Re: To the OP: Wintroll FUD about alleged insecurity refuted (was: Re: Linux why?)

On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:54:18 +0000, Aragorn wrote:

On Friday 08 December 2006 17:27, Tony Lawrence stood up and addressed
the masses in /comp.os.linux.misc/ as follows...:

On Dec 8, 10:37 am, Aragorn <stry...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Friday 08 December 2006 16:02, Tony Lawrence stood up and addressed
the masses in /comp.os.linux.misc/ as follows...:

Aragorn wrote:

Enter Windows NT. A microkernel which was largely stolen from VMS,
onto which a 32-bit Windows kernel was bolted. Security was also
bolted on via the NTFS filesystem and ACL's. But this security was
*clearly* only bolted on, because Windows could still be installed
on a FAT32 partition, which doesn't support ACL's.

I so wish I could find this, but I think it's been expunged from the
Net: at one time Bill Gates said something like "Windows NT is
effectively Unix" - he was referring to the Mach kernel parts of
course..Actually, what he said was that "Windows NT is a better UNIX
than UNIX". ;-)

My memory was a little different - but in any case, do you have a link
to the source of that? I've been trying to find it for years..

Unfortunately that information seems to have vanished together with Bill
Gates's "640 KB ought to be enough for everybody"... :-/

But Windows NT isn't UNIX at all. In fact, all NT versions have a
compound kernel, comprising of the NT kernel itself and a Win32 kernel
- now a Win64 kernel for /x86-64/ of course.

Yes, of course. At the time though, Microsoft at least had some
grudging respect for the value and power of Unix (heck they even sold
Microsoft Xenix way back when).

Yes, that is why Bill Gates said it. Back then, they were looking to
compete with proprietary UNIX in the server and workstation market. Just
look at the hardware platforms that were (initially) supported by NT. All
of those systems natively ran a UNIX operating system: SGI's MIPS, Sun's
SPARC, IBM's PPC and DEC's Alpha.

Up until NT 4.0, NT even had a 16-bit compatibility ABI for POSIX and
OS/2. This was later on revisited with the SFU (Services For UNIX) add-on.

I think that's WHY he said that, but I don't think it went over well
with Marketing. I'd love to find the source and refresh my memory of
context..

Microsoft has been very thorough in censoring the web... :-/

The NT kernel was written by Dave Cutler of DEC - Digital Equipment
Corporation, usually just referred to as "Digital", but not to be
confused with Digital Research, who developed CP/M and who have later
on released the successful DR DOS versions.

And Helen Custer wrote a book about it - I have that kicking around here
somewhere..

Interesting... I didn't know about that...

But even next to VMS, NT doesn't compare. Because - as you say - they
added on a bunch of crap. And this crap was called Windows... ;-)

Well, yes. But Vista once again was a "total rewrite" - and once again
they poured the old crap back in (
http://aplawrence.com/Security/windows_vista_hooks.html cited
previously)

The "total rewrite" of Vista was not a total rewrite at all. It was an
incisive revision in which they had to redefine the code dependencies as
the whole thing had become "a code spaghetti", as one of their senior
developers called it.

There is however a rumor that they're already working on something
completely different. I'm not sure they still are, but either way, they
were already working on this long before Longhorn got renamed to Vista.

Microsoft called it "Singularity", and it was an entirely new operating
system written from scratch, but not for commercial purposes. The idea
was - or so Bill Gates said - to develop the OS for internal study
purposes only.

I have no idea what this new OS would look like, but I presume that given
the nature and possibilities of modern hardware, it would be focused on
virtualization and computing-intensive stuff like clustering. Steve
Ballmer already uttered that Microsoft would start competing with current
clustering operating systems - of which GNU/Linux is one, of course ;-) -
early last year, if my memory serves me right.

However - and this is the rumor part - a computer magazine over here
reported on the successor to Vista, which Microsoft was already working on
late last year, and which would be codenamed "Dark Star". In cosmology, a
"dark star" is just a synonym to a singularity, otherwise known as a black
hole.

So quite possibly, the successor to Vista will be based upon the
Singularity project, which "was not intended for commercial release".

On the other hand, if you want a good laugh, check out...

http://www.mslinux.org

;-þ

Two most interesting & informative posts there, Aragorn. Thanks. :-)
.

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