In article , Wolf K
wrote:


"New! Improved!" is easy to do with cars, for example. You just change
the styling and add a few gimcracks. Impossible with an OS without a
radical redesign, from the ground up.

not only very possible, but it happens all the time, and with much more
than just styling changes.

each major version of windows, android, macos and ios are all 'new
improved' over the previous versions, sometimes in very significant
ways.

That's what made OS/2 and Windows
NT superior to DOS/Windows. Win7 (and Win8 without the Metro GUI) is a
relatively mature version of NT. Pretty good, despite its security
flaws. W10 is a styling change with a few gimcracks added.

win10 is a bit more than just a styling change. there are new features
and new apis. some apps will not work in older versions (although right
now, very few require win10).

MS has never
had a good sense of style, and its gimcracks apparently result from late
night pizza-fuelled BS sessions.

that part is true. microsoft's design language is pretty bad.

But those flaws can IMO at best be only patched over. It's possible to
build a more secure OS (see Unix, Linux, OS-X) but even those are
limited by the fundamental insecurities of the CPU chips, whose makers
have focussed on speed and power, not security.

AFAICT as an observer, it's possible to build fundamentally more secure
CPU chips. Given those, a fundamentally secure OS could be built.

that makes no sense.

But
not a foolproof one: users will always be the prime security flaw.

that part is true.

people are easily phished.