to upgrade our operating systems to use them.
The other side of that is bloat. Do all users really need these apps built-in to Windows? How many casual PC users do you know who use any disk defragmentation utility, including the built-in one? Now how many do you know who know how to use perfmon?
I'd love to see Microsoft make a clean, streamlined O/S that comes with a resource disk of utilities like the Sysinternals utilities. However, Microsoft seems to like bloat and I'm sure much of what they bought in Winternals will wind up in whatever comes after Vista.
-- J.T.
"I may not always know what I'm talking about, and you may not either."
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