Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1190746574.659643.182650@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 24, 7:26 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not by choice.

Is that a "yes, but not by choice", or a "no, by choice" ?

Yes, but not by choice; I'd have thought that obvious.

That did seem like the more likely interpretation, except that it
would mean you *have* used these tools you're slamming, which is
something of a surprise.

[ snip ]

Unix isn't a stranger to creeping featurism. The filesystem itself, X,
and emacs all come to mind. :)

The filesystem? seems pretty simple to me -- perhaps too simple
(the three-level permissions system, for example).

First of all, the "file"system contains everything but the kitchen
sink, rather than just the actual, you know, *files*.

By "filesystem" I have in mind something along the lines described
in the Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system ):
The mechanism for providing an abstract view of, and/or organizing
the bits on, a storage medium in terms of files and directories,
with associated timestamps, permissions, etc. I don't think the
application-level view of Unix filesystems has changed much over
the years, though the implementation has gotten more sophisticated.
An exception to this claim might be ACLs (access control lists).
Aside from them, where's the creeping featurism?

Second, the
permissions system is much more than anything you'll find on a
mainstream OS these days -- I'm pretty sure Windows (for most, if not
all Windows variants) has everything world-readable and -executable,
and write permissions by user -- no groups. Maybe directory read-
permission also is deniable. Particularly, there's no mess or fuss
with making your newly-compiled code, scripts, or whatever executable
-- arguably a bad thing.

I was under the impression that the versions of Windows that at
least make claims about being multi-user had some mechanism for
indicating which files were accessible to which users. No?

And to me a system that provides no multi-user capability, and
not even much of a way to make a distinction between normal-user
mode and system-administrator mode is -- well, inadequate.
Whether "mainstream" versions of Windows are inadequate in that
way I don't know. Recent versions of the Mac OS are said to be
"BSD Unix under the hood", so they have the capability to make
Unix-like distinctions. I don't know how much that's used.

[ snip ]

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.

Relevant Pages

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    (microsoft.public.security)
  • Re: Security and Sharing
    ... When they are logged in locally only the filesystem permissions are needed. ... When they access over the network they can do anything that the filesystem ... If you want then to be able to read files and browse the folder structure ...
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