<OT> MS finally gets a little smarter

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Sep 06, 2003, James McDonald wrote:
...
>So as usual I discover the Linux system is inherently better than the 
>old windows system. Thanks kurt most informative...

Windows has fundamental design flaws that date back to its origins as a
BDPL (Brain Damaged Program Loader) for hobbyist systems that never were
designed to work on a network.  One might use the analogy comparing Windows
to *ix systems which were designed from day one to be used in a hostile
network environment to an ultralite aircraft and commercial airliners.
Hanging big engines and a lot of seats on an ultralite won't make it viable
platform to transport people commercially.

The Windows versions that are base on NT have the potential of being more
secure, but Microsoft's policies of making everything very easy for the
ignorant user (e.g. executables in e-mail ActiveX, and other scripting that
can be executed automatically) have effectively rendered that potential
security worthless.

There are also basic software engineering principles that are ignored in
Windows.  David Korn, author of the ksh Korn Shell, made a presentation to
the Seattle Unix Group several years describing the problems he ran into
while writing uwin, a program to run a Unix environment under Windows.  One
thing he talked about that I found appalling is that some system calls had
differing APIs (Application Program Interfaces) on different versions of
Windows, and worse, different on the same Windows version depending on the
patches applied.  To put this more plainly, the same system call might take
different arguments and/or have different returns.

None of the above addresses the basic instability problems in all versions
of Windows and Microsoft Applications which result in frequent program
crashes, unscheduled reboots, memory leaks.  These are related to the poor
software engineering practices above rather than the fundamental security
flaws inherent in Windows.

Bill
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