Getting A Handle On Vista

visination.com wrote to mention a news.com article which runs down some of the basics on MS's new Operating System. From the article: "Among the key features of Vista as it currently stands are: security enhancements, a new searching mechanism, lots of new laptop features, parental controls and better home networking. There will also be visual changes, thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that are tiny representations of a document itself. On the business side, Microsoft said Vista will be easier for businesses to deploy on multiple PCs and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted."

Comments

Re:Darn!

[Trepalium]

That's not really true. The problem is that the installer can not replace any files that are in use by any open program. The windows file systems (FAT/NTFS) prohibit removing a file that's in use (although with NTFS, you can rename the file while it's in-use). The only sure-fire way to make sure the file is not in use is to reboot. There's no danger of a BSOD or any other severe system crash, though.

It's the brain-damaged file system's fault. Contrast this to Linux/UNIX file systems which can typically unlink a file (delete) without freeing the associated inode until the file is actually unloaded by all users of the file. The upside is that the upgrade can take effect without a reboot, the downside is that you may not be fully upgraded unless you restart all applications that use that file you're upgrading. When you upgrade apache, making sure all relavent services are restarted is easy. When you upgrade glibc, it's far from easy.

And the real kicker out of all of this is that Microsoft is unlikely to ever change this. I would prefer a system that worked more like Linux in this regard, but unfortunately many programs on Windows require this annoying file locking scheme to exist exactly as it does right now. If Microsoft changes this, it will break some software, and people will blame Microsoft for the breakage. Even people within Microsoft understand the problems this exectuable locking causes, which is why .NET programs for IIS use this strange shadow copy (different from W2K3's shadow copy feature!) method to allow you to update your website, despite the fact the executables in the target directory should be in use.