On Dec 17, 2004, at 1:05 PM, Peter L. Peres wrote:

> Windows was designed as a gui OS, user-friendly, with a limited 
> tunability.

You don't do it enough credit.  It was also designed to run on a 
stunning
variety of hardware, and to easily attach an even more stunning variety 
of
HW and SW "extensions" without having the users or owners need to 
understand
much about anything.  To a fairly significant extent, it is this 
"vendor and
manufacturer friendliness" that stands between windows and security, 
rather
than mere "user friendliness."

I remember the first time I installed FreeBSD on a wintel platform, and 
tried
to configure X.  Had to dig up a list of the horizontal and vertical 
refresh
frequencies that the monitor happened to suppoort, and then DISCARD 
most of
them so that X didn't make bad decisions about which ones it should use.
Windows, in contrast, read the PnP codes and got all the relevant info 
from
the vendors disk, and "did the right thing."  A real eye-opener...

BillW

_______________________________________________
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist