["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.basics.]
On 2005-10-30, Mxsmanic wrote:
Anthony Fremont writes:

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

But it's true.

Right, you don't really have much choice but to use the machine as an
admin.

That's not the fault of the OS. There are some applications that will
run without special privileges.

You'd have to go to pretty good lengths to write code that would hang
Linux just because you ran it as root.

No more so than for XP.

Hanging the kernel is primarily
accomplished by device drivers, which are running in kernel space, so
all bets are really off there.

The same is true for XP.

My point is that hanging windows is allot easier.

Except that it's not.

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.


If you're running a GUI, it's easy.


how so? in linux the GUI runs in user space, ditto the windowing subsystem,
it's only the video driver that has some priviledges,

I have the same background. XP is stable.

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.

Linux and UNIX are quite insecure, compared to NT.

how so? I heard that Microsoft moved the webservers from NT to unix
(I think solaris or BSD) for security reasons a few years ago. Hmm,
they seem to be running IIS again now.

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

The driver is usually written by the hardware vendor. Many drivers
are very poorly written.

That's why linux admins like the hardware that has open source drivers.

Bye.
Jasen