Leroy Nemm
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Sunday, December 07, 2003
MDM and the Microsoft Way
I'm just buying myself a P75-powered Libretto 50CT. Years behind the in-crowd, I've found a secondhand miniscule PC which I quite like. I intend to use it for programming external devices like door access systems, PABxs, PIC programmers, and so forth. (Also, I like the size of it, I haven't seen as versatile a communications machine since the Tandy M100/M200 'laptops' of 20 years ago. I still have and use my M200, it's inbuilt comms software and port have been a godsend on more than one occasion.)
Another thing about the Libretto, it runs Windows. I'm not biased, but much of the software written for serial programming and control of those devices has been written for Windows and never ported to any other operating system. I don't fancy doing any porting myself, as my knowledge of C or whatever is approximately zero. So the fact that this palmtop came with Win98SE on it was attractive.
I also like things to work reasonably well, so I started uninstalling stuff that I know isn't needed, unloading processes that do nothing for the operating system, and generally taking out stuff I know destabilises Win98. (I think I had some sort of record once, I kept a Win98 machine with a record uptime of 84 days, and it was running a web server and chat server... But that was probably a fluke...)
And right there, when I was trimming the running processes down to Explorer and Systray, it hit me. What sort of pants-down-bend-over-assume-the-position operating system runs a process like mdm.exe? (For the uninitiated, mdm is the Machine Debug Manager.) 'We accept that our software is so full of holes that we've written this special program to watch over it all and assist in debugging and recovering of crashed software.'
Okay, so maybe that's not precisely the way it works but the secret to gauging the company's attitude to it's own software IS in the naming of the program. It's like the famous 'Shouldn't See This' window that sometimes comes up as Win98 or 95 is spectacularly crashing - why bother to name such a process unless you fully expect it to be visible? And why would you expect that, hmmm?
So the culture of MS is pretty obvious from things like that. They build it fully expecting it to crash, to fail. And all those developers follow their lead, building ever more software for a platform that's already doomed by its own programmers not having faith in it. No wonder there's such a huge market of malware makers out there, they can all see the head-hanging attitude and immediately *know* they're going to have no trouble showing this software who's boss...
Worst of all, you can't just kill the mdm process, Win98 keeps resurrecting it. That about says it all... %)
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
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