Re: Ada & .Net (Rotor)

["Juergen Pfeifer" <nospam@nospam.org>]

That sounds to me like you have a hardware problem or you are using some
rotten 3rd party driver for some of your hardware. And in case of certain
hardware problems or driver bugs an OS  might fail. Another common source
for crashes is that people tend to use Windows with priviledged accounts.
Then even a broken app can crash your system. You can easily get this if you
run a faulty app as root on Unix.

Juergen

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:4519e058.0204100701.25c99fb6@posting.google.com...
> "Juergen Pfeifer" <nospam@nospam.org> wrote in message
news:<a90tsf$tms$07$1@news.t-online.com>...
> > >> ...
> > >> All that results in a much higher stability
> > > > of
> > > > Win2000 compared to NT4.
> > >
> > > But it still is not as stable as Solaris or even Linux judging from
> > > the number of reebots after I switched boxes on my desk. :-(
> >
> > Then you have other problems. I (and collegues) are running W2K
> > or WinXP for several month without any reboot (and we have
> > load on the systems).
>
> My home Win2k system (an Athlon box with a non-intel chipset on which
> I play a lot of games) tends to crash all the time, particularly while
> playing DirectX games. My work NT4 system (A PIII system with an Intel
> chipset on which I do development) generally stays up until we take a
> power hit at work (or I stupidly test out one of the device drivers
> I'm creating on it).
>
> The point of this is:
>
>   o  *Of*course* stability has everything to do with what you do with
> the system. It'd have to be a truly crappy system to crash when
> nothing's running. :-)
>
>   o  As an end-user, the distinction doesn't really matter to me. The
> fact of the matter is that, for whatever reason, I currently find my
> Win2k box significantly less stable than my NT4 box. Perhaps they did
> clean up a kernel bug or two in NT, but whatever crashes they
> prevented are being swamped by the overall buggyness of their hardware
> support and their DirectX interface.
>
> Now in defence of Windows, often the real culprit is the hardware.
> Over the years I've found that while putting together a PC system is
> fairly easy, putting together a *stable* one is pretty hard. Sun has
> only a very few hardware combinations to worry about, so its much
> easier for them to put together a stable system.
>
> For instance, I think I increased the stability of my home system by
> about %300 by just installing a case fan near the CPU. SETI@Home isn't
> giving my CPU a breather *ever*, and that takes a toll in heat.
> Similarly my wife's Win98 system for a long time had trouble with
> reboots whenever her desk was bumped. After a while I got sick of her
> yelling at the kids for bumping the desk, and determined to fix the
> damn thing. It turned out that the power supply's circuit board had
> broken near the mounting screw holes, and was thus swinging freely.
> Whenever the system took a big bump, the PS circuit board would swing
> back, and the circuits underneath would make contact with its metal
> enclosure. Out go the lights.
>
> But still we can't entirely let Microsoft off the hook here. They seem
> to get things working fine with the most common hardware, and then
> just quit. Folks with second-tier vendor stuff like Athlons and VIA
> chipsets are just left swinging. What you end up with is a thousand
> hardware vendors (who generally operate in very low-margin businesses)
> trying to make their drivers work with 4 Windows OSes and the drivers
> of a thousand other hardware vendors, which are all secret code and
> moving targets. It just *cannot* be done. I have to constantly scan
> the VIA and Athlon and nVidia websites for news of new compatability
> problem fixes. The fact of the matter is that users are dying to help
> fix problems, but The System in Windows won't let them.
>
> For example, there was one problem some folks were having with crashes
> while trying to burn music CD's. Over the course of a month assorted
> users narrowed it down to systems with NT and a certian VIA
> southbridge chip. VIA denied there was a problem. Next they figured
> out that it happened whenever there was activity on both IDE busses,
> and the soundcard was just using enough PCI resources to make the
> problem show up more often. Then somone managed to reverse-engineer
> the VIA bios and find a BIOS hack that made IDE behave diffently and
> fix the issue. Later semone else made an NT device driver to apply it
> at boot time. About a month later, VIA released a driver with the fix,
> so the custom device driver was no longer nessecary. The punchline is
> that it turned out that Linux folks had identified a similar problem
> and fixed it months before.
>
> I really don't see how the system Microsoft has set up of thousands of
> interoperating secret device drivers in a secret kernel can ever hope
> to compete for stability with the Linux system of drivers (and the
> kernel) being standard and open and available for debugging by anyone
> who happens to notice a problem with their particular hardware combo,
> vendor or not.
>
> --
> T.E.D.
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