I bring that up to highlight the weight of his opinion: Russinovich is legendary in terms of his systems programming contributions.
also the excellent book "windows internals", which is kind of like the bsd red book, or the magic garden svr4 book, but for systems derived from the windows nt kernel.
but perhaps his best work is this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blu...
a screensaver that produces a realistic blue screen (kernel panic) for the version of the operating system and kernel that are installed, along with a simulated reboot that lands back into bsod as an infinite bootloop. extra bonus points because it also creates fake disk activity (for the era of hdd lights and hdds that made noise) for extra realism during the simulated boot.
I did wonder how a screensaver can crash the kernel, until I remembered what it's supposed to do.
I was embarrassed for quite a while after that.
Most importantly, there's also a complete lack of understanding of the underlying motivations behind both Islamic terror organizations, and cyber crime groups.
I love a ton of things that Mark has built, and I'm glad he's out living his best life. According to the Amazon reviews, a ton of people loved the book, but from my perspective Zero Day is a rare miss.
I used this one at work for some time. Until I came back from my lunch break and got told by my office mate that he helpfully rebooted my PC because it had crashed in my absence.
> Note: before you can run Bluescreen on Windows 95 or 98, you must copy \winnt\system32\ntoskrnl.exe from a Windows 2000 system to your \Windows directory
There be dragons
The way they expose OS internals in a powerful-but-user-friendly way is delightful and empowering. I still remember the first time I used procmon; it felt like a veil was removed from my eyes, suddenly I could trivially see everything processes were doing!
Sysinternals represents an idealized Windows to me: an OS for power users with a GUI-first culture that differentiates it from Unix. Windows itself might not live up to that dream anymore, but at least we have Sysinternals.
When I see Mark's name, I stop and read the article.
Where does it end? If he says mint chocolate chip is the worst ice cream flavor, am I obliged to agree with him because he made sysinternals?
He’s an expert in the subject at hand, and that fact is more relevant than the fact that he’s the Azure CTO. What more do you want?
(And yes, of course you can disagree with him. That has never been doubted.)
It means he has a very informed opinion. That doesn't mean we are forced to agree (I do not), but that we must answer with another informed opinion ourselves.
MR is clearly expressing an opinion and reasons for it and it is up to you to decide whether his experience qualifies him to make such bold claims, whether there are edge cases for exceptions and whether or not you agree or care.
Otherwise, the argument is 100% valid.