Re: Bill Gate's Claims

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Jimi Thompson wrote:

> central offices?  They are required by law to have 5 nines of up time
> and they are quite open about not using Windows because of stability
> issues.

	There are multiple issues involved, and stability is just one.
There's also scalability issues and so on.  The fact that internal hotmail
migration documents talk about an installd freebsd base of around 60mb
whereas even with the developers help, they could not get win2k under 1gb.

	However...

> on the whole tends to suck when compared to comparable products from
> other vendors.  Their OS is buggy and in need of a major re-write

	Like?  If word sucks, then all the other wysiwyg word processors
pretty much suck too.  Ditto for the rest of the office products, and
you're stuck with TeX.

> since Windows 95.  The whole thing still depends on DOS, which is

	I think you're mistaken, the NT series (nt3.x, 4.x, win2k, xp, and
now 2003) is a completely separate code base.  Remember, Bill Gates tried
to hire Dave Cutler from DEC for a long time, but Cutler told Gates that he
doesn't work on toy machines.  The fact that you have a "cmd" dos box in
win2k doesn't mean that it _needs_ DOS.

> their ills (buffer overflows and memory based exploits).  The
> internals aren't that much different on Windows XP and Windows 95.

	That's where you're wrong.  With some 70,000 to 80,000+ APIs,
there's a WHOLE lotta difference between win95 and xp :)  And since it uses
the NT base instead of the dos/win95 base, it is very different.

> The best features from Windows 2000 were stolen straight out of *nix.

	Nope.  Dave Cutler was the head of VMS development, so the best
features were previously implemented in VMS.  For example, folks who have
done a low level analysis of disk structures say that ntfs is very similar
to vms's fs.

[other good descriptions deleted]

> Does Microsoft have it's place?  Yes, it belongs on the desktop since

	Microsoft does have some very talented folks.  However, it is sad
that some not so talented folks are in charge.  And those who do not do
anything, or worse, propagate shitty software, are kept around.  For an
example, read "The Software Conspiracy" by Minasi about NT3's video
subsystem.

	What I found interesting was that www.theregister.co.uk reported a
couple of years back that Alchin declared at the Intel Developer's
Conference a couple of years back that they had eradicated buffer overflows
in XP!  Of course, the first hotfix for XP was a buffer overflow.  So,
either he was a liar, or he was lied to (in which case, he's either
incompetent, or should have fired some folks).  Really sad that the
mainstream press did not pick this up, and grill Microsoft on it.

	Someone should gather up all these quotes and put up a webpage, and
let Bill Gates/Microsoft respond to it 8-)

-Tai
-- 
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"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural" - Craig Mundie, CTO Microsoft