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Microsoft's Most Successful Failure
m4dm4n writes "As we near the end of mainstream support of Win2k The Register looks back at what it has achieved. What was meant to be Microsoft's most secure OS ever turned into a disaster. Worm after worm changed the face of internet security in Win2k's first 2 years. Five years down the line the battle is far from won, but the improvements are dramatic." From the article: "Things were different in the year 2000. Programmers felt vindicated that the Y2K bug didn't turn out to be that big of a deal. We made it past January 1st, and then it was time to move on. Windows 2000 came out that first quarter, just as security was becoming more interesting to more people -- and Windows was a good place to start. It was also seemed to be the start of a new breed of Windows hackers."
but atleast it didn't took me 4 years to get my printer up and running... all in all I am very happy with linux, but why does it always have to be win=bad lin=good everywhere.
I won't make an arguement about security problems in Win2k, since the article is correct. However, I will say that I think Windows 2000 is the best MS OS to yet come out. The GUI is far better then XP (IMHO), has support for all the latest "bells and whistles", and it is FASTER than the equivalent XP machine.
I can't see how you can honestly call Windows 2000 a failure -- Microsoft didn't spend more making it than they made off of it, and it was actually (in my experience, at least) more reliable than XP.
I was the first STABLE windows platform that could handle multimedia apps.
Security became a joke, but stability was superb.
It was a gigantic leap from the 9x series.
Cheers,
Adolfo
A slightly off-topic comment, that I feel I have to make to someone somewhere...
My boss and I were talking a week or so back, and we were talking about taking a bunch of our libraries and somehow making them into something we can use everywhere. Now realize that we, unfortunatly, have about 200 applications to maintain, across Visual Basic, Delphi, Java, C++ in many flavors (Borland and MS are the majority) and a slew of other crap, including some VB scripts.
Now, obviously, a plain DLL isn't going to cut it... VB would be a pain in the arse to translate all of the declares to, and Java would need something similar to use a native library.
This IS where ActiveX control/libraries come in. And thanks to even automation, I can EVEN use said libraries in the windows scripts via a magical CreateObject.
The nightmare of using ActiveX controls on a webpage shouldnt blur the actual usefulness of the technology possibly elsewhere.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
just imagine if the nature of the stack wouldn't allow [buffer overruns]. If some kind of mechanism beside a simple jump had been used. Like registering an address in the CPU via an instruction and then calling that jump.
Would it annoy you to no end if I explained that you've just described the segmented memory model that has been available on the 386 and up since 1986? It just so happens that today's "Modern OSes" (right load of bull that is) map only two memory segments, then completely ignore the GDT, LDT, and TSS after that? It is, of course, done all in the name of "Performance", the mini-god for which many a programmer has sacrificed his first born for, but has never actually managed to show that this "performance" was worth it.
<sarcasm>But wait, we must claim that Java is slow in order to appease this mini-god! </sarcasm>
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade