The top 10 IT disasters of all time

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Utter nonsense

What you say is true... for Windows 3.x. Windows has had preemptive multitasking since Windows 95, and Windows NT (which is what 2000, XP, and Vista) has *always* had it.

Neither Unix nor Windows "tells" the app anything. When a process gets the CPU, a timer interrupt is set. When the interrupt fires, it is trapped by the kernel interrupt handler which transfers control back to the scheduler (note: there are some conditions in which the process loses the CPU before the timer fires, e.g. it waits for blocking IO; that's not relevant here however). A frozen user-mode application cannot stop this from happening. In Windows 3.x, which used cooperative multitasking, it was indeed the responsibility of the application to relinquish control back to the scheduler. But in a preemptive multitasking environment, which every modern OS is, this is simply not the case.

I have not managed to freeze either Windows NT, Linux or Solaris in the last 10 years without it being the fault of a buggy driver or a hardware malfunction.

Posted by: Dilandau   Posted on: 11/28/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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