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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: trouthead who wrote (21784)	10/26/1999 3:14:00 PM
From: Prognosticator	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

OK. No food in my hand. Let's engage in a constructive dialog for a change. One of my biggest problems with Microsoft's software is the way that they have consistently traded off stability for performance. For example, my understanding is that in Windows NT 3.51 device drivers ran outside the kernel, but that performance was poor (remember, 3.51 was running on 66 MHz machines at the time), so Microsoft decided to push device drivers into the kernel to improve performance, and NT 4.0 was born. Most of the random blue-screens of death can be attributed to driver crashes while in ring-0 of the kernel. When they were designing Windows 95, they found that keeping a separate binary image of a DLL in memory would quickly exhaust memory (remember, the footprint back them was 8MB), so they decided to share DLL's, and make them a system-wide resource. This allows one program passing illegal arguments into a DLL call to corrupt its internal state, and if the DLL is critical such as GDI or USER, take down the machine. Have Microsoft changed their approach in Windows 2000, or are they still trading off performance for stability? This is the crux of my issue with Microsoft: they will do anything they can to make money, but don't care about random crashes, lost data, instability, etc etc etc due to deliberate design tradeoffs. Sun has never, and IMO will never, make this kind of tradeoff with their products. P.