Re: [TCLUG:13229] win2k

[<Nick.T.Reinking@supervalu.com>]

Uh oh.  I'm guessing that my mailbox will soon be filled with a
very large win2k ranting thread.  So, I might as well get in my
share, then.

----- (These are *my* opinions only) -------

Win2K is worse at:
   
   Security - 35M lines of code is going to be a security nightmare.  It took
the OpenBSD folks years to assess many many less lines of code.  Yikes!
   
   Maintainability - Again, maintaining a small program can take a significant
amount of work to maintain - 35M lines of code?  ::whistles::  Remember what
the Master Programmer says, ""Though a program be but three lines long, 
someday it will have to be maintained."

   Resources - Win2000 took quite the powerful machine to push it - I was using 
64M
of RAM just booting the thing (after disabling a bunch of services).  Having 
things like
menus that fade in and out really don't help much in that regards, either.

Win2K is better at:

  Stability - I was very impressed by how stable Win2K was for me, even in 
RC2.  It 
never crashed on me once, so it's *much* better than any Windows in that 
regards.

   Hardware - Although the hardware support isn't as complete as it is for, say
Windows 98, they did seem to take the best ideas from WinNT 4 and Win98 and
merged them together.  All seems to be good, and it's hard to argue that 
DirectX 7
isn't a slick piece of software.

   DLL management - Although I don't know a whole lot about this, supposedly
Win2K will not allow other programs to overwrite system DLLs (took them long
enough).  Or rather, it will let them, but then it'll restore them with 
pristine copies.
What this does for memory usage, I can't say though.  DLLs are like shared 
libraries,
I thought - so each application would be basically "statically compiled" if 
they
follow Microsoft's advice - which is to include your own DLLs with your 
program.


----------------------
I think that Win2K is a step in the right direction for Microsoft.  It 
certainly seems
to suck less, although you'll probably not agree with me if you don't run a 
pretty
high-end machine.   ;)

Nick Reinknig