How about addressing some root flaws?
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| phsolide Aug 20, 2007 9:31 AM EDT |
Jeez, fewer security flaws - how about addressing some of the basic flaws in Windows. For the last 10 months, I have developed under Windows (XP, to be precise) for the first time in my life. That's right, I made it to 2007 without ever seriously using Windows. Windows has some really basic flaws that have contributed to its crappy security record, and indeed to its crappy software: 1. XP doesn't seem to really be happy with multiple users. This leads to goofiness like "Remote Desktop Protocol", I believe. Feh. 2. Drive letters, or more accurately, user-visible disk volume mount points. This leads to crap like "My Computer" - a hack to overcome some earlier sloppiness. 3. Carriage-return/linefeed line-ending tokens. Again, a hack to overcome sloppy coding (no TTY driver, I guess) which just leads to endless ramifications when communicating. 4. Lack of a window manager as a separate process, leading to locked-up windows, and windows that can't move around, etc. 5. Crappy process model that doesn't include a way to get the OS kernel to kill a process. This "every process has an event queue" thing really causes a lot of problems down the road. 6. Lack of fork/exec in favor of multiple versions of "spawn" or "SYS$CREATE" or "NtCreateProcess" or whatever. Since processes don't have a parent/child relationship, this creates problems of non-responding processes, etc etc etc. 7. Opening a file locks it by default. This is exactly opposite the approach that Unix took way back when, and it CLEARLY causes more problems than it's worth, as it seems that this locking is what causes the need for multiple reboot to upgrade anything. Oh, wait, if you changed any of these it would no longer be Windows. Sorry to waste your time. |
| tracyanne Aug 20, 2007 2:02 PM EDT |
Yep that's Windows, the platform I'm forced to develop on. Add to that list. Crappy memory management, which causes a 2 Gig of RAM 3.2GHz machine to have the performance of a p3 350 by the end of the day, actually sooner if you happen to have a lot of applications open at the same time. |
| hkwint Aug 20, 2007 2:43 PM EDT |
Please, go on, like this thread! What about a lack of a trusted software repository, which is why they install such loads of crapware? Or not having editable config files? |
| jdixon Aug 20, 2007 6:56 PM EDT |
> What about a lack of a trusted software repository... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ :) > Or not having editable config files? The registry is editable. That's what regedit is for. :) Or are you going to complain about vipw and vigr too? Yes, I know those are poor replacements for the real thing, but they do fit the definitions. You'll have to do better than that. |
| tuxchick Aug 20, 2007 7:29 PM EDT |
jdixon, except how much can you trust IE to know if it's visiting a genuine or spoofed URL? Hahaha, not at all! Calling Regedit a poor tool is such a masterpiece of understatement. :) |
| phsolide Aug 20, 2007 8:01 PM EDT |
Jeez, I completely forgot to complain bitterly about the 70s-style paging algorithm. The first edition of "Inside Windows NT" seemed to describe something akin to Mach 2.5's paging with the admixture of per-process page frames. Thanks for reminding me. And the registry does suck pretty badly. I mean, I read most of Peter Szor's anti-virus book a few years ago, and I could barely believe the baroqueness of the operating system he described. After having used it for a while, I now believe. I have no mouth and I must scream. |
| dinotrac Aug 21, 2007 1:01 AM EDT |
>I have no mouth and I must scream. Is that like having an itch when your arms are in a cast? Or having to work with more than 1 or 2 things on a Windows box? |
| jdixon Aug 21, 2007 5:29 AM EDT |
> ...except how much can you trust IE to know if it's visiting a genuine or spoofed URL? TC, Firefox seems to work fine with Microsoft's download site. They'll even graciously allow you to run the genuine Windows verification tool using it. :) I'll admit that they don't support firefox on their update site (there are ways around that, windizupdate for example, but they're kludges), so you're pretty much stuck with IE there. > Calling Regedit a poor tool is such a masterpiece of understatement. :) I'll grant that. However, my point still stands that complaints about Windows flaws need to be genuine ones. Use easily refuted claims will not get us anywhere. |
| tuxchick Aug 21, 2007 6:45 AM EDT |
Points to phsolide for an awesome literary reference :) |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!