Rick wrote:
"Paul J Gans" wrote in message Chris Cox wrote:
An application can’t crash XP.
Driver can cause blue screens, and bad hardware can cause lockups, reboots, etc. But that’s about it.
Chris
Hmmmm. I have a dual boot linux/XP machine. I’ve had
XP crashes. Not often and certainly far fewer than with Win9x, but crashes nonetheless.
The same hardware never crashes with linux.
In both cases applications can crash. In the case of linux one can get rid of the dead application. One cannot always do that in XP.
—– Paul J. Gans
PS: I don’t quite see the difference between a "lockup" and a "crash". If the user (or admin) cannot access the machine, it’s dead and one has to reboot.
At least with XP one does not get that awful screen that chastises you for "shutting down improperly" and telling you not to do that again. I *loved* that… NOT.
This topic reappears every several months, with the usual technically correct claim from Chris, followed by 100 other responses pointing out there’s no _practical_ difference between applications and drivers. The fact is, XP or Linux or any other OS can be easily crashed when an application (or a virus, worm, etc) installs a bad driver or service. The difference between the two means nothing to an end user, and the end result is the same.
ok. To the extent that a driver is in the OS space this is correct. I guess that one difference is that applications simply cannot install the OS part of the driver in linux without explicit action on the part of the superuser. I’m surprised that XP allows that for an ordinary user.
And Chris’s claim means even less now that CS installs its own system service (used for copy protection), which
Photoshop never did before. Now it _is_ possible for
PS to crash XP.
Yeah. Perhaps you have put your finger on why there is
no activation (yet) on Macs. I doubt OS X would allow
Photoshop to install an OS-resident driver. So activation on a Mac will have to wait for Apple to cooperate.
Rick
At the risk of sounding pretentious, let me explain a bit. The usual driver conceptually has two parts. One is a part that users can access. Thus when you run Whatever Program and it wants to write to the disk, it talks to the appropriate user driver. The user driver then talks to the OS part of the driver through an interface that is (or should be)
carefully defined. That way the OS designer(s) can make sure that the OS part of the driver does not do anything anti-social. This *usually* works — but not always.
On the other hand, if a program needs a special purpose
driver such as a copy protector, there is no way for that program to install anything in the operating system to do that. Microsoft has written the OS part of such a driver and that is why there can be activation etc., on XP.
Adobe also seems to be writing the activation number (or whatever they call it) on the hard drive in regions not
accessible to ordinary users. That also requires OS
support which Microsoft has evidently provided.
These two things will, in the long run, (and in my uniformed opinion) lessen the stability of XP as they allow mischief to be done.
—- Paul J. Gans
