One of the things that some people like to trot out in defense of Unixis the old chestnut:

On Unix everything runs as a user process, so you never have bluescreen of death reboots like you do with Windows; even if somethinggoes wrong, it's just a user process and your system doesn't go down.

I like Unix, but this sort of defense of it has always irritatedthe heck out of me. Ignoring how it can be false in practice , it's completely disingenuous

I happened to notice this today: if you go look at your garden varietythree prong power plugs, you'll see that the ground connector issomewhat longer than the two power connectors. Thus when you insert theplug the ground wire is connected before the power goes hot, even ifthings are a bit off-balance.

There's applications of this safe- before -engagement features in systemadministration; for example, Unix boot sequences usually configure IPfiltering before the network interfaces come up, not after.