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MS Upgrades To Be Smaller And More Frequent
duplicantk8 writes "Following the numerous delays to the Vista launch, MS is planning to have more frequent and smaller incremental upgrades, according to the Financial Times." From the article: "Those delays are set to end late next year with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95. The new versions of the company's key PC software are likely to rekindle higher growth after a period that saw its growth rate slip below 10 per cent for the first time last year, according to Wall Street analysts. Mr Ballmer's comments are the most public sign yet of the dent to Microsoft's confidence in its core development process that resulted from the Vista delays."
Those delays are set to end late next year with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95.
This phrase gets dusted off for every OS release MS makes. Heard it for 98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003... and will continue to hear it for every other bloody version MS flogs.
I found a similar statement in a Boston Globe article from August 8, 1996:
Who would have thought that about a decade later, it would seem like Microsoft was having the same problems:
Of course, what fixed Apple was not doing incremental releases. They had to do a step-function switch to Mac OS X.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Windows has had translucency since Win2000. The big deal for me is the deprecation of the Win32 platform, the first-class status of managed code, the deprecation of GDI and the introduction of the new DirectX compositing system, and some very significant changes to the security model. The Windows UI that they create is more of an afterthought as far as I am concerned. I'm much more interested what I can do with it as a developer, and I was blown away by the Sparkle demo yesterday.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
From what I understand, Linux doesn't lock the files like Windows. You can overwrite a file that's already open, and all new opens of that file will use the new contents. I've certainly never seen an error like: "cp: Error: Unable to copy file - destination file locked" or similar.
Get your own free personal location tracker
> The catch is that if you need to patch a critical system file, it's orders of magnitude
> more simple to just replace it upon reboot (since nothing's running). Otherwise you need to
> close down any applications and services that are using that file. Some system files are used by
> the GUI interface itself, at which point you're crossing your fingers and hoping it pops back to
> reality during the patch process.
Yes. But a lot of that is due to the fact that MS never really structured the system files properly. If they had done so, this would not be the problem it is.
> It's probably technically possible to do certain patches without rebooting
Very possible.
> but you'd have to have a savvy enough user to shut down and bring back dependent services.
Not really. If the installer is properly designed using MS Installer, it should fall back to copy-on-reboot if anything is in use, and alert the user to reboot. It's only the install programs that make assumptions that are a real problem. Instead of falling back to copy-on-reboot, they choke and die with a cryptic error message.
Spotlight is not powered by mySQL.
Just write a utility to do it for you, or download one of the numerous ones that do this for you. IE:
http://www.dr-hoiby.com/WhoLockMe/index.php
I don't really see the big deal...
You're right about Cairo, but that's NT 4 (1996), not Win 2k.
Inodes are a feature of all file systems under UNIX and unix-like systems including Linux. When you access a file, it's 'locked' in that it will not vanish on the process that opens it...yet, each process has a different inode.
Because of that, you can have one program that moves a file, another that deletes the 'same' file, and yet another that is currently editing the file. Each has a different inode. The result is that you can update a program, for example, and not have to exit it...but still fire up the new version!
Here are a few notes on this nifty feature;
http://www-1g.cs.luc.edu/~van/cs219/lect0/
http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/networking/puis/ch 05_01.htm
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If you have an app that loads 3 libraries, it has 3 different and unique inodes.
If another program loads the same libraries, that program has 3 different and unique inodes...for a total of 6 inodes between the two programs.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You are confusing filehandles and inodes. Inodes are unique on the filesystem. Filehandles are per program.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.