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 -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.'' -- Thomas Jefferson to James Lewis, Jr., 1798. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
