Objects virus scanned: 507,623 Objects infected: 0 6803

On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:55:15 -0500, DFS

Yes but not milicious.

It does seem that way mainly because the loudest posters hate MS for daft reasons, because they make money or because its kewl these days to hate MS users.

I'm not really like that and never have been. What MS were doing all those years ago, I was all for it, trying to build a single 'do-it-all' platform so as programmers we didn't have to write multiple versions of each thing we worked on. Didn't have to learn multiple architectures and so on.

Even now I would say that MS XP is a good product, it is still based on the initial MS idea of 'one system to do everything' and it does do that.

My only gripe with MS is what they did about security and anti-virus.

Many years ago I was invited to a conference by Microsoft, it was on the news group like platforms we used to use. Programmers from all over the world were involved. The main topics we were asked to discuss were the general direction of the next versions of MS Windows and in particular what to do about graphics.

An option for graphics control is to take all GUI into to kernal level, it gives a natural speed advantage with the make up of the machines at the time it amounted to close to 30% speed advantage, the down side being that you are inviting third party code down to kernel level. It's no use only having libs down there, the code that third parties write to manipulate graphics would have to be at least in part down there with it.

So the idea of two systems took shape, one for home use (eventually becoming Win98) the other for secure systems (NT client). The majority in the group were very much against the weaknesses from third party code down at the kernel level though. Although they were hackers and some early virus stuff around, it wasn't really taken seriously at the time, our concerns were much more to do with stability.

I don't even blame MS for the first big virus problems, it seemed that no sooner had NT client come out then they were hit by volly after volly of virus's and hacks. No one could really of forsean it. That had the knock on effect that IT people wouldn't bother paying the extra for NT when it was proving to be as weak as the much cheaper Win98.

It was a shame that happened because NT could of been sorted out, the way the early versions were built they could have been made secure a lot more easily than Win98 could. But it was too late, 98 had become the bigger seller to business, plus with MS's policy of giving many many copies away simply because once on your PC they were likely to win the MS Office sales too, so now they were left with a system that was never designed as a secure system in places where the users of them were demanding security.

I know people here will say that NT is as holly as a string vest, but had it been the main secure platform then a great deal more programmers time would of been ploughed into it to make it safe from the virus-hacker problems.

So what should MS of done about this? Well, they needed NT out there in place of Win98. In the way Win98 was rolled out, in many cases at no cost, it would of given a starting platform to give us a fair fighting chance against the virus's, remember that many of these virus fights were purely manual and having a system where the virus had full access made that task much more difficult than it should have been.

I still say that MS have Norton to thank for its continued success. Without Norton tools-anti-virus MS would of sank long ago, because they did nothing to help us in the field who were battling the hackers, virus's and then WALLOP they added a MS visual basic where you could do absolutely anything, full control of the machine, no need even to bring attention to yourself, could sneak around in the background doing anything at all.

My gripe with MS comes from days and nights lost because I was fighting virus's spreading around the system with the greatest of ease, till in many cases the only way to do it was clean a PC then switch it off untill you have cleaned every other PC, some IT departments would of been talking of many hundreds of PCs.

MS could of prevented all of that, even now they could put a stop to the virus threat, but they don't, and worse than that they make the matter worse by opening routes into your pc meant for sales and marketing, they give you ways to avoid anti-popup software, ways to run code on the machine without the users permission.

Thats my gripe with MS, the fact that XP could by now be absolutely safe, but it is unsafe by design.