MS Suggests Using Shims For XP-To-Win7 Transition

eldavojohn writes "Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser. Vista & Windows 7 have fixed that and implemented The Correct Paradigm. But what about the pre-Vista applications written to utilize superuser privileges? How do you migrate them forward? Well, running a virtualized instance of XP in Windows 7 is an option we've talked about. But Microsoft is pushing the idea of using 'shims,' which are a way to bypass or trick the code into thinking it's still running as user/superuser mode in Windows XP. This is an old trick that Microsoft has often employed, and it has brought the Windows kernel a long ways, in a duct-tape sort of fashion. At the TechEd conference in LA, Microsoft associate software architect Chris Jackson joked, 'If you walk too loudly down the hall near the [Windows] kernel developers, you'll break 20 to 30 apps.' So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, shims are your suggested solution."

Comments

I know you slashdotters hate to hear it

[Anonymous Coward]

But MS's support for backwards compatibility is THE REASON they own the desktop.

You can slam all you want, but they will continue to own the desktop because they run all the apps you want.

Re:I know you slashdotters hate to hear it

[WMD_88]

Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades (e.g., nethack is from 1985).

Nethack may be old, but the binary you use on Linux was compiled recently. Set up an old Linux system (RH 6.2, to throw something out there), run Nethack on it, and then try to run the same binary on a new system. It won't work.

Having the software be open-source alleviates most of this, but closed-source will never work too well on Linux unless they stop breaking everything all the time.