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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (63890)	12/25/2001 11:09:01 AM
From: John F. Dowd	Respond to of 74651

Bill: Thanks for your erudite post. Well thought out. Have a very Merry Christmas! JFD

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (63890)	12/27/2001 4:27:17 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 74651

My argument about too much new software is a matter of design. The GNU system is mainly made by the design principle "the perfect design has been achieved if you cannot remove anything from the program without losing functionality". Commercial software, on the other hand, often needs to provide funtionality to increase the number of people who are willing to pay for the product. There is no question that the first method produces the best quality and software that is easy to handle. CD writing under Linux is also a very good example of that. My statement about patching is true for all major MSFT software written the past five years. But it is quite easy to patch Linux software. You take the exact source code of the program you use, patch the three lines with the error and compile. Then you got a new binary, that is exactly the same, just the error has been corrected. This minimalistic patching is what I know from Red Hat. When Microsoft do patches, a lot is often changed. Especially the idea of applying a Service Pack to fix an error is dangerous - a service pack affects a lot of software. Windows XP still has DOS stuff. Like drive letters. Works well on FAT, which has no security built-in. Compatibility with Windows 95, which is essentially a Windows 3.1 on DOS with 32-bit DLLs and a new UI. As long as it's Windows 95 compatible, it has DOS roots that prevents it from working well. Your arguments about security shows this very well. Stripping down Windows is not about CPU power etc. It's about security. If you don't know which software you are running, you don't know how to protect it. But I agree, that XP multi-user is OK for most home users - it's just pretty unfit for corporate servers or servers connected to the internet. But on the other hand - Windows was never designed to be connected to the internet.