On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:16:38 +0100, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> The Myth of Apple's Insecurities
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| Microsoft OSes began with no security. Windows 95 through ME had
>| varying levels of front-end password-based security bolted on at
>| some point, but it was hardly layered through the entire OS like
>| UNIX. They weren't multi-user environments so interprocess security
>| wasn't seen as an issue, and remote exploits were all over the place
>| since they weren't built for network use.
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| As Henry Spencer said, "Those who don't understand UNIX are
>| condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
> `----
>
> http://weblog.infoworld.com/venezia/archives/011187.html
Oh, I love this.
"Simply put, Microsoft had the chance to beat Apple to the punch and make a
giant leap back in 1997 or so, killing off the existing Win32 platform in
favor of an NT-based client and server that did not have to run legacy
applications natively. They didn't, and we are still paying the price for
it today."
Simply put, if Microsoft HAD done what he suggested, nobody would have used
it and everyone would still be using a 9x based OS today, and in far worse
shape.
Even apple saw the need for backwards compatibility. Up until very
recently, OS X had a compatibility layer to run old <OSX apps. Simply put,
apple was able to do this in a non-native layer because there were very few
apps that would be hurt by the performance problems this created. Not true
of Windows apps, in which there were thousands of apps (many of which were
games) that users would have screamed if they were emulated. And frankly,
nobody would have used it.
How do I know?
We need look no further than the Itanium. Which did precisely that, and it
had hardware supported emulation, but even that was WAY too slow for users.
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