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Nark
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Cabramatta, NSW
Registered:
May 2002

Re: Want to rip microsoft off? Legally!

Thu, 07 October 2004 02:31

Norbie wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 11:59

Nark wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 10:32

Software packages used to work absolutely perfectly before Windows came out.

I know you're a one-eyed anti-Microsoft crusader, but come on, that's a bit much!

Me? One-eyed? Never! Laughing

I still stand by my comment, maybe not the "absolutely perfectly" part, but I *have* seen a change in what people consider an acceptible amount of buggy behaviour in software since Windoze came out.

Joshstix wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 12:11

I think we need to take a long hard look at where the instability comes from here. If you have one hardware configuration only and tame applications running on it then you can have a super stable OS. This was the case with Amiga, it's also the case with Mac. Microsoft don't have this luxury as they make an OS to run on any crap hardware with any crap saftware on it.

If MS had the opportunity to make an OS for the same kind of situation as Amiga and Mac then it would be just as stable. Hang on they do have one, when was the last time you saw an Xbox GSOD. The Xbox runs a Win2K kernel and yes if it gets errors it will bring up a green screen of death. I can't say I've seen a single instance of this happening however.

This is true to an extent, but the Amiga OS actually did have to cater for a wider variety of video cards (used for video capture etc).
But, yes, the variety of hardware for PC OSes is much wider.
I don't believe this can be used as an excuse for a flakey OS though. Bad drivers can lead to system instabilities, but I don't think this is much of a cause for Windoze instability problems. Performance, yes, but not instability. But then again, Linux can perform much better with the same hardware variety problems. Even more, the drivers are mostly reverse engineered stuff written by geeks in their garages.

Joshstix wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 12:11

Microsoft has several weaknesses in the OS market firstly they have to offer a one size fits all operating system that will work with and for the lowest common denominator. People expect backwards compatability between their current Windows XP machine and software they bought for Win3.11. When MS make changes to improve security such as they have with Windows XP SP2 they get burned for causing some applications that are not secure to stop working, however if they didn't do this they get burned for not fixing security issues.

I read an absolutely amazing article on a similar subject. They do stuff like detect whether a certain program is running and run workarounds for bugs in those programs! MS provide hacks around bugs in other companies's software!

Joshstix wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 12:11

The other weakness is the people that use the product. Lets take Blaster as an example. The patch for that issue had been available on windows update for 3 months before the worm hit. However there are still people being infected by it. Now is that a problem with the operating system or with the users, any OS will have patches released to fix security issues Linux is no different, the difference is that paople using other OSes bother to keep the machine up to date.

I don't think you can fully blame the users though. MS have been known to sit on bugs for 9 months before providing a patch. And of course another 9 months for Windoze admins to apply the patch... hehe

Joshstix wrote on Thu, 07 October 2004 12:11

Lastly one of the biggest problems for security issues faced by MS is people just want there to be problems. What happens when exploits are found in Linux? They get reported and fixed. What happens when people find exploits in Windows? They write an exploit/worm/virus.

The user base is a factor here too... Windoze is a nice target because you can compromise so many more systems with your exploit/worm/virus.
Although, there are fundamental differences in the security models. Windoze was not written to be secure. All the patches have been trying to put security over a core which was basically meant for single users with admin access.

Most exploits found for Unix aren't to do with the kernel. Whereas Windoze is the other way around (this is helped a lot by the fact that IE is part of the kernel).

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