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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."
Because yeah if MS were any good they wouldn't need to use these 'shims' or whatever they sound like because they would've developed a time machine by now to go back in time and delay the release of their OS's until they had full multiuser support that didn't slow things down too much despite the fact that people didn't even need it at the time.
Mistakes happen, sometimes out here in the real world you just have to patch up and get on with it. You can't just rip everything out and start again every time you hit a design snag when there're people relying on said everything to continue working.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
It said "shills".
Funny, Apple was able to make the transition from insecure, single-user based OS to more secure, multi-user OS without too much trouble and keeping a compatibility layer for older apps. Why can't Microsoft do the same?
LOL, Microsoft sux!
I've been saying it since DOS 4.
..."So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, writing your enterprise applications correctly is your solution."
The poster slaps Microsoft for suggesting 'shims' and then pretends that there's nothing wrong with enterprise developers writing crap code that ASSumes priviledges that it should not...? Smells like Teen Hypocrisy.
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