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Adventures With Microsoft Security Update Support | 49 comments (49 topical) | Post A Comment
Are we sure Microsoft was the villian?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#16)
by LetzRole on Wed Jun 22, 2005 at 06:58:30 PM PDT

I wonder if people stop to consider their own culpability in these matters. It is almost always the operator's error or some buggy 3rd rate software from a pirate factory or the like that corrupts the install related environment. Power failures / spikes/ improper shutdowns are all sources of corruption. Also, the junk people tend to leave hanging around in their file structure makes it a miracle the machines function as well as they do. People seem to think they can expect the computer to operate under any circumstances with no regard for how they maintain it or use it, as if its supposed to be bullet proof. Unreasonable expectations lead to unjustly defaming the supplier, i.e. Microsoft or whomever. Most of the time, the true villian can be found in the bathroom mirror. Making software so it is idiot proof is an idiot's concept of a solution.

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"3rd rate software"[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#17)
by sconeu on Wed Jun 22, 2005 at 08:00:45 PM PDT

<I>some buggy 3rd rate software from a pirate factory</I>

You mean like Symantec?  90% of the time you have to disable Symantec AV /Norton AV to install Visual Studio.

Oh wait, NAV *is* buggy 3rd rate software....

--
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America.
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3rd rate software[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#24)
by Anonymous User on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 07:16:55 AM PDT

No, he's correct. 3rd rate buggy software from a pirate factory describes Microsoft perfectly. So, yes it is that 3rd rate software causing the problem, just as the original poster implied. And before you get going on the pirate part, just ask any of the small software companies Bill has stolen from about the piracy they commit.

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I agree with a little of what you said[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#20)
by ekuns on Thu Jun 23, 2005 at 04:34:15 PM PDT

It is almost always the operator's error or some buggy 3rd rate software from a pirate factory or the like that corrupts the install related environment.

That's a fairly extreme statement, and I have to disagree. Yes, there are many cases where people install cracked software (which comes along with who knows what viruses) or people misconfigure their machines. All of that happens. But to say it is almost always that is to let Microsoft off the hook. There are many operating systems out there, and Microsoft Windows is by far one of the most susceptible to these sorts of problems. You might claim that people using the other operating systems tend to be more computer savvy. (And I do not just mean Linux, but also MacOS, the various UNIX operating systems, VAX VMS for students, and also including experience from the older Amiga and NeXT and other computers.) There may be an element of that, but not to such a degree as to explain the problems experienced under Windows that are not experienced to the same degree under other operating systems present and past.

Microsoft software in and of itself is quite capable of corrupting the machine. I've known people to have problems like that described here on fresh and totally legal Windows installations. And I am talking about computer savvy people.

Thus, I agree that there are a lot of people out there who do not know how to manage their machine very well, and who install a lot of malware with or without awareness of doing so. But to say that this is the majority of the problem is to overstate the case enormously.



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OS is reponsible for its own health[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#21)
by xyzzy on Thu Jun 23, 2005 at 05:29:29 PM PDT

The reason it is called an 'Operating System' is that it is the software responsible for operating the computer. If it is corrupted, the OS should be able to detect this and get the enviornment back to a known-good state. A fundamental problem with Windows is that there is nothing that 'owns' the enviornment that can make this determination, and manage the repair process. Windows should be able to pop up a message saying 'There is a problem with your enviorment. Please insert the "Windows Utility CD" and run WindowsRepair.EXE'; this would find the corrupted DLLs, registry settings, and the like, repair them, and get the user back up and running. I realize this is a pipe dream (we don't even get the OS on a CD anymore), but I don't think its too much to ask that an Operating System be able to actually operate the computer.

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Repair Utility not necessary[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#23)
by Fushigi on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 04:54:55 AM PDT

A repair util likely wouldn't be needed if the OS was actually isolated from the applications & drivers. Physical isolation from the OS portion of the disk and logical isolation in terms of RAM and other system resources. If Windows was architected properly, an application or driver would never be the cause of system instability/crashes. The app or driver might crash, but it wouldn't cause the OS to crash or flake out.

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Driver crashes[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#25)
by foxyshadis1 on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 08:19:00 AM PDT

That's great in theory, but right now every OS crashes or becomes unstable if a kernel driver fails horribly, which is why most OSes (including current NT-based ones) prefer user-mode drivers. And so far I've never seen a user-mode driver cause more than an application crash. For the same reason apps aren't allowed to scribble into each others' and the system's memory and disk, unless they enable privs that are only active under admin and sometimes power user accounts; and why SFP, SxS, and System Restore (eg, registry backups) are enabled by default.

Buggy kernel-mode realtek drivers hating on sleep mode are the only things that have ever made my entire xp system unstable in the last year, and I beat at it.

If you're talking about 98 and friends then you're talking about another planet entirely, which is kind of beating a dead horse. Many of the failings of current Windows comes down to running as root too much of the time, and developers who abuse that default to create software that requires and perpetuates it. More security and stability vs. pissing off your customer base and costing them a lot of money.

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Not every OS[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#26)
by Fushigi on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 11:33:37 AM PDT

Maybe every PC-class OS, but not "every OS". I can count using the fingers on my feet how many times I've heard of an AS/400 (now iSeries i5) crash due to a driver issue in the last 10 years. If a failure in a device or driver occurs, the offending device is disabled. You can troubleshoot or re-enable as you see fit, but the system itself will not crash.

BTW, the iSeries is also architecturally immune to buffer overflow errors. It won't execute data and an overflow can at most crash an app; it won't bring down the system.

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Kernel drivers failing horrible[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#27)
by ekuns on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 11:55:16 AM PDT

I was playing with a new Linux filesystem. My code passed a null pointer into the Linux virtual file system core code. That code took an oops and died. The rest of Linux, however, continued on with no awareness that the filesystem code was kaput. The Linux kernel subsystems are properly isolated from one another. EVERYthing on the system that did not need file access was totally unaffected by my code error.

On Windows, many things have been moved into the operating system area for marketing reasons -- to make things 5% faster or 2% faster. IE being integrated into the OS is one of these examples, but only one. When they moved IE into the operating system, they destabilized all of Windows. They have done this with many things. When you remove architectual barriers to subsystems, you do indeed speed things up, but you reduce stability by a much greater factor.

I totally agree that talking about any version of Windows from WinME backwards is beating a dead horse. Many of the problems with WinXP are driven by marketing decisions Microsoft made. Such as -- as you said -- running as root most of the time so Windows would be easier to manager for the typical user.

I am surprised that still, after all these years, that Windows has not seen the solution that UNIX (and probably many OS's) takes to DLL Hell -- use versioned DLL files so something linked against an old DLL will use the old one while something linked against the new one will use the new one. Viola. Problem solved.



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Wow, that's cool.[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#28)
by foxyshadis1 on Fri Jun 24, 2005 at 04:51:07 PM PDT

That's actually what SxS is, Side-by-Side install. XP includes several versions each of a couple dozen system DLLs. Its usefulness is still really limited, since it's only those couple dozen instead of several hundred; maybe by longhorn everything'll be fully versioned out. (I'm sure they got the idea from unix, like most of their 'new and better' features.)

I'm surprised that Linux took a blow like that in step, but it's been a while since I spent a lot of time on it, so I guess some of my ideas are outdated. I'm going to have to update myself. And Fushigi is right, my bad, unix OSes have been far more durable than PC OSes forever. (With my experience with Solaris, I should've known better.)

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Adventures With Microsoft Security Update Support | 49 comments (49 topical) | Post A Comment
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