Re: Bill Gate's Claims

Hullo, gotta throw in my 2 cents on this.  FWIW, I'm pro *nix and anti
Windows for systems that matter but some corrections are required here...


 <snip - military use *nix true - see also Trusted IRIX and Cray UNIX
etc...
>


> Microsoft doesn't have the best products around.  They have the best 
> MARKETED products around.  There is one Microsoft product that I 
> like, which is Visio. It, however, is the exception. Micorosoft stuff 

FWIW Visio was written by someone else - M$ bought the cpny.  It's nice
but it crashes and corrupts open files.  :-)

> 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 
> since Windows 95.  The whole thing still depends on DOS, which is 
> archaic and needs to be disposed of as it is the source of many of 
> their ills (buffer overflows and memory based exploits).  The 
> internals aren't that much different on Windows XP and Windows 95. 

Not so.  WinXP is actually NT 5.1 (or there abouts).

Aside: Windows NT was originally NT OS/2 and started with the IBM/MS joint
development agreement when IBM needed an OS/2 for PowerPC.  NT still runs
16 OS/2 apps- they ditched HPFS (OS/2's filesystem) support in NT 3.51.

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

Again not quite true.  NT's kernel was put together by people poached from
DEC before Compaq bought it.  These folks were behind the VMS OS which
lead to the rumour of WNT being one letter from VMS....

Similarities can be found - both OSes went for a split memory model. 
Kernel memory was paged in upper half of process space and user memory in
lower half.  The really neat thing NT did was in the kernel hardware
abstraction, deferred procedure calls and neat interrupt-level based
kernel thread scheduling.  That's why NT's kernel has an ENORMOUS memory
footprint - check it out on any Win2K or XP box.  There's tens of
megabytes consumed by the kernel that's not pageable!

And so ends my contribution.


Warwick