[ILUG] Windows 98 Replacement?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Conor Wynne (weeboy at conorwynne.com):

> Think its win9x your thinking of. Which is why the system had to be three
> finger saluted if the display got corrupted. This did not happen with nt4.

No, he _is_ thinking of NT4.  The graphics drivers had to be moved into
ring zero (kernelspace) during the beta cycle to restore performance to
acceptable levels, compared to NT 3.51 and prior, which ran the graphics
subsystem (more sensibly) in userspace.

I had a Microsoft executive (Alex Saunders) try to justify the change to
me on grounds that any machine whose graphics subsystem is hosed is in
trouble anyway, and needs to be restarted.  I asked:  "Er, isn't this
alleged to be a _server_ operating system as well?"  No reply to that --
and I didn't even get around to the _other_ obvious point:  that an OS
whose graphics system runs in userspace can recover/reinit the graphics
code without falling over completely (rebooting, etc.)

These days, if you raise those points to Microsoft folk, they shrug off
anything you say about avoidable fragility, and just blame faulty
hardware and drivers.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                                    Magnus frater spectat te.
rick at linuxmafia.com