Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Sadly, M$ has managed to convince the general population that it is 
> "normal" for computers to not work propperly. If you bought a washing 
> machine and it didn't work properly, you'd take it back and demand a 
> refund. But when people buy a computer and the software on it doesn't 
> quite work properly, people just think this is "normal" and 
> "acceptable". This, truely, is M$'s contribution to the field of 
> computer science.

  To be fair, though, there's no such a thing as a bug-free (production
scale) operating system or software. All major operating systems during
the history of computing have had security and bug patches and upgrades.

  Sure, some operating system have annually more security holes discovered
than others. However, big part of it is due to the popularity of those
operating systems. More popular -> more people use it -> more bugs are
discovered and more people hack those systems. Obscure unix-flavored
operating systems used in some obscure mainframes at the cellar of a few
dozen of obscure companies surely have also quite many security holes,
but they are not discovered because not many people use them nor try to
hack them.

  OTOH, I must admit that there are some operating systems which, while
being relatively popular, have also surprisingly low security hole counts.
MacOS X is a good example. FreeBSD is also probably such an OS. Linux does
not score so well in this scale, but that's, again, at least in part due
to the popularity of linux among hackers. (IOW it may appear as linux had
more security holes than eg. FreeBSD, but that may be in part caused because
not so many people try to hack FreeBSD as Linux. In a way, this is actually
a good thing for Linux because more security holes are discovered and
patched that way.)

> Do you even remember when WinXP first came out? And how everybody has 
> utterly horrified at the minimum hardware requirements to make it 
> function acceptably? It's been around so long now that everybody seems 
> to have forgotten that XP takes four times as much hardware to do the 
> same thing as older OSes managed to do quite happily...

  I wonder if you could even install XP in a 386, in any shape or form.
Any modern linux distro should be installable in a 386. Even X might work
if you use a superlight window manager, so you will not even be confined
to the command prompt.

  (Why would anyone even want to install linux in a 386? Well, if you
have one laying around, it makes a supercheap firewall or small-scale ftp
server, for instance.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message