"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Anthony Fremont writes:

It is my opinion that even XP doesn't qualify as a proper OS. Any
OS
that allows an errant application to hang things up is not right.

XP does not allow applications to do that, unless they have the proper
privileges.

That's what they say, but.......

Unfortunately, many Windows applications today won't run without
elaborate privileges, and if they contain bugs, they can hang the
system. That's not the fault of the OS; if you tell it to run an
application as the administrator, it will, and all bets are off.

Right, you don't really have much choice but to use the machine as an
admin. I log into Linux all the time as root though, and I run plenty
of bad code as root and it promptly segfaults and that's basically it.
You'd have to go to pretty good lengths to write code that would hang
Linux just because you ran it as root. Hanging the kernel is primarily
accomplished by device drivers, which are running in kernel space, so
all bets are really off there. My point is that hanging windows is
allot easier. On Linux it's fairly tricky just getting into position to
be able to start slapping the kernel around unless you're a device
driver of course.

Even so, modern Windows applications are generally extremely stable,

I'm not sure I really agree with that. It's probably a point of view
kinda thing. My background is in the mainframe world originally doing
online TP, so my definition of stability tends to be different from many
people. The same goes for security. Even Linux upsets me greatly at
times, especially MythTV and the ivtv driver. But that tends to be the
fault of the third party programmers and not the Linux kernel.

and XP is even more stable still. I can't remember the last time I
saw an XP system crash. If the hardware fails, it may crash. A bad

I can't fault the OS if hardware dies but, depending upon the particular
hardware, the driver might be graceful about it.

driver can still crash it in certain situations. But that's it. Even
the Windows Explorer, a bastion of fragile instability when it was
first transplanted from Windows 95 into Windows NT 4.0, now rarely if
ever causes any problems.

Come to think of it, not only can I not remember the last time I saw
an XP system crash, I can't remember the last time I saw it lock up.

Unfortunately, I can. Granted XP is better than their previous
offerings, but that's like saying it's better than a poke in the eye.
;-)