Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek Martin says:
	 And as the article you ponted to earlier suggests, an organization can
	 write perfect, bug-free code.  They simply need to make the commitment to
	 do it.  I agree wholeheartedly that the design process is the key.  If
	 your process is bad, your software will be too, except perhaps completely
	 by accident.

Well, actually, on an MS system, you can't.   It's  not  possible  to
write  any  software  at all without calling lower-level software, at
least at the system-call level, and usually at the  run-time  library
level. And since you can't know what that does (because you can't see
the source code), you can't rely on your understanding of  the  lower
levels  being correct.  While it's possible to design tests of the OS
and libraries, the number of possible paths is so large that it would
take  millenia  to run them on even the fastest machines.  So without
access to the lower-level source code, all other code's  behavior  is
inherently unpredictable.

This is essentially the same argument that  security  analysts  often
use:   If you want your computer to do only what you tell it, with no
surprises, you must have access to the software and hardware specs at
all  levels  down to the very lowest IC logic.  If you don't have all
the details on something that you call, you can't know its  behavior,
and you can't predict the behavior of anything that that uses it.

Software on an Open Source  platform  is  knowable  and  reliable  in
principle,  because you can get at the code for all the lower levels.
If it's on undocumented hardware, then you do have the same  problem,
of  course,  at a level below the software.  But software on a secret
platform like MS systems can't be made reliable  even  in  principle,
due to the unknowable behavior of the OS and the libraries.

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