MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Wed, 01 Mar 2006

Almost 12 years ago my fellow coders and I gathered in a theater in Indianapolis, rented by Microsoft, to get the inside scoop on the new OS they were coming out with. You may have heard of it: Windows 95.

It was going to be secure, much more so than DOS. Remember all those bad DOS virii? They'd be impossible in Windows 95! It would be equally impossible for an errant application to crash the whole machine, as was frequently the case in the then current Windows 3.1.

And about three years later, when Windows 95 was practically a smoking ruin, we gathered again to hear about an amazing new OS called "Windows NT 4.0" - finally, Windows would be absolutely secure and impregnable!

And so it goes ...

ExtremeTech is running an article on the new features of Windows Vista and why it is a must upgrade for all Windows users. They take apart the marketing hype and tell you what exactly to expect in Windows Vista. They specifically pick out less-hyped features like a kernel which has new Heap Management and details on SuperFetch, which is Vista's application cache

(link) [Slashdot]

/Technology | 3 writebacks | permanent link

On 3/1/2006 08:16:24
Arwin wrote

Why Vista?

Great link Dave. I have been wondering why I should consider an upgrade to Vista. I don't know if I'm in the minority or not, but I haven't been unhappy with XP.... or at least XP Pro. I haven't suffered the system crashes, virusesssess, long boot times, etc. Of course I don't use my machine for playing games, I'm careful about what email attachments I open, I keep my virus protection up to date, etc. All the things you are supposed to do. I agree with previous posts you've made regarding the superiority of the Mac OS and the fact it is based on UNIX. However I believe if Mac had as much market share as XP you'd find more virus and malware out there targeting it. Basically nessecity is the mother of invention. Personally I'm hoping Linux takes off and supplants both Windows and Mac.

On 3/1/2006 12:23:44
Dave H wrote

The Microsoft Mantra

Ah, my friend, you're drinking the Kool-Aid here with the line "However I believe if Mac had as much market share as XP you'd find more virus and malware out there targeting it." Nope - just flat wrong. It's not a population problem, it's an architectural issue. The core OS in every Windows operating system to date (not including Vista or Longhorn) has been based on a single user, "desktop" model. Unix (and I'm including Linux and OS X here) has always been designed as a multiuser environment - and in those kind of environments you simply must pay more attention to security. It's the reason folks in the city lock their doors more often than us rural people ... Take, for example, the recent announcement of a Mac OS X "worm" that spread through the iChat program. The very worst a malicious worm of this sort on that operating system could do to the machine would be to erase a single users home directory. A terrible loss for the user, to be sure, but not taking down the entire machine. It might be possible to craft such a package to install a rootkit - but that would be difficult as such installations in Unix based systems typically require the admin password just to install them: in Windows, any user can install any software without an admin password that could promote itself to root with the right code. Here's a pretty good analogy: Operating System to Building. Windows is a single family home - Unix is an apartment. When you visit a single family home, you frequently see glass windows in the front door. You never see these on the doorways to individual apartments, although you may on the front door of the building itself. If there's an alarm system in a single family home, it covers the entire house. In an apartment building, each tenant can install their own alarms, as well as the one installed by management covering the entire building. With proper firewalls and sprinkler systems, damage from a fire in a single apartment can be minimized much more easily than from a comparable size fire in a single family home. Until and unless M$ re-architects the Windows kernal to reflect a true multiuser environment, it will continue to have terrible vulnerability issues. The downside to this redesign is maintaining backward application compatibility: lots of folks have a tremendous investment in software, and aren't willing to throw it all away on a whim for an OS upgrade (even if they should). Which explains some of the reasons for my pessimism: it's not impossible for M$ to "get it right" - it's just extremely unlikely, given their enormous market share, that they'll do so until that share drops significantly. Be well, Dave H.

On 3/2/2006 09:28:23
Arwin wrote

Great analogy

I agree completely. Remember though Hackers love a challenge. Hopefully Vista will present a bigger challenge.

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