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Vista To Be Updated Without Reboots
UltimaGuy writes "Microsoft is working on a new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which will update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. From the article: 'If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot.'"
Not being able to kill services in not a limitation of windows, it's a limitation of the task manager. Use Sysinternal's Process Explorer - it will let you kill any process, even if doing so will crash windows.
How is this new, my {Unix| Mac| Linux} system has done this for years
Your mac most definitely has not done this for years. Even updating Safari requires a reboot on OSX. My mac can't go a week without Software Update asking for a reboot.
At least when one had to reboot to update, one could usually make an informed choice whether to interupt one's work, close everything, and reboot. One can only assume that the "update without reboot" process will not be without risk. That is not a slam against MS; software isn't perfect. One way we deal with such imperfection is by minimizing the consequences of a crash or fault.
What if "update without reboot" is, in the name of consumer friendliness, as well as in the supposed interest of the "mommies and daddies out there," both automatic and invisible, and something goes wrong and/or is corrupted in the middle of a vastly important project?
There is safety in being forced to reboot. It means you aren't doing something else.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
As much as we'd like some software companies to just update our current products it's unlikely that it'll happen. For you see, giving updates for free is not where the money is at, especially when you have an astronomical user base.
It's that way with a lot of things, for example I have a Wireless card that was sold AFTER the release of WPA but its drivers were never updated to work with WPA because they decided to abandon a perfectly fine card. If you contact the company they'll admit it no problem, they know they can get away with it and make even more money by doing something else.
For a lot of companies money comes before security. Unfortunately, thanks to a large ignorant user base (not everyone, but the majority), this is a perfectly fine business model for them.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
The slashdot crowd once again rears its ugly "i'm a linux zealot so I'll say anything against windows and for linux even if it's not true" head. I'm a regular user of both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. BOTH operating systems support killing and restarting MOST services without taking down the entire computer, as well as OSX. BOTH operating systems will let you dynamically load and unload hardware drivers without a reboot. BOTH operating systems will allow you to change your network configuration without requiring a reboot. BOTH operating systems require a reboot for kernel modifications. Windows requires a reboot for core DLL files since it doesn't have a runlevel 3 to drop back to like Linux does. But for all intensive purposes, if I have to shut down all services as well as X-windows, I'm not that close to being any better off. As other users have pointed out, don't blame Microsoft for the software maker's innability to report when a reboot is actually required or not. Linux never tells you when you "should" reboot unless you've installed a new kernel, it just blindly assumes you're ok, when sometimes you are not. This was also pointed out for OSX, whose update manager usually suggests a reboot even though the OS is capable of surviving without it. I can also tell you from personal experience that you can offer to "reboot later" and continue using the newly installed software with no problem most of the time. The difference in these approaches is that when grandma and grandpa install something and windows doesn't reboot for them and a conflict arises, they're left with a blue screen of death and can't understand what happened. When a linux user updates but doesn't restart X, and then applications start hanging, he/she knows, "oh, guess I just have to restart, that was my fault." When the general public isn't well educated and is using your software, you just do what's safest for them.
When a library is replaced the original is deleted, but the content still hangs around until all programs that rely on that library close, at which point the file system deletes the content.
Not quite - it's more general than that. When a file that an application has open is deleted, the link to it is removed (so you can't see it any more, nothing else can access it, etc) but the data is left in place and any file handles remain valid. Once the last handle to it is closed, then the inodes are marked as being free.
That's the case for *any* file, be it a library, an mp3, a text file, etc.
For what it's worth, I can see situations in which replacing a library that's in use could be problematic. If you start another instance of the app that's using it, for example, and the library that's changed defines a communications protocol, then you may well have problems if the two instances try to communicate. That may be relatively ok if it's an instant message system, but not so good if it's something more critical like an RDBMS. Not likely, perhaps, but not impossible.
The main issue is that in windows, two files can not exist under the same name (no concept of linking).
The same is true of Linux. In the case of deleting a file that's in use and replacing it with a new copy, there are not two files with the same name. There is one file with the name, and an area of data that is no longer linked to. That area of data *used* to have that name, but doesn't any longer.
When deleting a file that's in use, an OS has three options:
1. Delete it anyway and damn the consequences
2. Delete it but keep the data available for the application(s) using it (the Linux way)
3. Prevent deletion of the file (the Windows way)
Note that 3 isn't the only way it works under Windows, it depends how the file was opened. For example, WMP is perfectly happy to allow you to delete media files while you're playing them, notepad is fine with text files disappearing out from under it, etc.
It's official. Most of you are morons.