full-disclosure - Bigger burger roll needed

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Date: Mon Oct  3 20:42:06 2005
From: thegesus at gmail.com (TheGesus)
Subject: Bigger burger roll needed

> On Mon, 03 Oct 2005 06:42:37 PDT, Steve Friedl said:
> > On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 08:50:27AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu wrote:

> Perhaps if they hadn't been so busy designing baroque undocumented APIs for the
> use of their own monopolistic software(*), they could have designed a cleaner API
> that would have resulted in more stable third-party drivers.... ;)
>

They did have such an API at one time... in NT 3.51.

In NT4 they redesigned the GDI so that the user could bypass
"userland" and talk straight to the kernel.

It's been so long I don't recall the exact details, but this re-hack
paved the way for  DirectX and sped up the response of the new
desktop, which of course was lifted from WIndows 95.

After NT4 anything that hooked into the GDI could BSOD.  New video
driver?  BSOD.  New printer driver?  BSOD.  It was quite a mess.

Still is.

Worst design flaw ever.