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Interview of the Windows XP SP2 Dev Team
Masa writes "SuperSite for Windows has a nice interview called "Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story". The interview gives a good insight, what kind of a project the Service Pack 2 was, how it got started and how huge effort it actually was." The ITMJ Product Guide is part of OSTG, as is Slashdot.
I followed the link, but it was only a story about the quest for the Holy Grail. Except the Holy Grail was a dixie cup, and the crusaders took twice as long to search for it, but still came up with nothing, except t-shirts with corporate logos.
The Custom Mary
"The reason we called it RC1 was that we wanted people to think that we were serious." I for one welcome our serious microsoft overlords... for a change.
So at Microsoft, either something works and isn't secure, or is secure and doesn't work.
I know, this isn't really news, but it's not every day you hear it from Microsoft.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Looking at the timeline, almost half of it was filled with 'fixing' Internet Explorer
Just drop IE and spend more time on the freaking OS.
I've been reading The Old New Thing for a few months now. It's a blog written by a guy at Microsoft (I don't know what department), and among the things he writes about is why windows sometimes works in unexpected ways.
Yeah, Windows has lots of bugs. But some of those bugs can't be fixed, because certain major programs rely on those bugs . When you fix the bugs, you break the programs. Almost every bug fix windows gets these days is accompanied by a program breaking. MS has to try and decide whether enough users are affected by the bug to make the fix worthwhile.
MS has been pussyfooting it about breaking programs in the past, and I'm glad MS finally bit the bullet with SP2 and broke all those programs in the name of security. It was high time. Of course, it means I have to keep a second PC around for some older games, but hey, that's life.
The people at Microsoft know what is wrong with Windows. They have a variety of reasons for not fixing it. I can't say I agree with them completely but some of them make good "business" sense. It's too bad they care more about "business" than the quality of the product itself.
When Apple did MacOSX, they basically created a "WINE" for MacOS9. Not everything was/is perfect but a great many things continue to work without problems. They didn't sit back and say "oh... we have business reasons for not overhauling the whole OS and starting over from something more secure and stable from the start."
I have said it before and I say it again: Microsoft is perfectly capable of doing exactly what Apple did: Make a new OS and make a WINE to run the old stuff until people finally migrate over. I'm not a developer but there are plenty of examples out there to show it's not impossible. I know I can't be the only person who has ever thought of it and I wonder why they haven't done this at Microsoft already? Some people here have been kind enough to put forth some reasons why Microsoft hasn't just abandoned its current Win32 model -- essentially business reasons -- so can someone offer some likely reasons why Microsoft wouldn't build a new OS and then make a WINE for backward compatibility?
Todd: I'm talking Windows [Division] in general, or Microsoft in general. The Longhorn wave
As I had previously read this is not a joke, just look at this quote from a Microsoft worker: http://www.longhornblogs.com/robert/archive/2004/
Now, at the same time all this has been going on, there has been a lot of complaining about the constantly slipping Longhorn release date. I haven't weighed in on that too much yet, but I think it's time to break my silence. Microsoft shifted between 80-90% of the Windows Client Team off Longhorn development and onto Windows XP SP2.
Is not that the SP2 is a bad thing. Is a great improvement, but it took so many time, it was delayed so many times...that's all what Microsoft can do? I mean, they just put all they resources in the SP2 and it took them forever to release it.
Perhaps it's just me, but the open source world evolves much faster and has more resources than Microsoft. Every 6 months I see more evolution in the OSS field than what I saw in SP2 (and again, it's not that the SP2 was bad - it was great! But just look at fedora 3 with its SELinux integrationand all the rest. We're being faster than them IMHO, and how fast can you evolute is more important than "how good are you today"
- Microsoft's best are not able to turn off Media Player 8.
- Media Player 9 went thru a "security audit", so it must be better than 8, which has been tested by several hundred million people.
- Enabling a firewall breaks *everything*. Apparently they havent heard of a simple GUI with easily-understood checkboxes. (See IE options... for the classic counterexample).
- They somehow expect a semi self-anointed czar of security patches to gain everyone's support.
- Nowhere is it mentioned the (estimated) 45,000 uses of unsafe string functions in the source code.
Sigh^3?Following the first link in the story leads you to this picture (eventually):a m_85.jpg
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/war_te
Isn't that a penguin?
Isn't that Tux?
What's he doing there?
Spying?
Or... noo. They hold him captive??!