winscape 2310

These are guesses. Plug'n play implementations. Unknown device drivers in the past and the future. Unix certainly cannot "hardcode" devices, controllers, nor their geometries and quirks into the exec..which you guys the kernal. If any OS really wants to do multi-CPU systems, then not only does this have to be done at each boot time, but it might have to be done as a system checkpoint function; I just gave myself a headache thinking about this one.

As far as security...I, who owns a system or set of systems, would like to prevent nefarious devices from plugging into universal ports. If the code ain't there, the human can plug it all he wants and get nowhere with the system. A very effective security measure was to allow a user to generate crap and allow him to believe that he was doing something nasty. However, all bits were dumped to nul and never allowed to touch any gear of the system. So the nasty person keeps pumping his bits, the system keeps putting them into NUL:. The end result it that this guy will be kept occupied doing nothing without his knowledge. It's better than giving him an error so he knows he needs to try something else which may be a real unknown security hole.

BAH