Digital BW, The Print

Austin writes:

> I completely agree with both those statements,
> ESPECIALLY the first.  It seems to be the registry
> is now the real fragility of W2k, not the NTFS file
> system.  IMO, the registry is simply a foolish concept
> that never should have seen the light of day.

I agree.  It is too critical to the system, and too easy to break.  It's
better than the WIN.INI text file that it was intended to replace, but not
by much.

In general, I'm very wary of any kind of centralized, mission-critical
database file in any operating system.  Databases are just too unreliable
for critical OS use, so the less there are in an OS design, the better.  I
never much cared for the fact that Microsoft Exchange Server used a
monolithic, proprietary relational database, with no repair tools, no
fallback provisions, etc.; and the Active Directory successor is no better.

For reliability, I tend to like the UNIX philosophy of simple flat files.
Yes, it's inefficient, but it's easy to fix, as long as the design isn't too
bizarre (although UNIX does have a habit of putting such files all over the
place, which makes maintenance difficult).

> And...I don't mean by registry editing, I mean by
> some fool program writing the registry and screwing it up.

NT-family operating systems allow permissions to be attached to the
Registry, but because the Registry is such a rat's nest of parameters, very
often just about everyone can write to just about everything by default, so
it doesn't necessarily help much.