OS stability - was Re: [X Newbies] Crashing of text editor?

[marina]

On Monday, Mar 29, 2004, at 12:55 Canada/Eastern, Charles Martin wrote:
 >> [...] Mac OS X is not supposed to crash *at all.* As in *ever.*

and Alex commented:

 >C'mon. That's absurd.

Believe it or not, it's not "absurd". There are plenty of examples of
computer systems that *do not crash*, full stop. Now whether this is your
personal experience or not, it does not affect the fact that some OS's are
more stable and robust than others - so much so, that some simply do not
crash.

Example - we have a local network server, running FreeBSD (which is where
Darwin comes from). It's been going for five years non-stop. And I mean, 24
hours a day, 365 days a year, without a single crash. Another computer on
our network runs some version of Solaris (forgot which one - I don't use
it), and again, it hasn't crashed once in four or five years.

My experience with several flavours of Mac OS is not very dissimilar. Mac
OS 8 used to give me bigger problems than 9.2, which would probably crash 3
to 4 times a year, and OS X has been behaving pretty well so far (no
crashes in three years - although only two months of "full use").

Sheer luck? I don't think so. While hardware incompatibilities can explain
why some computers crash more often than others (and it's hardly a fault of
the OS, in these cases), some *operating systems* are by definition more
prone to crashes than others.

And the fact that PC users have grown accustomed to blue screens of deaths
and unexpected failures is not, and should never be taken as a sign of what
computers *in general* are. It is, in my opinion, simply a sign of how easy
it is to lower the standards when one has the monopoly of the market.

marina