What company could release such a product. No, it couldn't be ... naw ...

[Peter P.]

Simon <simon80 at ...> writes:

> The main point to take away from this is that Windows doesn't make bad
> IT systems, incompetent people make bad IT systems (including
> windows),

I think that you are jumping to conclusions. I have good reasons to believe that
the program may have died due to resource exhaustion and/or hardware problems
which led to device access errors followed by Windows 'pulling the rug' from
underneath the program (or the program ran out of some resource or did something
unexpected - like that division by zero on the NT-powered US battleship). One
well-known form of resource exhaustion is the appearance of high frequency
interrupts and/or oversized data packets on a device interface that is expected
to interrupt at most a few times per second. Same for output contention (e.g.
printer ran out of paper). Since Windoze insists to handle the errors itself
(popping up nice little useless windows to click OK on) applications have very
few chances to cope.

This particular kind of poison also works on Linux but less well (because
drivers and applications tend to be more robust and because of the lacking
'integration' which causes severe IO access errors to be reported to the
application directly, without gimmicky animations). A typical example is a
barcode scanner that goes into berserk mode and sends data continuously.
Depending on how the driver is done and on how the application can deal with the
generated data this may or may not cause mayhem. Similarly a mouse or keyboard
that sends invalid data packets can freeze the machine under GUI or crash the
application. This is equally true for Linux and Windows.

The Lusers will rediscover why high reliability protocols and equipment
standards are needed at the latest when these automations built on commodity
consumer grade IT equipment will become ubiquitous. In a business with 100
independent cashiers (not necessarily in the same premises) running on a server
for 16 hours/day the required uptime will be over 99% to guarantee that less
than two service calls will be needed per week in peacetime (meaning outside
those times when the network is under DDOS from extrotionists). Windoze does not
compete in that class imho.

Peter


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