[2762] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: UNIX in Perspective (was: Re: DOS and Macro Virus Discussion)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fisher Mark)
Thu Aug 22 15:56:55 1996
From: Fisher Mark <FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com>
To: hallam <hallam@ai.mit.edu>, www-security <www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 96 11:02:00 PDT
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
>The point I was trying to make was simply that the UNIX vendors put
>no resources into fixing problems with UNIX that could have been fixed
>for a tiny proportion of the profits it made for AT&T.
Yes, and no one else is, either (commercially).
>I don't think that the claim that WNT is the successor to UNIX holds
>for a moment. Cutler's contempt for C is apparent in the compiler he
>wrote. WNT is very clearly the successor to Culter's earlier systems,
>ELN and VMS.
Here at TCE, our common hardware platforms are IBM PCs, and Sun and HP
workstations. The commercially available OSes in common release for these
platforms are:
* DOS/Windows -- The less said, the better.
* UNIX -- As we have already discussed.
* Linux -- Still based on the underlying UNIX paradigms of a monolithic
kernel and security (apart from limited file security) as an afterthought.
* Windows NT -- Which at least does security for OS objects correctly, and
is a microkernel so should be easier to maintain and update. The problem
here is that higher-level network objects (Web pages et. al.) are not OS
objects, so the security and reliability must be applied after the fact.
Unfortunately, Cutler appears to like to do things the hard way (as you
have noted, his problem with using high-level languages). In this way he
may resemble Gates, as I have seen much more elegant designs for IBM PC OSes
than MS-DOS and the Windows kernel. It almost seems Microsoft's fate is to
always go down the most difficult path towards a technical goal.
>Its all very well for programmers to think they design systems for
>programmers. Really what they are doing is designing systems for
>experts. There is little that is technically innovative about the
>Web. What made it a success was that it was designed from a users
>perspective and not from that of a technocrat looking to increase his
>job security through obscurantism.
Computers are still too hard to use, whether you are an expert or not. An
interesting article, if you haven't seen it, is "The Anti-Mac Interface" by
Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen in the August 1996 Communication of the ACM.
I especially noted how the use of language could help tame the complexity
of what we want to use computers for. I don't think (for the most part)
that UNIX or most OSes have their enhancements designed just for
obscurantism; instead, if the trade-off is between "increased power" and
"usability by non-experts", the designer will almost always opt for
increased power. "Do not attribute to malice what can be adequately
explained by stupidity."
Just my 0.02$US...
======================================================================
Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics
fisherm@indy.tce.com Indianapolis, IN
