Windows NT Turns 20 213
An anonymous reader writes with a link to the observation from ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley of Windows NT's 20th birthday (it came out on July 27th, 1993): ""In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1. It was followed up by NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. Microsoft's Windows releases still rely on NT-inspired numbering conventions. Windows 7's build numbers commenced with 6.1; Windows 8's with 6.2; and Windows 8.1 with 6.3." The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.""
Lesson One (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.
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BSD is the core of OSX and it's even older.
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VMS pre-dated BSD substantially, and NT is basically a rewrite of the VMS kernel.
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If you call 6 months substantially:
October 25, 1977 - V1.0 VAX-11/780, Initial commercial release
March 9, 1978 - 1BSD
May 1979 - 2BSD
December 1979 - 3BSD with VAX support. ie. Virtual memory, etc.
November 1980 - 4BSD
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If you call 6 months substantially:
October 25, 1977 - V1.0 VAX-11/780, Initial commercial release March 9, 1978 - 1BSD May 1979 - 2BSD December 1979 - 3BSD with VAX support. ie. Virtual memory, etc. November 1980 - 4BSD
"1BSD" was an add-on to V6 UNIX (which was PDP-11 only), and 2BSD was also based on PDP-11 UNIX, so the "BSD" that contributed to OS X was more like 4.4-Lite, which dates back more to 4BSD and 3BSD than the PDP-11 BSDs..
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BSD is the core of OSX and it's even older.
VMS pre-dated BSD substantially, and NT is basically a rewrite of the VMS kernel.
...as opposed to OSX, which actually shares and reuses code from the BSD kernel.
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The core of OSX is a Mach microkernel,
Nothing "micro" about it, sorry.
BSD sits on top of Mach.
And rather a lot of the programming interface for kernel modules, and the system call interface to the kernel, comes from the BSD part, not the Mach part.
OSX has an Unix personality but it isn't a proper one.
And what might be a "proper" personality for OS X? If you've actually looked at the bits atop the core OS (yes, I have), it's a combination of BSD calls and Mach messaging to other processes.
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Wears black turtlenecks?
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Re:Lesson One (Score:4, Funny)
How's that post you wrote criticizing the post above you these days? I bet you don't think it's so easy to criticize oth-- oh, wait.
Re:Lesson One (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to have done something better to be able to determine whether something is good or bad.
Now that said, the NT kernel itself is pretty solid.
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Now that said, the NT kernel itself is pretty solid.
Having written device drivers for Linux, OS/2 and Windows NT-Win7 I find writing drivers for the NT kernel is the least frustrating by far. Stabler driver interfaces, better documentation, better tools (modern windbg for kernel debugging is very nice).
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Too bad it's just a kernel, and pretty much the entirety of the system aside from the kernel sucks ass and is getting worse at a rapid rate...
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Anyway I didn't consider the OS/2 kernel to be anything special. The NT kernel actually had a Posix and OS/2 pe
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OS/2 was originally developed by MS
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OS/2 was originally developed by MS. I think MS went out of their was to kill OS/2
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How's the kernel you wrote doing these days? Easy to criticise others i guess.
Who TF modded this as "Insightful" ?
:- "I can criticise a carpenter for a badly made table, even though I could not make a table myself. It is not my job to make a table."
Here is a quote (AFAIR) from the great Dr Johnson
Re:Lesson One (Score:4, Insightful)
The kernel is not structurally flawed.
It's just as sound as it was, the day Dave Cutler's team built an experimental port of VMS to CMU Mach. [sympatico.ca] It's just as sound a kernel, as the day Microsoft ripped-off VMS from DEC.
It is the perversion of microkernel VMS by a flawed loadable driver model, and the .DLL nightmare that really sucks, and introduces "unpredictable" behaviors.
"Hey! PDP-11? Ask me how!"
Re: Lesson One (Score:4, Insightful)
DLL hell wasn't as bad in 2k and XP and is almost entirely gone now since Vista thanks to SxS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly [wikipedia.org]
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When there's a security flaw in the version of the dll a program depends on, how does Windows deal with it?
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The kernel is not bad, though really it isn't that much like VMS, it wasn't a copy but an OS from scratch. However where Windows got very weird was its wrapping the kernel with the win32 layer. Almost all OS services had to go through the DLLs. While there was a POSIX layer that also existed above the Kernel, you couldn't do very much useful with it because important stuff existed only under Win32 (ie, networking, display, full file support, etc). In essence, the DLLs were the OS.
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The kernel itself is relatively solid, but there are problems.
Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed. I remember vaguely a hack from the logon of Windows NT which let you use the context menu, then somehow involving 'print' and/or 'help', you could get explorer.exe open without logging in. That was a flaw with the Win32 implementation, but it had to somehow allow user-level access to MSGINA and the kernel system for authentication and secur
Re:Lesson One (Score:4, Insightful)
Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed.
This was deprecated in Windows 2000/XP (and you had to explicitly allow a service to interact with the user) and it was disallowed in Windows Vista and has been ever since [microsoft.com].
The problem was that a service which typically runs with some form of elevated rights (at least to some resources) could expose those rights/permissions if there was a flaw in the interactive part that communicated with the user.
Your complaint is interesting, because the risk is very much the same posed by sudo (and every other SUID root) utility: The user is allowed to directly interact with a process which has higher privileges than the user.
Windows eliminated it. What about SUID root tools, which have historically *many* vulnerabilities and actual exploits and system compromises on its conscience?
I also remember when Vista moved graphics processing into user mode, so that the usual BSOD from graphics drivers famous in XP would simply be an abnormal termination. Reading suggests this was reversed in 7 because of the slowness this added.
Sorry, but this is BS. You need to cite sources for that "reading" you have done.
WDDM is still very much a split driver model [microsoft.com] where the driver author has to create a (small) kernel mode part and a user model part. The graphics subsystem is still much more stable on Windows than Linux. And even when the driver or hardware fails (e.g. overheated) it merely resets and comes back up, *without* killing any processes, clipboard or services.
If graphics - fundamentally the way the OS communicates with the user, since the command-line is supposed to be a second resort - has to be so close to the metal it can't be in user space without slowing it down, this is not good.
Wrong on all counts. Windows allow multiple ways to "communicate with the user". Core versions of the servers, for instance, does not use GUIs. And it is your BS claim that it "is slowing it down". All benchmarks I have seen strongly suggests that Linux has a very hard time keeping up with Windows in this area - even when Windows uses a compartmentalized (and more stable) driver model.
But if the intent is to provide a windowing environment, and the method of doing so is not secure, maybe the kernel has exceeded its usefulness.
1998 called. This is not the 9X kernel. The Windows kernel of today runs services in a ''seperate session'' from the users session.
I should also say that a lot of uninformed people parrot the idea that the kernel is well designed, siply because it flies in the face of all the Microsoft hate. The original nerd hipster, who likes something - or believes that something can be good - even if the masses hate it. Or just because the masses hate it.
So far you have offered nothing but speculation and outdated myths. Talk about uninformed.
I have personally used a Shatter attack to expose passwords masked by asterisks. There is a single byte in the window definition that says "replace every character with this one because this is a password box". If it is not filled in, the text box is normal. If it is filled in, it's a password box. Most apps that display a password set the password style (by default filling that byte with an asterisk) and put the password up.
I don't know a single application that pre fills password boxes with the current password. Would you care to elaborate on that?
Since Windows Vista, applications running with medium integrity level *cannot* freely send messages to other processes' windows. UAC integrity levels mandate that in order to send
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DLLs are entirely user-mode.
absolutely nothing to do with the kernel.
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Is the kernel-level DRM as structurally sound as it was, the day Microsoft ripped off VMS from DEC, back when, you know, such user-hostile garbage didn't exist in the system?
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See driver madness, above.
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Debug an NT device driver.
Hey! I recognize this!
Re:DLL nightmare (Score:4, Interesting)
I have yet to experience this DLL nightmare you speak of. I've had way more dependency hell on Linux than anything. Say you find a great program that does exactly what you need. Well the author based it off some obscure library that needs a dozen other dependencies
Fortunately, 'apt-get install great-program' always works for me.
I still don't understand how VMS can be compared to NT. They don't even seem remotely similar.
VMS
WNT
Just as HAL was one step ahead of IBM, Windows NT is one step behind VMS.
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Oh why didn't I think of that? Because a package was not available! Hence my need of compiling from source.
VMS=Virtual Memory System
WNT=Windows New Technology
Your point?
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Fortunately, 'apt-get install great-program' always works for me.
Talk about a flawed model. Instead of dealing with the problem (reference management), Linux repositories sweeps the problem under the rug.
Instead of coming up with a solution which can actually *both* allow shared libraries to be used *and* support a heterogeneous software environment, Linux repositories forces an artificially homogeneous environment.
Instead of a software package supporting d distros and v versions by virtue of an OS supported library broker, you are forced to create d*v versions of the so
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Talk about a flawed model. Instead of dealing with the problem (reference management), Linux repositories sweeps the problem under the rug.
I strongly suspect that you do not understand the problem fully.
I then read your post and became convinced.
Linux has no .SO or dependency hell as you seem to think.
On a fine grained level, libraries support symbol versioning (e.g. libstd++) so a new libstdc++ can link against an old program, provided the versions do not drift too far. On a coarser level, you have shared
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(from http://arch [linux.com]
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http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=99890 [linuxmint.com]
http://fixunix.com/redhat/489285-rhel-5-1-rhel-5-2-dependency-hell.html [fixunix.com]
http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Linux-X86-26-Oracle-9204-and-RPM-Dependency-Hell [freelists.org]
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53077/firefox-circular-dependency-hell-on-linux-mint-13 [stackexchange.com]
http://linuxgazette.net/issue71/tag/3.html [linuxgazette.net]
http://lwn.net/Articles/198455/ [lwn.net]
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/406017-does-dependency-hell-still-exist-2.html [opensuse.org]
* "The bes
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I think you need to brush up on your English. The letters HAL precede IBM, which means it's one step behind.
I think you need to read more Clarke.
@ArchieBunker - Re:DLL nightmare (Score:2)
I still don't understand how VMS can be compared to NT. They don't even seem remotely similar.
Then follow this [windowsitpro.com] link.
... Many users believe that NT's developers carried concepts from VMS to NT, but most don't know just how similar NT and VMS are at the kernel level (despite the Usenet joke that if you increment each letter in VMS you end up with WNTWindows NT). "
From the link : " Most of NT's core designers had worked on and with VMS at Digital; some had worked directly with Cutler.
And : " [the] similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS In
Re:Lesson One (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the NT kernel is probably the most well engineered component of modern windows. hell, it is what gave windows things like preemptive multithreading, proper memory protection, and hardware abstraction. The win32 base runtime sits on top of this, and pretty much everything else microsoft has released over the years acted as a wrapper for it. Windows 95 was the attempt to squeeze win32 into 4MB of ram for consumer machines while keeping hardware ports accessible by dos applications. These two goals were fundamentally in conflict with stable and reliable software. The reason we don't have to reboot windows every few hours anymore is due to the windows NT kernel.. As bad as you may think windows to be, it's A LOT better than the days of 3.x/9x.
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um what? Sure, there are modules (in windows\drivers), most of which are hardware drivers, but the registry is a database, not an api for devices. I suppose the kernel does use it to track device configurations and such, but that's it. Typical applications do not have kernel modules. Many do have services, now, mainly for DRM, which sucks, but services run in userland, not kernel space.
NT 3.51 was the best kernel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NT 3.51 was the best kernel (Score:4, Insightful)
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That was my sense as well. Especially for the DEC Alpha version, NT 3.51 seemed quite stable.
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We were using it for DEC Alpha servers doing credit card transactions rather than user machines. at least for that it did pretty well. We only took it down once in 3 years to upgrade the drives.
Some form of Unix could have done the same work with half the machine, but others wrote the system before I came on the scene.
I had Linux as one of the OS's on my workstation and liked it a lot. For the Unix servers processing check transactions and doing database work (Oracle) we used SCO instead as we were using X2
Re: NT 3.51 was the best kernel (Score:3)
Oneof the major issues wit 4.0 was how they switch the video drivers to ring 0 for better performance, but most video drivers in those days were total crap. Things have gotten better.
OS/2 was better (Score:2)
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Ah the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. FYI, even MS never intended OS/2 NT to replace OS/2 2.x initially.
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No they didn't. OS/2 1.x was primarily done by IBM using IBM's tools. Many portions were so poorly understood by MS that they wouldn't change any of it or release its source to OEMs.
OS/2, from the very beginning, was by IBM for IBM. It was an OS designed for the 286, a processor designed by IBM for IBM, and it was defeated by Intel who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on processor and by MS, who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on OS. IBM was solely responsible for the trash that was OS/2 and the
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OS/2 1.x was primarily done by IBM using IBM's tools
After v1.0. Microsoft was entirely responsible for the initial releases of OS/2.
the 286, a processor designed by IBM for IBM
Wrong. Intel designed the 80286. IBM (along with other chip makers) made their own version later on.
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by MS, who took ownership of the 32-bit follow-on OS.
Of course, this was before they turned this OS/2 2.0 project into an entire fiasco that I have very bad words against MS about [blogspot.ca].
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It was originally a pretty good design (Score:5, Interesting)
Originally it was a pretty good design, based on the concepts implemented by DEC's VMS system. It only got butchered later by people who didn't know their stuff as well as the original engineers.
Warts and all, Windows owes it's lineage to VMS and the once mighty DEC.
I've heard there are still places running VMS-based hardware.
Re:It was originally a pretty good design (Score:5, Informative)
I've heard there are still places running VMS-based hardware.
Hell, VMS-on-VAX was Digital's replacement for the PDP line of minicomputers (phased in in 1977), and even their predecessors are still running [slashdot.org] in a few places.
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I'm sure OpenVMS is in use, running some COBOL for a bank orso. In 1995 VAX/VMS was HUGE in network cluster tech.
I was right in the middle of that, since we were pitching a VAXcluster box against Appleshare and WinNT for serving Computer Based Training for Fokker Aircraft (now sadly defunct).
Our requirement was to serve a classroom full of Apple Mac's (Apple OS 6.x, oh good times), Appleshare won.
VAX/VMS choked on 2Mb/s on a 10Mb ethernet. Still I loved the architecture, and it sparked by furure *nix intere
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Here's to Kernels (Score:5, Funny)
The Linux kernel would have bought it a beer, but it hasn't turned 21 yet.
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Legal drinking age is 18 in Finland (and much of the civilised world, actually. USA is kinda weird. Mind you, allowing driving and drinking at the same time, does that sound like a good idea? Maybe they are right. No, surely not).
No, wait, Linux first release was 1991, that makes it, um, 22. What the heck is wrong with your arithmetic? What do they teach at school these days? Bah. Get off my lawn. (And yes, I did program PDP 11s back in the day. Why do you ask?)
Re:Here's to Kernels (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps the GP meant that the NT kernel hasn't turned 21 yet.
Windows NT's name (Score:5, Interesting)
V +1 = W
M + 1 = N
S + 1 = T
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In case anyone was wondering what NT stood for
V +1 = W M + 1 = N S + 1 = T
I forget where I read it, but I recall NT standing for New Technology.
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Well, you know, that New Technology Technology is what powers Automated Teller Machine Machines.
...into which you type your Personal Identification Number Number.
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I forget where I read it, but I recall NT standing for New Technology.
My, possibly time-addled, memories from the OS/2 days were that the future of the PC was going to be OS/2 NT (OS/2 New Technology), but then Microsoft announced that they were releasing a new OS called Windows NT, which was nothing to do with OS/2 New Technology at all, no sir.
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You are missing the Point. The architect of VMS became the architect of WNT - Dave Cutler.
Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
An article for WinNT turning 20, but nothing for Slackware when it did the same [slackware.com] 10 days ago? What is wrong with you, Slashdot?
Wait, don't answer that...
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It takes a lot of skill to keep windows running for 20 years.
a 24 year old could have run slackware for the last 20 years.
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An article for WinNT turning 20, but nothing for Slackware when it did the same [slackware.com] 10 days ago? What is wrong with you, Slashdot?
Wait, don't answer that...
You could have submitted it to Slashdot. That's how this place runs...
Windows OS version numbers from NT4 onwards (Score:2)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832(v=vs.85).aspx [microsoft.com]
Missing releases (Score:2)
A few releases are missing in the partial Windows NT history mentioned in the article:
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP
- Windows Server 2003
- Windows Server 2003 R2
- Windows Vista
- Windows Server 2008
And the Xbox.
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You forgot 2008 R2. But I think their point was the Windows that are most current. Besides, MS has client and server go hand-in-hand so it's a little redundant to mention both.
- 2000/2000 (obviously)
- XP/2003/2003R2
- Vista/2008
- 7/2008 R2
- 8/2012
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I remember the good old days (Score:4, Insightful)
When every new release of NT brought with it new and useful features at least I was always excited to upgrade from 3.5 on till about 2K8.
Now nobody seems to care about technology anymore... It is all politics, marketeering and guarding the table to ensure no excess value is ever left upon it. Innovation is now measured by games with shells, errecting walled gardens and fresh paint of questionable quality. Sad to see so much potential go to waste.
Re:I remember the good old days (Score:4, Interesting)
2008 R2 has some nice improvements over 2008, and 2012 has a lot of nice new stuff, but I *hate* that they decided to use the Metro UI for Server 2012. I liked having the Windows Classic theme for 2003/2008. The Metro UI makes it more difficult to get to some basic settings. It's a server, make it simple and straightforward and aesthetics be damned.
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Last revolutionary M$ product (Score:4, Insightful)
NT was the last revolutionary product put out by Microsoft. VB3 came out the same summer, and was also revolutionary. Excel 4.0 and Word 2.0 were the only other two revolutionary Microsoft products, and those came out the year previous.
All of these products are essentially unchanged over the past 20 years, with even the same codebase, with the exception of VB 3.0, concepts of which continue in the 2nd generation Visual Studio product (based on the late-90's Visual Interdev platform, chucking the highly responsive 1st generation that ended with Visual Studio 6.0).
Re:Last revolutionary M$ product (Score:5, Informative)
Being my usual devil's advocate, there have been some innovations which have been useful that MS has made. They are not revolutionary as NT (which was nice at the time because it was completely pre-emptive, while Windows and System 7/8 were cooperative multi-tasking operating systems.)
One of the bigger ones was the jump from NT 4.0 with all its service packs to Windows 2000. The old domain structure got tossed for a new directory server model, which has proven to stand the test of time in companies. Nothing is perfect, but AD has been decently reliable and secure. I don't often hear about complete compromise of AD unless someone managed to get complete rights on an AD server.
GPOs are another item. This is something that has zero value to all but enterprises, but are extremely useful when they come to play. The enterprise-tier management tools in Windows are not perfect, but they are extremely useful. If I want to lock access to USB flash drives to certain users, I can easily do that with security groups and OUs. This isn't flashy, but it makes life easier to turn the legal department writings into stuff I can say I can implement.
Then, there are some cool features. Windows Server 2012 has disk deduplication. This will come in handy on VM servers. It isn't perfect deduplication, as it is a two stage thing (writes are done normally, and a background task removes the duplicated blocks with links), but it is something useful.
There are also things that get the "A for best effort" award. .NET comes to mind because it does help with some basic security issues, and allows one to use their language of choice (I even remember visual ADA.)
To me, MS is a mixed bag. They do some cool things in the enterprise. However, on the user front, they need some help/polish. They need to focus on developer morale so a new platform would get a critical mass of apps/games on it when it comes out.
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C# is an excellent language, and is superior to Java, in my opinion.
C# hasn't really gone anywhere, because MS isn't really pushing it anymore, but it was well-designed.
There are some other MS products which were pretty good. SQL Server was fine (I realize it was based on Sybase 4). Visual Studio is pretty good.
MS's worst products, in my opinion, were Exchange and Outlook. MS should have fired everyone that was working on either of those. I was astonished that Outlook still sucked so badly after a decade of
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The trouble with GPOs is that many of them are extremely porous and can be bypassed with minimal effort. They are enforced mainly by the programs that they apply to. For example, the GPO to stop people using the command prompt can be easily bypassed simply by having a cmd.exe binary that ignores the setting. Similarly with regedit.
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The trouble with GPOs is that many of them are extremely porous and can be bypassed with minimal effort. They are enforced mainly by the programs that they apply to. For example, the GPO to stop people using the command prompt can be easily bypassed simply by having a cmd.exe binary that ignores the setting. Similarly with regedit.
Uhm. Not all GPOs are security policies as you seem to believe. If you do not want users to access resources on the local computer then use permissions to restrict users instead of trying to stop them from going to the command prompt. This is not your stupid sudo. There are other and better ways to secure resources than trying to prevent users from running applications that can access them.
You may hide the command prompt if you don't want your users to strafe out where they don't know how to come back from.
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I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out. Think about it: 16- and 32-bit program support, plug and play (or "plug and pray" as we called it early on), protected memory support, good virtual memory support, pre-emptive multitasking, networking support. Yes, as a multitasking operating system is was mediocre and its stability left little to be desired when compared to Windows NT, but compared to available alternatives (Windows 3.11 and MacOS) it was
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I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out.
WTF ?! - a kludgy OS that was outdated at its launch - it had been preceded by better OS's in Windows NT and OS/2. MS should have been producing a Lite version of NT in 1995, but someone in MS was still in love with DOS and wanted to keep building OSs on its ricketty foundation - as they did with Win95/98/ME for 5 wasted years.
AND it ran on just about every configuration of PC hardware imaginable.
That is not thanks to MS, it is thanks to the hardware makers who knew that without W95 drivers for their kit they would never sell it. MS was in the fortunate position that they co
Oops, forgot Visual C++ 4.0 (Score:2)
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I do remember when Microsoft got rid of the multi-window IDE and everyone else followed. Hated it and still do.
LoB
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huh? everything in that wikipedia (except the name 'developer studio' which was decided on for 4.0 by Julie Larson in a rather contentious meeting) was part of Visual C++ 2.0.
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I was really excited about NT when it first came out - I wanted there to be a common OS, living on different microprocessors, not just x86, and NT was that for me. The Unixes were fragmented, each w/ a different one for each platform, but NT had the potential of being common - b/w Intel, MIPS, Alpha and later, maybe others.
I was however disappointed that NT never progressed on the RISC side at all. NT-RISC on both Alpha, as well as MIPS R4x00 was a golden opportunity for Microsoft to develop a win64 sub
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I tend to agree about NT. Once you add the GUI component Win2k was the pinnacle of their OS line. It was uphill to that point, and has been downhill ever since.
I disagree on excel being revolutionary however, it was evolutionary, from competitors products and ideas.
proof... (Score:2, Interesting)
...that 640k was not enough!
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Who said that?
Windows NT 3.51 (Score:2)
Windows NT 3.51 was the most stable operating system I have ever used.
I miss it sometimes.
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Start up Visual Studio. Enable a breakpoint in C/C++.
Insert a CD and start playing it.
Run your program and wait to hit the breakpoint.
Now wait until the CD player skips to the next track.
Guaranteed blue screen.
Show Stopper! (Score:2)
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Just read this over the past week. Never knew Cutler was such a douche. Reminds me of the argument that came up here a few weeks ago about Linus's management style. Cutler makes Linus seem like a real hoopy frood in comparison.
Re:Doesn't it go further back? (Score:5, Informative)
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Have you actually used WinME? It's the same Win98, but with DOS hidden and locked down and a icons/sounds backported from Windows 2000. Windows 2000 is a much more modern NT-based OS and having used it alongside WinME I can tell the difference is clearly visible, with Windows 2000 winning in almost every test except memory consumption and compatibility with Win9x apps.
Windows 2000 was originally planned to replace the DOS-based 98, but application/driver compatibility was not perfect, so Microsoft instead p
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Have you actually used WinME? It's the same Win98, but with DOS hidden and locked downWindows 2000 is a much more modern NT-based OS
I read Devman as that is what he meant - that WinME was the last OS to be based on DOS.
Windows 2000 was originally planned to replace the DOS-based 98, but application/driver compatibility was not perfect, so Microsoft instead produced the WinME abomination before finally moving everyone to XP.
I understand that it was not because "app/driver compatibility was not perfect" (it still isn't) but because of MS internal politics. The DOS/W9x team and the NT team were run in rivalry and the former lasted for years after they should have been taken out and shot. By about 1998, even entry level PCs could easily have run a lite version of NT (I ran NT4 then on a far-from-cutting-edge PC). The excuse w
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The NT kernel was based on VMS in it's core design, which is what matters, not the APIs. VMS APIs were based on FORTRAN interfaces, while NTs were not, so of course they're not "compatible."
The key feature that I remember from my operating system class is that instead of semaphores, NT/VMS were based on the concept of "critical code sections" -- a completely different approach for implementing the locking needed for parallel code.
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The NT kernel was based on VMS in it's core design, which is what matters, not the APIs. VMS APIs were based on FORTRAN interfaces, while NTs were not, so of course they're not "compatible."
BS. The NT kernel was created based on experience with VMS and a lot of new ideas. For instance, permeating the entire NT kernel is the concept of handles. A handle identifies a kernel object with a jump table. What we today call an object (in the OO sense), as it identifies and encapsulates an piece of memory with data as well as method references.
One of the advantages of this design is that the desired access level (read/write/delete/...) can be expressed when the handle is originally opened. If access is
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The DOS line ended with Windows Me. For a while, MS had the home line based on DOS and the business line based on NT. At the turn of the century, they dropped the DOS lineage and just made different versions of the NT lineage (Home and Pro).
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There were two different lines of Windows kernels until Windows 2000. It was with 2000 that the WinNT kernel finally had all the API wrappers needed to run all regular 32-bit windows programs.
The people on slashdot are also wrong about the origins of NT, which was in fact rooted in OS/2 NT aka OS/2 3.0
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Early versions of WinNT did support it.