Re: Which Windows OS is Safest

[Eystein Roll Aarseth <eystaar () online no>]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 12:05:15PM +0000, MARTIN M. Bénoni wrote:
> Humm...I cannot understand hom people can still talk about NT when there 
> are at least W2K boxes since a while, and Win2K3! 

Two years ago, I visited a factory that was making small electronic
components. They still used 386es running Windows 3.x and a PC-NFS 
network to control many of their machines. Of course, the office PC's 
were modern, but the machines that helped them to have something to 
sell were about ten years old. 4mb RAM and 106mb disk, anyone? 
And those were the *large* disks. Some had 40mb hd's. :-)

Why? Well, they worked, it was as stable as Win3.x ever was, and they
*could not* change the hardware they used without asking their
customers. ISO specs and/or contracts which said that the customer
had to know and approve *everything* about the way they made their 
products. Some of it was parts for medical hardware, other products 
were made to pass military specifications. You *do not* want to change
the production line for those things unless you have to. The bureucracy
involved will make you insane and kill a *lot* of trees.

> NT has got a lot of bugs (6 SPs!! ), and I think at least a whole
> which cannot be patched! Why NT is still in admin's minds???

Six SPs spread over what, six years or so? I certainly *hope* that MS
will be supporting 2k/XP for that long, but I don't hold my breath.
It's still an OS that admins *know* because they've fought the damn
beast for *years*. It's not an OS that should be left unprotected on
the net in 2004, but it will continue to be used on isolated networks
and single-purpose installations. Remember the noise about old
mainframes and Y2K?

Feh. I'm defending NT. I feel... *dirty*.

EAa 
-- 
I learned enough about NT internals from coworkers to realize that
underneath it all, there's some quite nice stuff. Unfortunately, then
they had to bolt Windows on top of it and ruin it.  -- Matt Brown

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