Yes, it was a fairly old (past 2 year) Petreley article but
I forget where I saw it, either www.sunworld.com,
www.ncworldmag.com, www.unixworld.com, www.linuxworld.com,
you get the picture what sites I visit....
I think the word "scalable" tends to be abused. There are
three levels of scaleable, process, thread and instruction
level. At the very least, until WindowsNT is 64 bit, the
largest addressable space for 32 bits is 4Gigs of ram. This
may sound a lot, but in reality is very small for servers
with in cache databases. With financial data, 4Gigs is not
a very big database at all. If one uses the word "scaleable"
to mean managing large datasets, WindowsNT does not cut it.
I may be incorrect, but their version of C++ does not seem
to have datatypes to address beyond 32bit longs, NT gurus
can set me straight here.... (WinNT on Alpha was 64bits, of
some sort, probably just instruction length and not address
space....)
Is Windows secure? This depends on the individual site. In
general, Windows is archectured to be harder to make secure
than unix is to make insecure. This is because there is so
much bundled into the operating system to make life "easier"
for the programmer (eg MTS, COM, DNA) that any application
has to be fully traced through its interactions with the
OS to be secure. Auditing an application becomes a matter
of faith that fancy OS features like MTS are not open
wounds. Secure applications try to be as self contained
as possible so that one trusts other features as minimally
as possible. It's more work, but the proper way to do it. |
