Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture

bariswheel wrote to mention an episode of 'Going Deep' on Channel 9 which takes a hard look at the architecture of Windows Vista. From the post: "Rob Short is the corporate vice president in charge of the team that architects the foundation of Windows Vista. This is a fascinating conversation with the kernel architecture team. It's our Christmas present to all of the Niners out there who've stuck with us day after day. This is a very candid interview." Topics discussed include the history of the Windows Registry, and the security/reliability of Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

Comments

For those of us without speakers...

[the unbeliever]

Can someone post a transcript please?

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[jtorkbob]

Sure! Here is my transcription of the entire link:

Error: 503 Service Unavailable

Server returned file not found

Kind of sums it up nicely, if you ask me.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[Jugalator]

Wow, talking web servers. Microsoft is innovating!

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[AuMatar]

Not found, eh? Must be the security section.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[CODiNE]

Hey guys, I'm deaf. Been wondering about this for a long time, is there any kind of open source voice recognition package I could pipe audio through and get some kind of recognizable text? Phonetic is fine, I'd just love to be able to get a rough idea of what's being said in things like this and of course ancient TV released on DVD's with no subtitles or captions arrrggghh! Hey put that in a Knoppix distro and you've got Deafix!

I just bought the Red and Stimpy DVD set which clearly states it's Close Captioned on every single piece of the package and yet there's NOTHING there. I get stuck with this kind of stuff all the time.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it sucks like a hoover: 99% original microsoft code, 1% ripped off from BSD. If it works half way respectably: 90% ripped off BSD code, screwed up by microsoft marketing, 10% claimed to be original micorosoft code, but written by 3rd parties, and shoved in by microsoft marketing. The marketing people claim it's the best system outsourcing, stealing, and intimidation can buy.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[wolrahnaes]

Are you only trying Closed Captioning or have you also tried the DVD player's subtitle feature? It might be subtitled and just called closed captioned on the box thanks to some marketroid.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[artson]

"Hey guys, I'm deaf. Been wondering about this for a long time, is there any kind of open source voice recognition package I could pipe audio through and get some kind of recognizable text?

Two things: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18420 IBM to open source speech recognition, and.. http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/ Open Mind Speech project. Nothing concrete, but there's source code available.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[CODiNE]

Hrrmmm... actually I just tried them out on my laptop and the CC works fine. Guess my TV decoder is starting to conk out on me.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, there's one person here who says "Post drunk it's more fun that way" (or something to that extent.

I gotta add to it, READ DRUNK IT'S *Polite* FREAKING AWESOME!!!!

That was by far one of the most funniest comments I ever read. But then again, I just had my 6th (maybe 7th) double shot Skyy vodka with Martinelli's apple cider (go figure)..

I downloaded the clip to watch it later, it made a lot of sense but I'm too drunk to watch the whole thing. Actually I'm too drunk to post (glad I hit that post anonymously thingy majigar, or did I?) :P
anyway, good stuff...
Live long, peace, one love, et cetera ad nauseum
Man I'm drunk!!!

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[Anonymous Coward]

post ~= s/\(or.*/(or something to that extent)./g

p.s.: I'll try that tomorrow (if I can get my hands on a perl enabled thingy) and if it does what I think it should do I'll call myslef a champ!!

Anonymous Coward,
Too freaking drunk to taint my name...

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[jtorkbob]

Ah, one of the great Intarweb institutions: posting (anonymously!) to brag about how drunk you are.

I appreciate the comment. I really do. I try very hard to amuse as many people as possible. This is my first +5 Funny, even if it was only because I replied to an FP, and I think I've finally arrived. But now I just want to drive this thing even further off topic by pointing out how stupid you are.

Not just you, but pretty much our entire generation. I truly believe that the way young people insist on drinking their way into social acceptance, we are putting a lot more at risk than healthy livers. Children are taught to idolize the party lifestyle. We are shown over and over that consuming behavior-altering substances is an acceptable way to avoid uncomfortable situations and shirk responsability.

So, I've come to the conclusion that such people are stupid and have weak minds. Unfortunately, alcohol use encourages breeding, which counteracts any saving grace of gene-pool filtration.

In other words, thanks, but no thanks, you drunk bastard.

Re:For those of us without speakers...

[LifesABeach]

Hi,

Windows Vista? Oh boy! I can hardly wait to see what I can do with this new toy! And the NEW security "features" that I'll be able to ussssssssez.

Regards,
14 Year Old Script Kiddies, and Out-of-Work-Programmers with nothing to do, and all day to do it.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a "back-door" porno?

I love the questions they ask.

[IntelliAdmin]

My favorite is: "do you ever wish the registry had never been developed?"

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Jugalator]

I personally think the Windows Registry is the software implementation of the saying "putting all eggs in one basket".

But of course, backups are automatically made on successful bootups to minimize the damage done if you'd suffer from a file corruption in that specific file. But I've never figured out when it does that. It clearly doesn't seem like on every successful boot, as I've seen messages like "Windows has restored a registry backup" and after that wondered where all settings the past few months went, and why some programs don't even run anymore. Gah... Thankfully last time it happened were a number of years ago. *knocks wood*

Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for .config XML files stored in the application directory (sort of like their old .ini files) in their new wave of .NET applications, and that seems to be more like the recommended way of storing application settings. I don't know how user-specific settings are dealt with if doing it that way though, and if it's only suitable for settings for the local machine.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[c0dedude]

What was his answer -- the site is down for me. If anyone here knows the history of the registry, please post it, as it seems like a tranewreck to most.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the registry was an april fools joke that a PHB thought was a real idea.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

See:
        C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\
        (can be sync'ed with a domain server)
and
        C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\
        (remains on this machine only)

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

Basically, they said that the registry was too successful for its own good; so many apps use it that it has almost become a general purpose database, which it was never intended to be. They say that one of the biggest problems was that there were never any comprehensive standards published on how it was to be used, so devs did whatever they wanted, which caused chaos that contributed to it becoming a mess.

The registry first existed for registering OLE document types in about Windows 3.0. At the time, it had almost no structure and responsibility. The first release of Windows NT (NT 3.1) made the registry much more important: everything that used to be stored in .ini files moved into the registry, along with all the driver and system config for a full OS. There were even compatibility shims created to redirect access to the old .inis into the appropriate registry keys. A couple of old .inis were kept, but only to placiate old apps. Notably, the entire NT shell used the registry exclusively, unlike DOS/Windows: for example, the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes tree originated in NT 3.1. NT also expanded the registry concept into multiple hives all mounted in a common hierarchy: each hive file is like a mounted filesystem. The machine's hives are in system32\config: a SYSTEM hive that the bootloader loads that drivers need to get the system started, a SOFTWARE hive that contains all of HKLM\SOFTWARE, and the SECURITY and SAM hives that store the accounts database and the machine's private keys. Each user also gets their own profile hive. Originally, the user profile consisted of only the user's hive, but NT4 made it a full directory for storing documents and other things. Before Windows 2000, a domain controller stored the entire user database in the registry, which led to some serious scalablity problems. I suppose they could've used a heavier database (like 2000 does), but at the time i'm sure it seemed like good code reuse.

Meanwhile, the Windows 9x/ME series still uses .ini files (like win.ini and system.ini) for much of the old 16bit core code, but uses the registry for the code they imported from NT, like the shell. COM (introduced in Win95) also uses the registry heavily for GUID registrations and such. Many of MS's own products countinued to use the registry for all their settings, but some of the newer versions are starting to move away. IIS 6 has a XML configuration "metabase", with the old registry entries kept only for compatibility. .NET is threatening to use XML for more config, as is Vista. It seems to me that Exchange has also switched to an XML type thing recently.

Personally, I don't see what the big problems with the registry are. The registry is a hierarchial database system provided by the OS designed to store configuration information. The only differences between it and a /etc type config directory is that

1. The storage is managed by another database on top of the filesystem, instead of the filesystem db directly.
2. The seperation of config entries is handled by the db in the registry, whereas each app comes up with its own format in /etc.

The registry has several documented functions for hot backup and restoration, and has always been journalled (like the fs metadata). A lot of apps abuse the registry, but I think they'd do the same thing with their config files on another OS.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[starwed]

Personally, I don't see what the big problems with the registry are.

With most old applications, I could simply copy the root directory onto another computer, and it would work fine. As apps started using the registry more often, this sometimes became impossible; programs would just refuse to work because they couldn't find the registry entries they needed. (Games are especially bad, as they often keep CD keys in the registry.) I can see why the registry could be useful, but in practice it (or perhaps just how programmers have used it) has caused me quite a lot of hassle.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[jez9999]

It doesn't work well for all apps. Sometimes you don't want the complexity of being able to have different settings for different users, but do want to be able to take your settings with you wherever you copy the app. In that case, the registry is a damn nuisance and it's much easier if the app uses something like an .ini file in its app directory so you can just copy the whole app dir wherever and keep your settings.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Nebu]

Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for .config XML files stored in the application directory (sort of like their old .ini files) in their new wave of .NET applications, and that seems to be more like the recommended way of storing application settings. I don't know how user-specific settings are dealt with if doing it that way though, and if it's only suitable for settings for the local machine.

There's a special directory for storing user-specific settings. On a default install of Windows XP, it's located at "C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\[company name]\[program name]"

AFAIK, there's no guidelines on what to do if two companies share the same name and the same product, though I guess that would be relatively unlikely.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Spank me for not previewing. There is a missing in between the \\'s.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

I personally think the Windows Registry is the software implementation of the saying "putting all eggs in one basket".

Kinda like how putting all your filesystem metadata in one database is the software implementation of the saying "putting all eggs in one basket"? The registry is a binary hierarchical database optomized for config (small entries), broken into mountable volumes (registry hives), journalled and with hot backup functions. A filesystem is a binary hierarchical database optomized for large files, often journalled and with hot backup functions. If you want backups, see ntbackup: the "System State" option includes all the machine's hives. System restore also makes backups of the system hives.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it seems like they're trying to get away from the registry for these sort of config files. The suggested way of storing user specific settings for your application is in an XML config file, in the user's Documents and Settings directory.
They provide a "Configuration Application Block" with the .Net framework to make this easier - here's a bit of dry and boring documentation about it if you'd like :-)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnpag2/html/config.asp

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Part of this is the fault of the applications and/or installers themselves. It is fully possible (and a few apps exist) that when the registry keys are not found, they are installed from system defaults. If the installer was also kept in the application's directory and had an option to just install the registry keys then things would be portable again.

Hell, putting a simple .reg file in there would do it for many cases.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Nurgled]

That's almost as bad because I still have to go back and set everything up again. If I've copied an app rather than just installing it from scratch, chances are I did it because I was hoping to bring over my config changes too. I generally do this these days by just exporting a chunk of the registry, but some apps seem to do something more "clever" which causes them to break even if I do this.

There was a VoIP app I used to use (whose name escapes me) which seemed to work okay for a few minutes and then would inexplicably pop up a dialog box saying something along the lines of "Application broken. Please reinstall." I just ended up uninstalling it.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

Sometimes you don't want the complexity of being able to have different settings for different users, but do want to be able to take your settings with you wherever you copy the app.

That's a good point. Still, you don't want a central config system of any type in this case; an /etc directory wouldn't be any better. Besides, an app that donesn't store its settings per-user isn't multiuser. What is it supposed to do when multiple people try to run it at the same time on the same computer? You may not be using it that way, but someone may need it on a terminal server.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[BillyBlaze]

Exactly - since we already have the filesystem, what exactly was the point of the registry? Just optimize the filesystem for smaller files (ReiserFS, anyone?) or use bigger chunks (instead of one key-value pair == one file/registry entry, have multiple pairs on their own line in a file).

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[timeOday]

Kinda like how putting all your filesystem metadata in one database is the software implementation of the saying "putting all eggs in one basket"?

That's the tragedy of the registry idea. Why have this whole extra registry implementation and toolset when it's almost completely redundant with the filesystem and all the familiar tools that operate on the filesystem? Just to optimize for small entries? If your filesystem has that problem, optimize it. Just as Hans Reiser.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[AFCArchvile]

In Win2K it doesn't make automatic backups, aside from the "Last Known Good", which rarely works when you want it to. A while ago my Win2K machine was frequently BSODing on shutdown (it was a BAD_POOL_CALLER BSOD, and it was the NVidia Forceware driver's fault; the BSOD had happened right after the GUI came up before, but later on it happened more often right after shutdown). I had become so sick of having to re-enter my CPU bus speed because I was shutting down after the BSOD that once I shut down just before the computer had reset from the BSOD. The next time I booted up, it said that C:\WINNT\System32\Config\system was corrupt. That's the main registry file. "Last Known Good" is a backup saved in "system.alt"; that was corrupted too. I had to restore from a copy of the registry that was saved from right after the textmode part of the Win2K install, which had been performed about 20 months ago. I could thankfully boot again, but I had to install drivers and applications all over again, and I couldn't use a few key Microsoft programs, especially Windows Update. I've since upgraded to a much faster machine, and given it XP Pro.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[ivoras]

I'm sure that, if Microsoft did something like that (turn Registry into bunch of XML files), there would be an army of Slashdot-reading nerds going "Wow, M$ is stooopid - and what about memory consumption and speed of processing of all that XML files?!", "And just how is M$ going to ensure data reliability / transaction safety with textual XML data?!" and others.

The Windows Registry in Windows NT systems is a database-like construct, with sort-of transactions. They even have access control lists to manage security - keys can be made writeable only by some users, etc. Some registry files ("hives") contain security information and are not readable by normal filesystem utilities (access-denied on open(); though this is not registry-specific :) ).

Think of it like using mysql or sqlite database to store and manage system configuration instead of bunch of config files - it's NOT a bad idea.

(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing).

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[IntelliAdmin]

Wish I could tell you, but my registry is corrupt so I was not able to play the file

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[AKAImBatman]

It's still the wrong way of doing it. The Windows NTFS filesystem has full support for storing meta-data on the files. Windows SHOULD be storing registry type stuff as attributes on the program file. But it doesn't. Which means that you're making a mess no matter what you do. Lots of extra/unnecessary garbage to manage.

That's why Linux has a real opportunity to pull ahead.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Nebu]

Some of the meta data required is the path to the program executable. This is so that you can check if a program is installed, and then vary your actions accordingly. It does not make sense to store this data on the file itself.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[AKAImBatman]

That is solvable with a DBFS query. Making links in a registry-type database almost guarantees that you'll have problems stemming from uninstalls, reinstalls, and other movements of files. A quick search of the FS data system, however, can get you the information you need just as fast, and FAR more accurately.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[smittyoneeach]

"putting all eggs in one basket".

A rather verbose spelling of "turkish prison", say I.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[smittyoneeach]

So why not do something intelligent and implement it as a SQLite database?
What's less than half a meg of C that already works on Windows between friends? It's not like the existing registry files are exactly svelte.
Ah, yes: good ideas can be discerned by the Redmond refusal to implement them.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Nebu]

Yes, this is one reason I'm looking forward to the DBFS in Windows Vista. =)

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Brandybuck]

I personally think the Windows Registry is the software implementation of the saying "putting all eggs in one basket".

Way back in the early days of the Windows Registry, it was supposed to be only for system wide data, not for individual applications, which had the option to create their own load registries (just like apps have their own config files in Unix). But somehow that decentralized idea never caught on, especially since Microsoft themselves didn't do it for their own apps, and barely even mentioned the capability in their docs. Thus we end up with all the eggs in one fragile binary basket.

This is the big reason I don't like the push to get a central configuration registry on the Unix desktop. Give developers a basket, and they WILL put all their eggs in it.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Karma Farmer]

Windows SHOULD be storing registry type stuff as attributes on the program file. But it doesn't.

Yeah, then roaming profiles are going to work great.

The registry isn't great, and the per-user, per-application private data caches implemented by Microsoft need some work. But 99% of the "solutions" proposed by slashdotters are far worse than what we already have.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Overly Critical Guy]

I love when people defend the failure that is the Windows registry. Spyware and virus authors want the registry to stick around forever too.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[AKAImBatman]

Yeah, then roaming profiles are going to work great.

And roaming profiles are a *good* idea because... ???

The more meta-data you can link up to individual files, the better you can network those individual files. The problem is that Windows is an explosion of little files, with an explosion of configuration files, with an explosion of proprietary databases, with an explosion of special directories on top. It's a fracking mess, and roaming profiles is a band-aid.

No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term. Plus, GUI designs have never been reevaluated in the face of modern hardware.

Read the article. I haven't covered everything (it's an article, not a book), but you may find that it's actually a good idea. BTW, the follow-up is here.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Osty]

So why not do something intelligent and implement it as a SQLite database?

Feel free to travel back in time and suggest they do that. The registry has been around for over a decade. SQLite has not. The registry works (yes, maybe it can get corrupted, but I haven't had that happen in years), and there's other stuff Microsoft can and should focus on besides re-writing the registry.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[pnatural]

Think of it like using mysql or sqlite database to store and manage system configuration instead of bunch of config files - it's NOT a bad idea.

No, it's not a bad idea: it's a horrible, brain-dead, idiotic implementation.

Let's not forget it's Microsoft we're talking about here.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[NutscrapeSucks]

Nice idea, but the OS had to run on FAT for compatibilty reasons, so not feasible back when they invented the Registry.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[jonadab]

> Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for
> .config XML files stored in the application directory (sort
> of like their old .ini files) in their new wave of .NET
> applications, and that seems to be more like the
> recommended way of storing application settings. I
> don't know how user-specific settings are dealt with

Those are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Name\Application Data\Name of Application\

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Bellum Aeternus]

Simply being from M$ does not make an idea bad. Take Xml/Http. Even Google likes it and it is a M$ idea. They built into IE 5.5 long before Mozilla/FireFox or any other browser had it.

M$ has had other good innovations too. Don't just knock something because it's from M$. Knock the Windows Registery because it's outdated, aniquated, and unreliable. :-p

(Mod me down if you have to...)

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[klui]

Unfortunately, you cannot manipulate the data using standard Windows tools as though it were written as a set of files under NTFS. For instance, it would be really nice if I could search for all registry entries that was created/modified since I installed program X. The metadata exists, but is not exposed by regedit. And if something corrupts an entry in the file system, I think the chance of the entire hive becoming inaccessible is less than if the registry is in 1 file. Maybe I trust NTFS more than the registry "file system." Or are they done using same underlying calls?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

Why have this whole extra registry implementation and toolset when it's almost completely redundant with the filesystem and all the familiar tools that operate on the filesystem?

That's a good question.

My SOFTWARE registry hive has 99865 keys and 143228 values in it. User has 18154 keys and 106945 values. Added to SYSTEM, my registry contains a total of 131181 keys, and 291410 values. 131k keys is more than 10x larger than the 11584 files in my \WINNT directory. My main disk has 351k files in 20k directories; moving the registry structure there would mean six and a half times the number of directories and a 83% increse in files, assuming one file per value. I'd characterize my computer as one a typical developer would have.

It's not completely unreasonable, though: NTFS already stores files smaller than about 900 bytes directly in the MFT file record (space that would otherwise be wasted) and NTFS's extended attributes (or even file streams) would provide a nice implementation of key values, but there's still the issue of 6x directories for structure. Although they have the same basic structure, the scale of the registry and filesystem are each quite different. The registry sucks for large entries: the entire SOFTWARE hive is only 26MB, but then again filesystems traditionally suck at tiny files and directories. I suppose Microsoft could've added a special directory flag that optomizes for tiny directories. I suppose the hierarchy in the registry could be flattened/simplified to require less keys, but that would give up security granularity (but I'm sure some could give), and would require a very major overhaul at this point.

The registry hasn't changed much since it was first introduced in its modern form in NT 3.1, so let's look at how things were back then. I've got a VM of NT 3.51 with Office 97 and VB 5 on it. In SOFTWARE, SYSTEM, and USER, there are 12673 keys and 18851 values. Compared to 254 directories and 4k files, moving the registry to the filesystem would've meant 50x the directories and more than 4x the files (or extended attributes, assuming you could get apps to use 'em).

There's a reason that different types of databases exist. Filesystems are general purpose DBs that have direct access and handle large files well. SQLish table oriented databases are used for lots of things that flat files directly on the filesystem suck for. The registry is a specialized database for the high structure low leaf data that comprises config files. Windows is hardly the only software product that uses a special binary config database; see the 'registries' that Mozilla or Eclipse use for examples. Could they have been implemented directly in the file system? Sure... but would it've been the best way?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

What, exactly, does the registry have to do with spyware and viruses? If you're saying that the large size permits hiding by obsurity, a file system structure to store the data would be the same. If you're saying that it provides some kind of security hole, please enlighten us as to how. If anything, giving each key its own security descriptor makes it MORE secure than a flatter version implemented in a filesystem.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[drsmithy]

Exactly - since we already have the filesystem, what exactly was the point of the registry?

Because the Registry was conceived and designed back around 1990.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[drsmithy]

Thus we end up with all the eggs in one fragile binary basket.

It's worth pointing out that the Registry is a number of "binary baskets", one of which is carried around in the user's profile, not just one big file.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[timeOday]

See if you find these interesting: http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html http://namesys.com/

In short, I'm convinced the registry doesn't require a separate implementation from the filesystem.

Designers (including Mozilla's) are entrenched in the idea that lots of tiny files are bad. Traditional filesystems and even api's to some extent aren't optimized for that. But Microsoft was in a different position, because the designers of the registry were in cahoots with the filesystem people (same company). Instead of inventing the registry, they should have optimized NTFS for config info.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Brandybuck]

When someone says "Windows Registry", they are referring to the system wide registry. That thing that is edited by regedit. Trash your user's profile and you lose a some minor configuration data, and most likely end up with usable "default" settings. Trash your system registry and you're hosed.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Sarisar]

Where I used to work we didn't do anything in the registry if we could help it - we ended up writing a few standard libraries to do similar things. If it's program related data, dump it on the H drive (read only) with the program files, if it's user data, dump it on their Y drive. Roaming profiles works fine with that and it doesn't require any stupid registry stuff that ends up getting copied up and down the whole damn system. Like the time someone was running a newer version of notes, which overwrote the old notes data which when a new person logged into the machine they inherited and within a few days no-one could check their mail. Good thing this was only in the test environment. Or the time I found out why it took me 20 minutes to log on every single damn day because it was copying my ENTIRE REGISTRY FILE DOWN plus all my 'personal files' and some program had filled it with crap, which I have a feeling was MSDN doing a full install in 'my docs'. Removed that stuff and it logged on in seconds afterwards :)

But I digress. I hate the registry, it's a terrible idea if you need to copy a system out to reinstall XP or something, then you have to reinstall every single damn program back in. But if the registry didn't exist everyone could simply have two HDs, one for windows and one for all their applications and it wouldn't care about it if you reinstalled. This would also mean if (or rather, when) your machine gets screwed up (viruses / trojans / other hacks / simply dies because it's got too much shit on it in the registry) you can reinstall and have everything still the way you want. Window size, everything like that could be ini files and not registry and wouldn't be wiped.

Going back to this company, if we had the ini file wrong we simply updated it and next time people ran, easy. Or if it was on their Y drive we ammended the batch file that ran almost every program (which while sounding stupid was very usefull) to delete or fix the problem then run the program. All remotely done, no need to get every user to run stuff on startup to fix registry issues, then find out one guy didn't do it and everyone else that logged in gained all the settings (as mentioned above).

Is www.bantheregistry.org available? I think I might want to start my own charity :P

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Fallen_Knight]

131181 keys, and 291410 values

A: for each Key you'd have a file, at worst, so 131181 files
B: alot of the keys and values are pretty uselss and totaly OVERKILL i think
C: many and i mean MEANY keys and subkeys are like /network/adapter/stuff1,stuff2,stuff3
D: there is much duplication of keys and values.

So there would nto be 131181 files, no where near
theres alot of stuff in there thats pretty weird to have in there
registry is prone to bloat, at least it used to be and probably still is
some of the stuff in there is more suited to a /var or /tmp then the registry
it makes mvoeing configs across installs or frmo 1 system to another damned hard.

Now what makes me sure it was the wrong way is linux uses config files, and a linux system with a full package install seems ot have ALOT more software to configure then windows, so how come linux can easily use config files and windows can't? windows can't need that much config data??

config files are alot easier to edit, change and debug then the registry, as you have many MANY tools that can read and manipulate text files. grep, find, whatever.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Rezonant]

I'm pretty sure that the "last-known-good" is from the last successful shutdown.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Anonymous Coward]

You bring up an excellent point. Reiserfs will likely not be popular for at least a decade because apps must be written to support it. Since most people don't have reiserfs, any app that requires it will be quite unpopular. Windows has the same problem with NTFS. Since Windows cannot rely on having an NTFS filesystem available, having it store the configuration data would not help very much. Not only does NT (all current Windows versions are based on NT) have to be able to boot from FAT[32], but the APIs still have to work on Win9x. What they would end up with is just some config-optimized FS layer on top of the filesystem. Come to think of it, they could call it a "registry"...

Remember, FAT (like most old Unix filesystems) could not have more than 64k files (each taking up at minimum one sector) and directories are not stored in sorted order on disk. This means that putting every key in a different file would start to limit the number of other files you could put on the filesystem and cause config file access to be slow because you would end up with lots of files in large directories.

When the system boots it creates a copy of the systems configuration data (LastKnownGood), which is relatively easy because it involves just copying a segment of a file. If the data were stored in a hundred or more tiny files, making this copy would have a huge performance impact on boot-up.

The Unix answer to this question is to either hard code the information right into the executable (most binary installations must go in specific directories) or write out a file in some proprietary format, and that doesn't solve the problem that the registry was initially designed for -- to manage all of the components of a distributed object system (OLE) where none of the components needs to know where any other component is installed or what it can do.

Quite honestly, I think the registry is a good solution to the problem of where to store lots of configuration data. Unfortunately its growth has not been managed, and is now a mess. Still, doing a search in regedit for some configuration is much easier than trying to grep the filesystem for something.

dom

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[The Ilia]

...Bill? Is that you?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Orgazmus]

And im pretty sure i DID shutdown my machine sometime in the last two years.
Maybe the shutdown wasnt successful, and nobody told me?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[dubl-u]

Personally, I don't see what the big problems with the registry are. The registry is a hierarchial database system provided by the OS designed to store configuration information.

I'm not a Windows programmer, but the practical problem I see is that a filesystem is *already* a hierarchical database, one for which there is already widespread existing knowledge and many handy tools.

It seems to me that they could have accomplished everything they did but in a backward-compatible way by providing a nice library for config file managment. By making their own (very limited) database, they forced everybody to reinvent or do without things you can easily do with text files. E.g., backups, version control, network shares, searching, auditing, editing, diffing, and commenting.

I think that last one, commenting, is particularly important and particularly overlooked. Looking at my apache and postfix /etc directories, I'd guess that they are respectively 80% and 95% comments and examples. By making it so that I never have to even look at the manual for common operations, they radically increase my ability to learn about and maintain the software.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Frizzle Fry]

In Vista, the directory is "users" rather than "Documents and Settings".

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Eivind Eklund]

Making state saving easy makes software tend to save more state. That makes said software behave differently each time it's started up. With bad developers, this can be highly annoying.

Eivind.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[smittyoneeach]

Why the time machine?
Implement it now, with an API facade so that the b0rkenness of legacy code holds constant.
As for on what MS should focus, my recommendation is seppuku.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[mederjo]

(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing).

How about a config file approach which has a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications ? This is what Apple's CFPreferences API does. There is one API and it stores prefs in files in various locations you specify... hang on, no point in me explaining it, here's a link :

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFound ation/Conceptual/CFPreferences/index.html

To sum up, preferences are stored in XML files in various locations, for example the current user of your application, all users of your application etc. No reason it has to use XML files with the API it has, but that's what it does. You don't actually deal with the files yourself, you just specify a domain and start adding and retrieving values as you will. It has the advantage of consistent access without the possibility of borking the entire system when someone does something stupid with the registry trying to store config info for their application.

Seems like the best of both worlds to me.

Regards,

Jo Meder

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they don't need the overhead of SQL or an RDBMS for storing and retreiving config files, mostly stored in key/val pairs?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[master_p]

Interestingly, Microsoft has started opting more for .config XML files stored in the application directory (sort of like their old .ini files) in their new wave of .NET applications, and that seems to be more like the recommended way of storing application settings.

Well, the Amiga O/S worked like that 20 years ago: each executable was accompanied with an .info file, which had the app settings. Installation of an app was nothing more than copying some files into a directory. If you would like the app to be in a different directory, then you just have to copy it to the new directory. And if you copied the executable through the GUI, then the info file was copied along.

People have been screaming from day 1 that the Windows registry is a bad idea. There were numerous examples on how to handle apps' config files, but Microsoft chose to implement the lamest one. It always have been a sad fact...but on the other hand, these guys introduced drive letters, the backslash path separator and WinMain :-).

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[smittyoneeach]

Are 'they' in Redmond, or elsewhere?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Sirfrummel]

AFAIK, there's no guidelines on what to do if two companies share the same name and the same product, though I guess that would be relatively unlikely.

...OR, the SAME company released the same product TWICE!

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

Like I said before, it's more a scale issue: filesystems don't handle large quantities of files and directories with tiny dataums very well. Like someone else mentioned, Windows has to be compatible with the FAT filesystems, which are not equipped to handle 100k directories. It might be possible to compress the directory structure to require less containers, but then you'd start sacraficing security granularity and common format structure.

Backups: RegSaveKey
Network shares:Remote Registry service
Searching, see Edit->Find in regedit, or write your own search prog in code. It's not going to be any harder to walk the registry tree than a filesystem tree.
All kernel objects support auditing. See Edit->Permissions->Advanced->Auditing. Make sure object access auditing is enabled in the local security policy.
Editing, see regedit.
Diffing, export to a text reg and diff those.
Inline commenting vs external help is a matter of style. Microsoft has opted for external help, but there's nothing stopping you or anyone else from attaching extra string values to a key for commenting purposes only.
Windows already doesn't have a versioning filesystem (like VMS does), so any versioning system would have to be your own implmentation, registry or filesystem.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[dubl-u]

Like I said before, it's more a scale issue: filesystems don't handle large quantities of files and directories with tiny dataums very well.

Older unix filesystems don't handle this well either, but somehow /etc and ~/.foo still work. Curious, eh?

RegSaveKey [...] Remote Registry service [...] write your own search prog [...] regedit [...] export to a text reg and diff those

Yes, you're proving my point here. The introduction of a custom database format requires people to reinvent tools or bridge to old ones, and requires a whole set of registry-specific knowledge to get things done. Sometimes that's worth it (e.g., SQL databases) but it's a heavy, heavy cost.

Inline commenting vs external help is a matter of style.

That's demonstrably wrong in that it suggests the two are functionally equivalent. It's like saying that uncommented code is just as good as commented code as long as there are some external docs. Except help files are even worse in that they can't be easily maintained by people managing the configs. Apache and Postfix both have excellent external help, but they still heavily use configuration comments, and good sysadmins add in even more.

Windows already doesn't have a versioning filesystem (like VMS does), so any versioning system would have to be your own implmentation, registry or filesystem.

Also incorrect. For unix setups, I can (and do) use RCS, CVS, or SVN to manage config files. (As well as cp, rsync, and tar, of course.) Because the configuration files are text, I get a lot of configuration management functionality for free that has to be reinvented with proprietary binary formats.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

You make some excellent points. I'm afraid that my citing performance/scale is just grasping at staws. (though I bet your /etc doesn't have 131000 directories in it) I was thinking about 'why the registry' in this thread, and that's about the only reason I could come up with. I wonder how hard it would be to write a FS driver that would wrap the underlying registry up in a file like interface...

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Overly Critical Guy]

If you're saying that the large size permits hiding by obsurity, a file system structure to store the data would be the same.

Wrong. With the registry, it's easy to exploit the system via mechanisms like DSO, or discreetly hiding things on startup.

On OS X, for instance, you can see what's starting up in /Library/StartupItems

It's just stupid to create a giant database that stores everything from filetypes to startup items to system configuration. Oh, and have fun when the file corrupts.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Foolhardy]

Wrong. With the registry, it's easy to exploit the system via mechanisms like DSO, or discreetly hiding things on startup.

On OS X, for instance, you can see what's starting up in /Library/StartupItems

Why is something more hidden simply by being in the registry, compared to being in some obscure config file? Windows could have a lot of different locations for startup items, regardless of how configuration data is stored. If Windows used an /etc type system, then there would be locations spread across multiple (equally obscure) text files instead. The registry itself is not needed for this. Also, I find it hard to believe that every possible way to start programs automatically on OSX exists solely in /Library/StartupItems.

It's just stupid to create a giant database that stores everything from filetypes to startup items to system configuration. Oh, and have fun when the file corrupts.

Just stupid. What an insightful and convincing reason.

The registry is journalled just like the filesystem is. I don't know about you, but I've never had a registry hive get corrupted on NT. Can you explain how it's more possible for a registry hive to get corrupted compared to the filesystem? How about more possible when compared to a XML or text file? In fact, if a program crashes while rewriting a text file, anything that didn't get written is automatically lost. A journalled binary database can simply roll back the transaction.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[ivoras]

You should back those statments up with some real-world information:

- how is it outdated and antiquated? It's a hierarhical database just like, for example, LDAP. Unfortunately it doesn't provide quite rich search possibilities but that's because it's made for situations where you know where to find what you're looking for (mostly because you have put it there). And a (hierahical) filesystem is also a database.

- how is it unreliable? Has a registry corruption On WinNT+ ever happened to you personally or someone you know? Has it been fatal?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Lehk228]

that was scrapped a LONG time ago

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[dubl-u]

I wonder how hard it would be to write a FS driver that would wrap the underlying registry up in a file like interface.

Interesting! That's a great idea, and what they should have done all along.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Haeleth]

No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term.

And every single one of the "other PC GUI systems" you cite is a single-user OS with few, if any, multi-user capabilities. Since not one of them even attempted to solve the same problem as Windows - to whit, how to mix configuration and metadata with multi-user environments - I fail to see how you can consider them comparable.

When the crunch finally came and everyone realised that everything had to support multi-user operation, what happened? Unix was already there. Windows had a kludge in place that worked well enough, for enough people, enough of the time, for it to survive. And the rest? What became of the other wonderful GUI systems you mention? They failed to adapt, and died!

BeOS and the Amiga sank quickly, and are now remembered only by a handful of fanatics who are still trying to come to terms with the collapse of their religion. RiscOS would have been long dead already if it hadn't had a niche in education; though apparently it's still around somewhere, lurching sadly along like the walking dead in their haunted catacombs. And the Mac was sick unto death, nearly taking Apple with it - who survived only by, uh, binning basically their entire codebase and adopting a Unix-based system? Oops.

Funny how the "worst" design was the only desktop OS that was actually adaptable enough to survive. I guess you subscribe to some kind of anti-Darwinist "survival of the unfittest" theory of evolution?

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[AKAImBatman]

Uh, yeah. Whatever you say. RiscOS was hardly single user, nor was BeOS. Most of the GUIs (GEM, NeWS, VisiOn, etc.) never even had a chance to compete in a multi-user, networked world. Most of them preceded Windows, but were crushed by Microsoft before they made any progress in the marketplace.

The Mac adapted to networking quite well, thank you. Before Windows, even. And OS X has shown that the NeXT interface (made in 1986, mind you) is far superior to your "adaptable" POS.

Really, if you're going to troll, at least try to make sense.

Re:I love the questions they ask.

[Makarakalax]

Do you really think the reason Windows succeeded where the other examples did not is multi-user support? I'm tend to put more faith in the fact they dominated the PC market at the time.

Is that a word?

[slavemowgli]

[...] the corporate vice president in charge of the team that architects the foundation of Windows Vista.

"architects"? Is that even a word?

Re:Is that a word?

[Kazzahdrane]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=architect s suggests not, at least not when used as a verb as in this case.

Re:Is that a word?

[DyslexicLegume]

Only when used as a plural noun.

Re:Is that a word?

[WallaceAndGromit]

Yes.

Re:Is that a word?

[JonN]

Quick check over to dictionary.com reveals:

1. One who designs and supervises the construction of buildings or other large structures.
2. One that plans or devises: a country considered to be the chief architect of war in the Middle East.

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no word in the English language that can't be verbed.

Re:Is that a word?

[andyh1978]

"architects"? Is that even a word?

Apparently so, nowadays. First you architect solutions, then you're leveraging synergies, and it's a downhill slope from there into corporate marketspeak.

In the words of Calvin, verbing weirds language.

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't be anal retentive if you don't have an anus"

You can retain someone else's. I have several on a string around my neck. They look like calamari.

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no word in the English language that can't be verbed.

I think you'd have trouble verbing "the".

Re:Is that a word?

[heinousjay]

Past tense of the is thud. Like the sound this joke made.

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

my bet is that the writer is from a latin based language. In portuguese [the translation for] "architect" exists both as a noun and a verb, so while reading that I didn't sound weird at all. I didn't know it didn't exist in english as a verb until now (not that this means anything, as my english is not anything to brag about).

Re:Is that a word?

[eatjello]

Anyone know if there is a verb for the word architect (other than paraphrasing, like "designs")? Perhaps "archetypes"?

Re:Is that a word?

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

They look like calamari.

Yeah, but I bet they taste like crap.

Re:Is that a word?

[digitaldc]

"architects"? Is that even a word?

'Architects' is a word, but I guess the correct word 'designs' is just not as creative.

Re:Is that a word?

[No2Gates]

If MS uses it, then it has to be a word....

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a fucking moron?

architect (är"k-tkt") n. 1. Abbr. arch., archt. One who designs and supervises the construction of buildings or other large structures. 2. One that plans or devises: a country considered to be the chief architect of war in the Middle East. [Latin architectus, from Greek arkhitekt½n : arkhi-, archi- + tekt½n, builder; see teks- below.]

Re:Is that a word?

[itchy92]

Yeah, but verbing weirds words.

/Calvin and Hobbes

Re:Is that a word?

[Tim C]

Yes of course it is, but it's a noun - it's the plural of architect.

However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs - hence people are "tasked" with doing things, rather than being assigned tasks, you "architect" a system rather than designing it, etc. In this case it's almost forgivable, as technical design is a distinct discipline from visual or graphic design, so it's nice to have a separate word, rather than having to use "technical design" and "graphic design", which are a little cumbersome.

Re: Is that a word?

[Black Parrot]

> First you architect solutions, then you're leveraging synergies, and it's a downhill slope from there into corporate marketspeak.

The trouble starts when you find yourself thinking outside the box. Next thing you know, you're talking out your ass.

Re: Is that a word?

[Black Parrot]

> However, there is a (depressingly stupid, imho) trend at the moment to use nouns as verbs

It's not a trend of the moment, it's a basic property of the English language.

For example, it should take you about a minute to think of 25-30 long-accepted verbs that are the result of "verbing" the names of body parts. Start with "head" and work your way down to "toe".

Re:Is that a word?

[busman]

From apple dictionary ..

architect verb [ trans. ] (usu. be architected) Computing design and make : few software packages were architected with Ethernet access in mind.

Re:Is that a word?

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct term is 'verbizing'.

Wonder if Dave is involved

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if Dave Cutler is involved, and if so, to what extent

Re:Wonder if Dave is involved

[aCapitalist]

Have you read ShowStopper?

Re:Wonder if Dave is involved

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, and don't have to. I was around in DEC when he was there, and although I didn't work with him, I had friends who did/tried. I met him once, in fact. Which is why I was asking in the base note, since I'd have thought that the successors to NT would have been better architected than they were. Instead, they continue to be riddled with security bugs. I guess CGB didn't help that much, either...

But, then again, we know who was the Chief Architect, and it wasn't Dave...

'nuff sed, except thanks for pointing out that book to us; I'm sure it's interesting reading.

Re:Wonder if Dave is involved

[TheNetAvenger]

Which is why I was asking in the base note, since I'd have thought that the successors to NT would have been better architected than they were. Instead, they continue to be riddled with security bugs

Don't confuse security bugs in the Win32 subsystem and NT... They are different things, and NT itself has proven to be less security prone or buggy than almost any OS, even many beloved Open Source OSes.

How deep did they go?

[Spazntwich]

Because I'm only interested if it was BALLS DEEP.

Re:How deep did they go?

[schnikies79]

HAHAHAHAHA. I rarely laugh at posts but this one had me rolling for some reason.. Bravo!

Normally I'm a fan of the Deep Inside Series.

[Anonymous Coward]

But that was the worst porn video I've ever seen. There wasn't even any nudity, but considering how these people looked (think your local linux user group visits The Gap), that was probably for the best. My rating? Totally Limp.

Re:Normally I'm a fan of the Deep Inside Series.

[Mr. Vandemar]

I disagree. I got kind of excited when the one guy started talking about "applications spraying their goo all over the place".

Re:Normally I'm a fan of the Deep Inside Series.

[ruiner13]

Dude, that is the very reason they have the "Post Anonymously" checkbox... TMI.

Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

...good old ini files are much more easy to use (i.e. copy around, fiddle and the like)

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[dc29A]

...good old ini files are much more easy to use (i.e. copy around, fiddle and the like)

That will also make applications easier to port. Something Microsoft doesn't want. Registry is a good lock-in tool for Microsoft.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, this will make applications easier to copy to a new system after a reformat or general cleanup. Microsoft shouldn't give a tiny rat's ass for this, since that's the way (ok, one of the ways/reasons) their software ended up in everyone's computer...

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[displaced80]

(I'm a .NET developer .... hey, don't shoot me!)

I'm a huge fan of .conf files (or, on my home platform of choice -- OS X -- .plist) files. Although I appreciate .conf files' readability, sometimes I want to store prefs which are a little more complex. My preferred method is to create 'Prefs' classes in my apps. Depending on requirements, I'll make a UserPrefs class and optionally a SystemPrefs class (for prefs that apply to all users). These are just a bunch of properties to hold each setting. It's nice from a coding point of view because you can put sensible defaults into the prefs class(es)' constructor in case the prefs haven't been saved previously. I then just serialise and de-serialise these classes into and out of an XML file. These get saved into appropriate filesystem locations.

The resultant XML isn't as tidy as that which OS X's Cocoa frameworks produce, but it's still a gazillion times more manageable and flexible than registry entries. I'd like to put together a generic viewer/editor for these xml files (much like OS X's 'Property List Editor'), although they're still plain-text tweakable if you're paying attention.

The registry is an idea whose time has passed. I'd like to see a future MS operating system implement a standardised xml file layout for everything the registry holds, using as many individual files as are appropriate. Turn the legacy Registry API calls into wrappers for the file-based system.

That'd make things neater, if done right! :)

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Jugalator]

Hmm... Well, assuming you have the source and are ready to start porting code, it's just about changing the behavior of a number of well documented API calls. You can make a library out of it with your own preferred behavior to make the code reusable. Actually, I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already done so and posted it somewhere on the web.

It's hardly a lock-in method when it's both documented methods and it's easy to find out what happens -- the Windows registry is hardly rocket science, but more like a tree of settings that can have a few different data types.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Jugalator]

Turn the legacy Registry API calls into wrappers for the file-based system.

For those who don't know, this is actually exactly what Microsoft themselves did starting in Windows 4.0. They changed the implementation of a number of Registry API calls to work (read + write) against the registry rather than system .ini files. Time to change back to files again, maybe? ;-)

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[HiredMan]

• I'm a huge fan of .conf files (or, on my home platform of choice -- OS X -- .plist) files
  
• The resultant XML isn't as tidy as that which OS X's Cocoa frameworks
  
• I'd like to put together a generic viewer/editor ... much like OS X's 'Property List Editor'
  

So you're copying the way OS X does things within .Net to compensate for the way M$ does them. Sounds like you're ready for the Windows next-gen R&D team alright!

=tkk

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

The resultant XML isn't as tidy as that which OS X's Cocoa frameworks produce

Actually, .plist files are managed by CoreFoundation - which sits underneath both Carbon and Cocoa.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[tomhudson]

Topics discussed include the history of the Windows Registry

I was hoping they would announce who was responsible, and kill him or her instead ... the registry should be classified as terrorist WMD - Windows Melt-Down.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Claire-plus-plus]

My least favorite "feature" of the registry is the tendency it has (sometimes) to have the entries for software that has been uninstalled. I assume the problem is with the uninstall routines of the software not the registry itself but if configuration files were used instead it would be childs-play to remove the configuration of old versions.

One example where this irritated me was in Java programming years ago. I needed to use the newest version of the Java API so I installed it. However, the IDE I was using (I think it was Forte) kept saying there were 2 versions of Java installed and insisted on using the older one. Additionally the old version of the compiler kept running instead of the new one. I uninstalled the old version of Java and thought things would get better, however, things got worse. Now it said that there was no compiler available and that it was still using the older version of the API that I deleted. After some investigation I found that the old version was gone but was still in the registry.

I can't remember the solution to the problem I eventually devised, but I must have solved it. However, if there was no registry one would assume that removing a software package completely would be a LOT easier.

I would suggest that the easiest way to go without the registry is to store all data in the "Documents and Settings" directory. Then if it all goes pear-shaped it would be easily fixed.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Frostalicious]

Although I appreciate .conf files' readability, sometimes I want to store prefs which are a little more complex.

The configuration section doesn't have to be just a list of name-value pairs. You can design your own config sections with the full hierarchial functionality of XML. Look up the IConfigurationSectionHandler interface.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Foolhardy]

Er, you mean with File->Export and File->Import in the registry editor? If the machine with the settings isn't booted, use File->Load Hive to mount first so you can use export. I've transferred lots of apps this way.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[badriram]

nope he is just using .Net's way of configuration files. dotnet has built in apis to use xml config files, and makes it very easy and extensible.

ps: nothing wrong with copying

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are also disparate, contain no concept of a heirarchy, have no type-safety, cannot have value-level security descriptors, are not-user specific and I cannot easily push out twenty thousand individual settings (standard, I also write my own) using overlapping centralized policies at the click of a button.

The registry, for what it is, is a great idea. The implementation is under par for today's standards, but it is still ultimately a good mechanism for storing settings. That said, as mentioned in this interview, the registry has become a problem because it is being used for way too much. It's supposed to store simple specific items.

Fortunately, for MS, the implementation is very abstracted. Applications never interact directly with the registry. They call a small set of very specific API which handles all of the underlying I/O. They could easily replace the current proprietary binary files with XML files or a database and applications would chug along happily. Shit, MS actually had an iota of forward thinking in 1994, and I think that's impressive.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[jcr]

Holy crap! As bloated as the .NET frameworks are, they don't even include something analogous to NSUserPrefsController?

Are you kidding me?

-jcr

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[19061969]

And with . files (Unix equivalent to .ini files), it's possible to leave comments. This can help enormously in a production system to explain why some settings are not standard and why they should not be changed. (-1 offtopic)

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[aix tom]

I agree on portability. I have a few cross-platform perl scripts that, depending on where they run, either use *.ini - files, environment variables or the registry to store configurations.

The bad thing about the registry is that it is never quite clear when and how it get's corrupted. We run a setup with about 30 terminalservers and roaming users, and some of those perl scripts I mentioned are used to write values into the user-registry that get lost or corrupted on a regular basis during login or logoff when it is transfered to or from the machine the user is logging on and the profile storage.

The concept of storing configuration in a database and not in a INI-file has advantages, but those advantages are mostly lost when it's a proprietary database that is stored on a fixed place. E.g. in our environment it would be better if we could put the user registries in a central database and get rid of the login/logoff corruption problems.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in the software industry for over a dozen years, I was embarrased to know what the obviously well-known term NSUserPrefsController was. To try to inform my ignorant mind I tried googling this mocking symbol of my ignorance, alas I found nothing.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[ad0gg]

How would you different configuration(say pop3 login info) with a .ini file for multiple users on the same box?

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[5plicer]

nothing wrong with copying

I believe M$ attorneys would disagree ;)

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because I think he was referring to NSUser*Defaults*Controller, not "Prefs".

Some info

Unfortunately, the explanation is pretty dense unless you already have some background in the OS X Cocoa framework or its predecessors on NextStep, but it should give you some idea.

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Hasai]

Check out KXMLEditor. I use it to tweak and repair XML files, and it works just fine.
];)

http://kxmleditor.sourceforge.net/

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[jcr]

That's because I think he was referring to NSUser*Defaults*Controller, not "Prefs".

Yeah, my bad.. I didn't look up the name first.

Anyhow, is this really missing from the .NET frameworks?

-jcr

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[amliebsch]

You would store the .ini file (or more likely, the .conf XML file) in //C/Documents and Settings/%USER%/Application Data/App Name/

Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like .NET 2.0 application configuration classes and methodology standardized this kind of behavior (from what I've read, what you describe is pretty much exactly what it does - maybe they saw some of the stuff you did or you sent in your ideas).

"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Architect" is not a verb... any more than are "leverage" or "impact."

"Designs" works just fine.

Re:"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but virii and boxen at least have English-language rules behind them. They happen to be exceptions, but that's the reason "pompous asses" love them so much.

Re:"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but virii and boxen at least have English-language rules behind them.

No they don't, you stupid cunt.

Re:"architects"

[colinrichardday]

It would be "viri", not "virii", except that "virus" was a mass term in Latin. Also, aside from "ox"/"oxen", there are no other such plurals of nouns ending in "ox" (no "foxen").

Re:"architects"

[sconeu]

What about VAXen?

Re:"architects"

[EccentricAnomaly]

"Architect" is not a verb

It is in Apple's dictionary (the one that comes with 10.4)

Re:"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, on viri. The plural of virus would be viri, but does not occur, as per Lewis and Short and I believe the OLD. On "oxen," however, you are limiting your terms too much: while I can't think of any other plurals in -xen, I can think of two other plurals in -en : brethren and children.

Re:"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

Virus 'poison' is neuter, second declension. No joke. The plural properly is vira. There are a handful of -us neuters in the second, although very rare.

Oxen, bretheren, children, women and men if you count those,

Re:"architects"

[Junior J. Junior III]

Also, aside from "ox"/"oxen", there are no other such plurals of nouns ending in "ox" (no "foxen").

Won't somebody think of the childrEN!

Re:"architects"

[anphanax]

This is just another example of Apple's innovation. They're finding new ways to use old words. Just another example of how they're knocking Microsoft off it's feet.

Re:"architects"

[Anonymous Coward]

It is pretty clear that we are talking about nouns ending in "OX" not "DR".
Incidently CHILD is the noun, not CHILDR.
Therefore, CHILDren is the plural, not CHILDRen

Re:"architects"

[electroniceric]

Fortunately that has left us the opportunity to invent "foxen" now. As in:

"Check out those foxen. I'll bet at least one of them's a model."

Re:"architects"

[funtime]

That's because Apple is using the abortive American English version of the dictionary instead of the real thing.

Re:"architects"

[WilliamSChips]

No, there is no plural. And you can't interpolate vira. There are only three or so -us words that are second-declension neuters--virus, pelagus, and something else. None of them have plurals.

Source

[endemoniada]

I hope the post pieces of the source for people to comment on :>

Early Codename

[rfinnvik]

Early Vista kernel codename: Heart of Darkness

Re:Early Codename

[Anonymous Coward]

The Horror! The Horror!

Does Vista's Kernel support ESCAPES in WMF files?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if it does a number of things will be going deep inside.... Fista Vista!

Fix whats there!

[a_greer2005]

Not flame, genuine curiosity from a 20 year old IT major

OK, am I the only one who has grown weary of the "oh well, another month, another insain exploit" state of mind in which windows users and admins seem to be willing to accept? Why do people just accept this, I understand a few bugs, and maybe a SINGLE large scale outbreak in something as commonplace as Windows, but this crap is just outright crazy now-a-days.

Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on, so why do they "just take" this seeminly QC-lacking products from redmond with glee?

Re:Fix whats there!

[a_greer2005]

Hate to reply to self but: heres the rest of my thought that I forgot:

If you already paid for WinXP, why the hell should you have to pay AGAIN for the "security" that was supposed to be there...and in 2k, NT4, yadda yadda yadda?

Re:Fix whats there!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like getting gang-raped in a Turkish prison : eventually you get used to it.

Re:Fix whats there!

[rpd10]

Oh but business does accept it; or I wouldn't be staring at an XP desktop now. BTW isn't "20 year old IT Manager" an oxymoron?

Re:Fix whats there!

[jjohnson]

Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on...

Businesses in all markets accept this kind of quality from their suppliers and partners all the time. They don't like it, they scream about it, they change relationships because of it, but don't think that problems of the same scale don't constantly occur in businesses generally. I say this as someone who spent five years in plastic housewares manufacturing. Technology is not unique at all in this respect.

Re:Fix whats there!

[kwalker]

I believe the term is "conditioning" which replaced "brain washing". When you're used to getting something of a certain quality from a particular person or organization, you come to expect it. (That's the tech-savvy people who defend microsoft)

Either that or you have no idea what a WMF is (May even think it's an acronym for a body part) and don't understand how it can hurt you or why it's important. (That's everyone else)

Besides, usually with partners, suppliers, etc. you have a way of punishing them, perhaps a contract stipulation. With Windows, unless you're actually willing to roll-up your sleeves (Or buy a Mac), you're stuck. And for most people, they'd rather sit around, drink beer, watch NASCAR and complain about how slow their computer is getting and how they can't get rid of all those damn pop-up winders.

Re:Fix whats there!

[fleaboy]

I did notice today that Windows Live customers should not be affected by the WMF exploit. Guess you didn't pay ENOUGH just purchasing XP.

Re:Fix whats there!

[dc29A]

OK, am I the only one who has grown weary of the "oh well, another month, another insain exploit" state of mind in which windows users and admins seem to be willing to accept?
- That's easy to say. Problem is much higher on the food chain. Managers and people with money, who pay for projects have no clue what's good and what's not. To make matters worse, Microsoft shoves under their noses "unbiased" studies that show Windows is superior to *Nix. So managers get brainwashed and think that the people below them (coders, admins, etc.) are a bunch of hippies and they are wrong about *nix being better. So they end up buying into MS propaganda and continue using MS products. Of course the programmer or admin who has a mortgage and bills to pay can't really slam the door and leave, finding another job is not easy. The "Screw you guys, I am going home" line doesn't work in the real world anymore. It worked in the Dot.com bubble for sure. Not anymore.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Arandir]

It's a combination of ignorance and complacency. People just don't know any better, and it doesn't annoy the decision makers enough to demand a change. If all you've ever known is Windows, then it's all too easy to think that everything else must be just the same. If you're a decision maker you're never going to get your hands dirty with the issue anyway, so who cares? You've got grunts to take care of that.

Add to that the major hurdle of switching away from Windows, and you end up with the current business climate.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Arandir]

...they change relationships because of it

Yet the question being asked is why businesses DO NOT change relationships with Microsoft when it delivers crap. My company dumped a major supplier, and at great expense, over quality issues, but when a Windows virus infected a quarter billion dollars worth of product, no one even blinked.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm they accept it every week from linux vendors, sun, IBM etc, why not MS? check out the vulnerability list just in the 2.6 kernel since release, it is appalling.

Re:Fix whats there!

[MightyMartian]

Oh, I'm sure they blinked. But MS has so thoroughly convinced the world that Windows is the only operating system that they just simply felt there was no place else to go. And to some extent, those businesses and corporations are correct. The investments are huge, and to change course would be extremely expensive, from IT departments getting up to speed with alternatives to the poor guy just trying to send a spreadsheet via an email program. This is, in reality, the best demonstration of the kind of damage the Microsoft monopoly has had. An inferior product, which is only in the last year or two really began to solve some of its most serious shortcomings, has become so embedded into corporate and consumer culture that the alternatives are shut out. People will use Windows and Microsoft's other products no matter how crappy or insecure simply because they cannot fathom working without them. Microsoft's market share is guaranteed simply by fear.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Quirk]

I say this as someone who spent five years in plastic housewares...

Mr. McGuire: "I want to say one word to you. Just one word."

Benjamin: "Yes, sir."

Mr. McGuire: "Are you listening?"

Benjamin: "Yes, I am."

Mr. McGuire: "Plastics."

Re:Fix whats there!

[Arandir]

The investments are huge, and to change course would be extremely expensive...

Actually, this happened a few years ago during a transition from Unix to Windows. The Unix line is still selling like hotcakes, and is what is putting bread on the table, but has officially been declared "obsolete" by the management in favor the Windows based product.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate hearing bullshit like this from stupid desk clerks that think because they had a uniform on while behind the desk, they count as a soldier.

Re:Fix whats there!

[deaddrunk]

Either that or you have no idea what a WMF is

It stands for weapon of mass fubaring.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course outright bribery never enters the picture. Never. Just not possible, people in the business world are just too ethical for that to occur in big sales situations. The word "kickback" doesn't even exist.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Anonymous Coward]

I did notice today that Windows Live customers should not be affected by the WMF exploit. Guess you didn't pay ENOUGH just purchasing XP.

"Customers can also visit Windows Live Safety Center and are encouraged to use the Complete Scan option to check for and remove malicious software that takes advantage of this vulnerability." Source.

How is your comment justified? I.e., how will Msft be able "to check for and remove" the exploiters of this code? They can't fix the Sony issue...

Re:Fix whats there!

[Tibor the Hun]

PHBs my friend, PHBs. They're the ones with money and power to make decisions, not the IT Guys. IT guys are there to do their masters bidding.
You're still young, so think about business administration or management classes. IT will get you to mediocracy pretty fast, and that's it. Focus on telling people, not computers, what to do, and how to do it.

Re:Fix whats there!

[jcr]

this crap is just outright crazy now-a-days.

It's not a recent phenomenon, by any means.

-jcr

Re:Fix whats there!

[chrisgeleven]

The thing about Microsoft is they are too willing to bend over backwards for backwards compatibility. Yeah it is great you can run on XP almost ever Windows app ever created...but that has come at a steep price: security.

That is why IE has been so hard for them to secure, or why the latest vulnerability affects a part of Windows dating back to 3.0.

You know why Microsoft won't fix it? Because they have so many businesses that rely on old software (the classic why upgrade from Office 97 argument).

If Microsoft really could or cared, they wouldn't have waitied till Windows Vista to fix the "let's run every as administrator" mistake they made.

Re:Fix whats there!

[ThaFooz]

Fix whats there!

A long term plan for fixing the underlying architecture problems is as important as maintaining the current release... otherwise you're just turd polishing (which is more expensive to Redmond & the end users in the long run). System Architects and QA are almost apples and oranges too.

Not flame, genuine curiosity from a 20 year old IT major. Why do people just accept this... Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on, so why do they "just take" this seeminly QC-lacking products from redmond with glee?

I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high

I mean for home users, it boils down to a Wintel system or an Apple... if you're buying a new system its an easy choice IMHO, but what does an unhappy windows user do if they have nice x86 hardware? What do you really expect non-tech-savy users to do when presented with the options of (a) selling their current sytem at a loss and buy new hardware, (b) really making an effort educate themselves for the purpose of switching to an OS with little-to-no commercial apps/games/tech support, mediocre media playback, and a clunky UI (no, I'm not hating on Linux. Fantastic workstation/server, craptacular home desktop) or (c) just accept it & hit the reset button/ bust out the system recovery disk every now and then until it's time for a new box (or a stable release comes out).

For buisnesses, migrating workstations/servers is only possible if the application support is present, and you have the cost of re-training. Porting any custom C#/ASP/MSSQL/etc to cross-platform solutions is time consuming and software developers are expensive, ditto with *nix sysadmins. Not to mention the fact that any good Windows should be able to eliminate (or at least mitigate) the threat of said security flaws.

If you already paid for WinXP, why the hell should you have to pay AGAIN for the "security" that was supposed to be there...and in 2k, NT4, yadda yadda yadda?

Well I'm not exactly a MS fan, but I don't think its quite so sinister. Old versions (even pirated versions) are entitled to security patches for a few years, which is pretty reasonable. To expect lifelong upgrades for free is asking a bit much though. I mean, I expect Honda to issue recalls on any safety issues on my Accord, but don't angry when they won't retrofit it with a hybrid engine.

Re:Fix whats there!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Linux doesn't have this problem.

No, really, it doesn't.

You know why?

98% of Linux software is open source. The other 2% is made by people who have at least read about open source, and thus release early and often, keeping pace with the changes, and eventually releasing the source code when it's no longer profitable.

When the source code is public, probably half the backwards compatibility issues can be fixed by recompiling. The other half can easily be maintained if so much as five or ten programmers have the interest, and with the apps everyone relies on, it's much more than that.

I'd like to be able to say that the architecture is so great that backwards compatibility simply isn't an issue, but the fact is, if we're going as far back as when Windows 3.1 and DOS were around, things like glibc and gtk have changed enough since then that you probably do have to mess with the program. Although I have to say that overall, backwards compatibility seems to have been done much better and more easily on Linux.

No, the thing about Microsoft is that they do exactly enough to keep their marketshare and to keep the money flowing. Frankly, I don't think I've seen anything ever come out of Microsoft which wasn't completely driven by marketing and management, except Bungie and Valve. Nice thing about open source is that it's much easier to do things the right way, because programmers are making the decisions. Say what you will about usability, but modern Linux is rock solid.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Panaphonix]

I have heard that it was estimated that it would take more money than there is in circulation to change the world over from Microsoft to another OS.

Re:Fix whats there!

[NutscrapeSucks]

> 98% of Linux software is open source

It's a pointless argument because, by in large, the legacy stuff is custom/vertical software that is very unlikely to ever have an open source replacement.

Re:Fix whats there!

[davegust]

I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high

I'd say you're drinking the Slashdot kool-aid. Apple desktop market share is not growing in any significant way - still below 3%, and Windows Server 2000/2003 is gaining market share against *nix.

Re:Fix whats there!

[TheNetAvenger]

OK, am I the only one who has grown weary of the "oh well, another month, another insain exploit" state of mind in which windows users and admins seem to be willing to accept? Why do people just accept this, I understand a few bugs, and maybe a SINGLE large scale outbreak in something as commonplace as Windows, but this crap is just outright crazy now-a-days.

Have you ever done any *nix administration? Go take a look at the security updates for any *nix variant, OSes are not perfect - PERIOD.

Linux had more holes and patches again in 2005 than NT, just like the previous 5 years. So using your logic, why would anyone trust Linux in a server environment? (Not dissing Linux here, but you have to keep on top of security and fixes no matter what OS or Server OS you are running.)

If you are running a *nix box and not keeping on top of security because you think you are immune you are fool.

Re:Fix whats there!

[TheNetAvenger]

I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high

In relation to the price of the changes the previous poster brought up, the problem with Apple, is instead of SP1 and SP2, you get 10.3 10.4 with a $100 fee each year.

Even on the desktop, Microsoft at least doesn't charge for updates that are not major releases. SP2 of XP was more of a re-write than almost every OSX.x release even.

SP2 brought in many of the managed and security advancements from the 2003 Server development, in addition to new features, and it only cost a download.

If were were talking about NT4 Servers, I would agree with the above posters argument about why stick with MS, but 2003 Server and even the current Win2k SP have been surprisingly tight on security and updates and fixes have been pretty minor and painless.

Any *nix Sever needs security updates as well, even though they are not as often targeted platforms - so to move to *nix and not keep on top of security and patches would be foolish.

Re:Fix whats there!

[drsmithy]

If you already paid for WinXP, why the hell should you have to pay AGAIN for the "security" that was supposed to be there...and in 2k, NT4, yadda yadda yadda?

The "security" is there - it's just most users ignore (or circumvent) it.

Re:Fix whats there!

[16K Ram Pack]

I used to work on mainframes, and remember when the first NT4 servers arrived. I was quite shocked at the downtime and flakiness of them.

I also remember soon after my dumb terminal was replaced by a PC, being told that the solution was the three-fingered-salute and then asking the tech support technician why I should do it, which of course had no explanation. I was surprised because on the mainframe, we just didn't have it "hang", it stayed up. If something went wrong, it was almost never down to the OS, but down to user error.

Businesses didn't used to accept this. A Windows PC crashing is just one of those things now.

Re:Fix whats there!

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

You misunderstood -- you're probably not alone since the Microsoft press release was, in my opinion, crafted for that purpose: What they said was basically that Live customers are protected from known exploits using the WMF hole. Any updated Anti-virus/Anti-spyware software will do the same. The hole is still there for any new exploit.

Re:Fix whats there!

[online-shopper]

Where do you work again?

Re:Fix whats there!

[ThaFooz]

In relation to the price of the changes the previous poster brought up, the problem with Apple, is instead of SP1 and SP2, you get 10.3 10.4 with a $100 fee each year.

How does Apple's release cycle differ from Microsofts (aside from MS missing ship dates)? XP was released shortly after Windows 2000 for the same price tag, and I would argue the change from OSX 10.3 to 10.4 is more significant than Win2k to WinXP. Windows service packs are largely fixes and security updates, just like OSX has equivelent services packs (for free) to go from version 10.X.Y to 10.X.Y+1.

Re:Fix whats there!

[SuiteSisterMary]

Sorry, but why would it surprise you that a multi-million dollar machine, designed from the ground up for hardware redundancy and virtualization (to the point that you can yank out a processor, while the machine is running, and the mainframe won't really care) and with a much different paradigm for program development, in terms of careful code vetting, change analysis, and so on, runs differently from a two thousand dollar machine, generally built out of almost, but not quite, lowest-bidder parts, designed in no way, shape, or form for hardware redundancy, virtualization, or barely even privilege separation, with a development paradigm that stresses the ability of anybody with a compiler to write code, and gives them as much freedom as possible?

Are you also surprised when your Pontiac Sunfire can't do the same tasks that you generally do with your fleet of 18-wheelers?

Re:Fix whats there!

[Arandir]

Siemens AG. I'm safe enough telling you that, because it's such a freaking huge company, but I won't tell you what division I work in. Siemens is an official partner of Microsoft. What Microsoft tells Siemens to do, it will do, no questions asked.

Re:Fix whats there!

[TheNetAvenger]

I would argue the change from OSX 10.3 to 10.4 is more significant than Win2k to WinXP. Windows service packs are largely fixes and security updates, just like OSX has equivelent services packs (for free) to go from version 10.X.Y to 10.X.Y+1

I bet you could argue, but look at the base code, and architectural changes that 'people' don't see, and you will find there are 'vast' differences from Win2k and WinXP.

Even in my Example, the code base from WinXP Release to WinXP SP2 is a massive rewrite or recompile of most of the base OS and kernel based on advancements made in the Windows 2003 development.

I have a bit of insight on both the OSX architectural and Windows architectural changes, so I could just say, this is how it is and you are wrong, but I would rather encourage you to go do a bit of research on this if it truly interests you, stop taking the word of 'so called experts', even myself... (And Especially on Slashdot)

I will go as far to admit that Apple has tried to add in 'selling' features with each release of OSX, but as for major changes to the OS or even the Interface to the OS the changes are more minor than a lot of people would like to believe.

Expose looks cool, and the new widgets are nice add on, but these are not major OS feature changes and are not any more than the free add-ons provided by Microsoft like updates to Windows Media Player, Desktop Search, Movie Maker, etc... Ang again, even on this level, these are all free download updates from MS.

Take Care and I hope you do explore the issues I present.

What does this line of code mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

if (defaultBrowser != MSIE || defaultMediaPlayer != WiMP || defaultMailClient != LookOut || defaultGUI != FisherPrice)
{
alert(Microsoft)
}

Heh, my "confirm you're not a script" is "issues." Not surprising.

Re:What does this line of code mean?

[heinousjay]

It means your sense of humor is defective.

Cue ominous music

[CaptainCarrot]

Why do I get the feeling this is the programmer's equivalent of that scene in the teen slasher movies where the girl is going into the dark basement, unarmed and with nothing but a flickering candle for light?

Re:Cue ominous music

[Anonymous Coward]

Help! Grue!

Re:Cue ominous music

[CaptainCarrot]

Or Jason with a chainsaw. Either way...

Re:Cue ominous music

[Hasai]

Just once, just ONCE, I want the girl to go into the dark basement carrying a xenon flood and an Uzi.
];)

slashdotted

[Cmdr_earthsnake]

Click on link + server not responding + hosted on a microsoft server +MS publicity = slashdotted

Re:slashdotted

[protohiro1]

Damn, good MS have come up with a scarier, uglier error page for asp.net? We are working on a new CMS in .net at my company. Those error pages seriously freak clients out. It looks like the world ended.

Re:slashdotted

[protohiro1]

I assume that the database server is overloaded, so the cms is throwing an error. Couldn't there be a more graceful way to do that?

Re:slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

http://httpd.apache.org/

Re:slashdotted

[smalgin]

1. >Click on link + server not responding + hosted on a microsoft server +MS publicity = slashdotted
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

AT exactly 4am GMT everybody click on the above link.
Let's prove apache servers don't get the /. effect!

Re:slashdotted

[Al Dimond]

I wouldn't call myself a web applications expert, but I've worked a bit on them and I'd say your solution should be to write yer own durn error pages. It's generally not a very good idea to expose error pages to users that you didn't write yourself. Writing your own error pages, besides being a good security practice (because you're not showing what kind of server and database technology you're using), also makes sure that you think about the types of errors that could occur and how to recover from them.

Though I'm sure you already knew that. Perhaps if your site is internal with just a few trusted users that already know what technology you're using it's not a big deal... though in that situation it would seem silly to roll your own CMS when there seemingly are many commercial and FOSS ones available for cheap or free.

speed

[fsterman]

Holy shit, I just averaged 1.1 megs a second download! They are going too be hurting after this.

Re:Where is the news?

[0racle]

Oh no, something from just over a week ago! Trash it people, its obviously of no use.

For those of us without monitors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone post a ... oh, wait.

You name it, they've probably been there.

[CarpetShark]

Microsoft has been releasing a lot of Vista video "interviews" and tech intros lately. If you believed what they're trying to sell you, you would easily think that the Microsoft Vista teams are developing ground-breaking new technology for the benefit of us all.

However, any remotely circumspect look at them will reveal that they're carefully choreographed attempts to show microsoft as a powerhouse with new ideas behind every corner... i.e., "Ohh look, here's Joe, the guy responsible for all this, right behind the camera...". What's more, they're basically doing what they've always done, stealing other peoples' technology and claiming is as their own, in the process. One of these videos, for instance, is all about microsoft's new printing architecture, which is basically just a rip-off of postscript. Microsoft is finally catching up, and yet they tell their customers that they're doing new stuff.

It must be nice to have mainstream consumers for your main customers, rather than IT pros. You can sell 'em anything, and they'll never know it's crap, because they don't keep up with the industry.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[delong]

It must be nice to have mainstream consumers for your main customers, rather than IT pros. You can sell 'em anything, and they'll never know it's crap, because they don't keep up with the industry

That's why I always skip all these "new Windows release" articles - they're pap. Usually just alot of mouth breathing over widgets and rather pedestrian implementations of mundane technology. Boring, and not very informative. Keeps alot of boring writers in jobs, though. Microsoft is like a 5 year jobs program for "IT Professional" writers that otherwise don't know their ass from their hat.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[MightyMartian]

Well, it was precisely this sort of hype that kept Windows 3.1 at the forefront while an actual 32-bit operating system that would run existing Windows applications (better than Windows itself) actually existed. Microsoft, through various "computer" magazines (which were nothing more than MS shills), painted a beautiful picture of Chicago, through artists renderings and feature lists for features that didn't even exist. Of course, when Windows 95 finally arrived, it was a bug-ridden piece of crap, but the marketing onslaught and MS's corrupt ways of dealing with PC manufacturers destroyed OS/2. People actually willingly went for one of the most unstable operating systems that MS ever produced.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Urusai]

Hey, OS/2 was also developed by Microsoft. Damned if you do, damned if you do it again.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[stubear]

You are probably the same jackass who goes around crying "why doesn't Microsoft just do things like UNIX" and when they finally borrow a couple riffs you're crying"boo hoo, Microsoft is copying UNIX". It's clear they're damned if they do and damned if they don't do it's really no wonder they don't care very much about what the Slashdot community wants or thinks.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[guaigean]

Yes, because they got paid to develop it by IBM. However, they also did everything they could to sink it. See? They get paid to build it, they get to use the ideas to put into other Windows versions, and then they get to claim that actual competition existed at the time so as to look non-monopolistic. So what if they lost a bit in OS/2? They more than regained it through the marketing crush with 95.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[MightyMartian]

They designed the 16-bit version of OS/2, but abandoned IBM and the 32-bit version and developed Windows NT instead. But it wasn't NT that ended up on the vast majority of machines in the mid 90s, but Windows 95. While OS/2 Warp was not a perfect operating system, it was miles ahead of Chicago, which was a real bastard child, unstable, with legacy support far inferior to that of OS/2. But MS won because it waged on all out marketing campaign for at least year, even when Chicago was essentially vaporware. They have done that over and over again.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[jacksonj04]

Take a look at the Vista beta 1 (Still known as "Longhorn Beta 1") and you'll see that a lot of the marketing is actually in there and good stuff. The virtual folders are nice, as is the more metadata-oriented indexing. It's true that Explorer crashes and burns regularly (Doesn't seem to like copying lots of files) but for a beta 1 it's not bad going.

A lot more of the hype is satisfied if you install the WinFS and WinFX betas for the new filesystem and graphical API. All in all, it's shaping up to be reasonable but then again the marketing people haven't really begun writing release hype yet.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[CodeBuster]

You can sell 'em anything, and they'll never know it's crap, because they don't keep up with the industry.

This is true in any transaction where an information disparity exists between the buyer and the seller. How do you know that the artificial replacement parts that the surgeon is putting in your body are any good until after the deal is done and something breaks? Nobody can be an expert in everything.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[FFFish]

When I purchase a car, I always refer to it as "my new car," not "my car which, while used, is new to me."

Same with Windows. It's not that the ideas are new new, just new to Windows.

Except for that idea about allowing WMF files to execute code. That's an old idea to Windows. Funny they decided to keep it!

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[AnEmbodiedMind]

Yeah sure it is a clever marketing move, but you a way too harsh.

For example one of the interviews with the vista audio engine guys they talk about how Mac OSX has been a long way in front and how they are inspired by great compeditors.

They have an OS X box on the wall

And if you look at the MS Office user interface work, you can't claim that isn't innovative work

Finally if you actually watched the linked video you'd see they actually talk in depth about the flaws in the windows architecture and how they are trying to move forwards.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[dryeo]

Yes, but that was under IBMs direction and also IBM rewrote most of it for Ver 2+. Also the most innovative feature, the WPS was designed by OS/2.
Funny enough one of the causes of the divorce was MS insisting on moving the graphic drivers into kernel space which naturally IBM refused

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a point, but they do seem to claim it's new and their idea.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Virtual folders and metadata indexing. Hardware accelerated desktop composition. I sure hope we see that someday.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Thing 1]

Easy: get the part numbers, in writing, from the doctor some time before the surgery.

Then, do your research.

Possibly recommend different parts to the doctor, and possibly change doctors when the initial doctor sticks to the expensive part that you happened to notice, in your research, that the doctor owns a piece of.

Nothing is free or easy, but I'm giving you the above plan for the cost of reading it. ;-)

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[cortana]

and when they finally borrow a couple riffs [from UNIX] you're crying "boo hoo, Microsoft is copying UNIX"

Only when they don't give credit where credit is due... which is pretty much always.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[drsmithy]

While OS/2 Warp was not a perfect operating system, it was miles ahead of Chicago, which was a real bastard child, unstable, with legacy support far inferior to that of OS/2.

Say what ? For all Windows 95's faults, you can't say its legacy support wasn't exceptional (hell, it's the whole reason Windows 95 was written in the first place). To say OS/2 had _better_ legacy support than Windows 95 is just laughable.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[drsmithy]

Funny enough one of the causes of the divorce was MS insisting on moving the graphic drivers into kernel space which naturally IBM refused

Uh, no.

IBM and Microsoft "split" in 1990.

NT 4.0 (the first version with the video driver in kernel space) was released in 1996.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[jacksonj04]

Hey, I never said MS invented it.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[dryeo]

No, MS wanted to move the video drivers into kernel space in ver 1.3 (maybe 1.4?). IBM flat out refused as IBM was interested in stability whereas MS was interested in speed.(and IBM was paying the bills) So the drivers stayed in user space until ver 4.
MS ended up keeping the video drivers in user space thru 3.51 then moved them into kernel space with ver 4.0 and now their amazing idea with ver 6? (Vista) is to move them into user space.
All hail MS the great innovaters.
Personally I'm using ver 2.45

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[drsmithy]

No, MS wanted to move the video drivers into kernel space in ver 1.3 (maybe 1.4?). IBM flat out refused as IBM was interested in stability whereas MS was interested in speed.(and IBM was paying the bills) So the drivers stayed in user space until ver 4. MS ended up keeping the video drivers in user space thru 3.51 then moved them into kernel space with ver 4.0 and now their amazing idea with ver 6? (Vista) is to move them into user space.
All hail MS the great innovaters.
Personally I'm using ver 2.45

Ah, I see, you're just trolling.

My mistake - please, carry on.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[jav1231]

"a long way in front"
And this is new? MS has been following on many technologies for years. My guess is, much of Vista will be a rip-off of OS X and Linux. Remember in 1995 when Netscape was building a business on Internet technology and Bill Gate's keynote didn't even mention the word "internet?" Innovation, Baby....it's all innovation.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Prophet of Nixon]

What are virtual folders in this context? Can I finally create a 'folder' that shows an aggregate of the content of several actual directories (sort of like a SUBST if it allowed multiple targets)? I've always wished I could do that, since I have some directories which should logically be together, but span several partitions/hard disks.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[MightyMartian]

Let's see. It ran Win16 apps better than Windows 3.1 did, and using VDMs, in a fashion far more reliable than any of the Win9x operating systems. I could run far more DOS games in OS/2 than I could in Win95 or Win98. So I'm afraid it's no laughing matter. OS/2 was far superior to Windows 95 as far as handling legacy apps.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[LordMyren]

Much of the world is built around stealing peoples ideas and putting them to good use. Whether its MS or someone else, as long as their actually putting these ideas to good use, they deserve credit. If MS does take some of the ideas from Singularity and makes a more microkernel-alike system, they deserve massive props. OS-X isnt still built off Mach is it?-- I know they did something off Mach, but wait, OSX was a BSD... *shrug* (its been a while). Anyways I'm pretty sure Apple somehow managed to never let anyone actually reap the benefits of the microkernels they've used, and I know they at one point did something with Mach. So, here's a small cheers to MS.

Linux's religious insistence on being monolithic is egotistical and fucking retarded. It stiffles innovation again and again; video card drivers, the reiserfs fiasco, the years it took to get a userland fs in, &c

Myren

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[CarpetShark]

First of all, Linux no longer monolithic. Second, Microsoft are taking credit for others' work, not just making good use of it. Third, most of it is already put to good use -- having a monopoly that lets you spread things further than the competition that you keep down is not a virtue. Fourth, singularity is a rip-off of HURD. Fifth, linux video works better for me than Microsoft Windows Media Player, so I wouldn't go shouting the virtues of windows video too highly. Sixth, reiserfs is here, now. Vista's still not here, and most of it's advanced features have been cancelled. Regardless, BeOS innovated in Filesystems years ago, so none of the major OS's are in the lead there. Seventh, claimign that Linux stiffles innovation while making false claims about Microsoft's goodwill shows you for the corporate shill you are. I'm just trying to work out if you've had the sense to get paid for being a shill, or if you do it out of some twisted sense of belonging to a cause.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[jacksonj04]

Yes, and tied with metadata they become quite powerful. For example:

All audio files under C: longer than 30 seconds rated 2 stars or more.
Any documents viewed in the past month with "work" as a keyword.

Or even a nice simple:

Anything with "holiday" as a keyword.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[CodeBuster]

This course of action is certainly possible but it is not always feasible for each and every transaction that one engages in on a semi-regular basis. Naturally, large and important purchases, such as major surgery, vehicles, real estate, and investments, require greater diligence on the part of the buyer...Caveat Emptor as they say. However, there are a myriad of smaller transactions that we make every day, such as where we stop for gas, how much we spend on lunch, and many other small items that, while individually insignificant, add up to a larger sum of money than most people would care to admit. You could spend all of your time researching whether the McDonalds burger delivers a better comparative value than Burger King, but for most people that would be a waste of time so they just eat the cost...pun intended. This is an entire area of study in economics, imperfect information, which seeks to explain the choices that people make based upon the fact that in the real world there is almost never perfect information on both sides of a transaction. Getting back to the original example...not everyone has the individual expertise to evaluate the quality of a good or service before it is purchased which is why we rely upon the opinions of experts whom we trust. You may ask another doctor about a particular part or procedure, or you could try and read the medical journals...as a layman, or you could read what other people have to say on the Internet, but at the end of the day you are trusting the opinion of another because you are not qualified to fully evaluate the information yourself. The real world economy is all based upon imperfect information...just ask the marketers.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Hynee]

Well, the impression that I got from the interview is that they're mostly concentrating on development, making development easier without worrying about affecting other areas of the OS and keeping compatibility.

The only other thing they pushed was M$ being innovative, but that's more clever software than ground-breaking academic type of initiatives.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[LordMyren]

reiserfs is no fun without the meta...
does that count as a double entranda?

i guess i didnt make my original post clear.

the kernel dev's still think of linux as a monolithic kernel. join the kernel if you want a working project; we will garuntee you no stable external facing API's... thats what they said to video drivers, and i'm amazed they made any consolation at all for fuse. but what happens when something like reiserfs comes along? it has to be shoehorned in and trimmed down to fit with the existing picture kernel-dev's have for the kernel. thats what i mean when i talk about stifling innovation. its not only a monolithic kernel, its a monolithic development process. its an entirely different form of monopoly, but it is one none the less, and its because linux is inherently monolithic. i'd love to see examples of how this has changed, but besides fuse, i'm not aware of many.

winfs is one of those big infinity projects, but it could be said that reiserfs is a ripoff off it (at least of some of the earlier different incarnations). conversely, singularity may be a rip off of HURD, another great infinity project, but it looks like some of singularity is actually going to make it to market. you're absolutely right, its a shame microsoft doesnt give credit where credit is due, but if your interested in isolation, interested in security, you know about EROS, HURD, & microkernel, and you've probably read some of the papers of people who did actual research.

i really dont see microsoft as using a more microkernel alike approach as means of suppressing others, i see it as the logical choice now that we have the performance to use microkernel systems. i'm not a shill for ms, i'm a shill for microkernel. i dont think i ever stated anything about ms doing goodwill, i just happen to be a technical purist; whether its money-sniffing ms or oss-touting linux following smart tracks, i think its important to note someone is doing something intelligent. i'm psyched to see someone actually delivering the one true microkernel path, even if i'm never going to frakking touch it.

Give and take, its all shades of gray.
Myren

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[Anonymous Coward]

And Linux or OSX isn't based on previous work at all? Innovation is a more misused word on /. than in MS press releases. Google is innovative for incremental functionality improvement over several generations of search engines on the same path. Apple is innovative for buying the foundation for iTunes and dressing it up. MS is not innovative if anything remotely similar has ever been done by anyone before.

Re:You name it, they've probably been there.

[jav1231]

Yep! Class dismissed.

Direct link to video

[Anonymous Coward]

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/c/81cdb 151-0aae-4f50-ab44-654b5f7ae0db/kernel_windows_vis ta_2005.wmv

Re:Direct link to video

[TubeSteak]

181MB

Fuck that's big.

There isn't even much point in downloading it, even if /. clicks it all at once, I doubt it'll put a dent in their server capacity.

That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

Now I'm only half way through the video, but holy minimizer Batman, is that all they're doing?

So they discovered software dependencies and configuration management, error handling in the kernel, and reversed one of their previous errors - putting device drivers inside the kernel.

I'm no OS guru (I'm just an applications guy), but shouldn't they have thrown the whole mess in the garbage and started over? They're referring to the Vista kernel as "NT"!! It's freakin NT!

NT's karma has waned (especially this week). God help us - we'll be stuck with MS security holes forever.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

The NT kernel has always been a rock solid piece of well designed software. There may be a crap load of problems with windows but one of them isn't the kernel. don't confuse the mess that is the rest of windows as being some fault with the kernel architecture.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

Modded informative?

The NT kernel is rock solid and it makes perfect sense for vista to be based on the server 2003 kernel.

Re:That's It??

[jonbrewer]

Echoing the sentiments of the ACs who have replied to this, I too need to put in a good word for the NT kernel. It's excellent. It always works. I started working with NT 3.51 10+ years ago (same time I moved from Digital Unix to Linux) and have found it to be a great OS. Give it good hardware & software, (these days set it behind a firewall) and it will run for YEARS.

I managed an early Y2K program back in 1998 where we moved a network from 486/Win3.11/Novell to 586/NT4.0/NT Server. We didn't put removable media in the machines & didn't give Administrative rights to anyone. I wandered around the facility recently to find dozens of those ugly beige box clones still going. Thus happy to see NT kernel continuing in Vista (whenever that may happen...)

Re:That's It??

[cnettel]

Of course it's NT. How many total rewrites do you see of something this big, that also would break the code of every hardware vendor and his dog if you changed it completely?

Some interesting things done in Vista are file system transactions (possibly making a complete program install atomic, if you want to) and much better cancelling of (a)synchronous I/O. The latter part is hugely interesting, as, in my experience, an application that won't get killed is generally caused by it being stuck on an I/O syscall in the kernel. It isn't mentioned in this video for some reason, maybe because it doesn't matter to the overall kernel design; only to the I/O subsystem. Compared to some designs, the NT kernel is after all only monolithic in the sense that there is a lot of stuff running in ring 0, it's both modularized in design and linking (you don't compile a device driver into the kernel, you just load it in kernel space, that difference is actually huge).

Re:That's It??

[0racle]

Ah yes, throwing everything out and starting from scratch is a fantastic way to fix security holes and bugs.

See Also:
Windows 95
Windows NT 3.1

Paragons of stability and perfect programming without a single bug all thanks to throwing everything out and starting over.

Re:That's It??

[kuzb]

Yes, because we all know Linux, BSD, OS X have never, ever had security flaws.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

This video is just about kernel architecture - channel9 has been running videos on the new features of Vista (including the kernel) since PDC last year.

Re:That's It??

[Brandybuck]

Of course they have. But nowhere near the severity and frequency that Microsoft has. Talk to anyone in IT that has to support both Unix (any variety) and Windows and they will set you straight.

Re:That's It??

[ThaFooz]

Ah yes, throwing everything out and starting from scratch is a fantastic way to fix security holes and bugs. See Also: Windows 95, Windows NT 3.1. Paragons of stability and perfect programming without a single bug all thanks to throwing everything out and starting over.

You seem to imply that every security hole is merely careless programming that could not have been avoided or reduced by better architecture. Biting the bullet & a major re-write worked pretty well for Apple. More incremental changes like protected memory have made big differences in win2k.

Re:That's It??

[ichin4]

I'm going to make a wild guess, just based on probabilities, that you are a Linux fan.

You do know, don't you, that in Linux, device drivers run inside the kernel?

Re:That's It??

[0racle]

No, what I'm saying is that starting everything from scratch might fix some bugs that were in the previous version (hopefully you learn from your mistakes) but at the same time is going to introduce numerous others at the same time.

Biting the bullet & a major re-write worked pretty well for Apple

Ya, upgrading Nextstep did work well didn't it.

Re:That's It??

[TravisWatkins]

They run in kernel space, there is a (small) difference.

Re:That's It??

[cortana]

Linux is only a kernel. I would be interested to see a comparison between the amount and severity of security flaws found in Linux compared to the amount found in the NT kernel.

Re:That's It??

[ad0gg]

And drivers in Longhorn run in userland. Thanks for making the grandparents point.

Re:That's It??

[TravisWatkins]

Unless you know something they aren't telling (or was in the video) not all of the drivers are moving to userland, only video drivers (which Linux has always had, the drivers run in X).

Re:That's It??

[TheNetAvenger]

More incremental changes like protected memory have made big differences in win2k

I would assume you are meaning DLL isolation, since protected memory has been a part of NT since it was born.

Re:That's It??

[drsmithy]

More incremental changes like protected memory have made big differences in win2k.

Uh, Windows NT has _always_ had "protected memory".

Re:That's It??

[TheNetAvenger]

Linux is only a kernel. I would be interested to see a comparison between the amount and severity of security flaws found in Linux compared to the amount found in the NT kernel.

It is hard to get real information, even the recent CERT report:

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB2005.html

Lumps not only OS Vulnerabilities, but every vulnerability from every piece of software that runs on the OS. So if Joe Blow Developer at IceWarp for example writes insecure crap code it gets listed as a 'Windows' Vulnerbility.

Even if you parse these lists, there is no distinction between kernel and non-kernel vulnerbilities.

At the very least lists like this should be by platform, then organization for products they produce, and not lump everything into what OS the software runs on.

Also note that they list 'updates' and not vulnerbilties, for example a single 'vulnerbility' for OSX is:

Apple Mac OS X Multiple Vulnerabilities

And if you click on the detail, you find that it was not a single vulnerbility but a single 'update' that addressed 50 vulnerbilities.

So if you extrapolated out all the OS level listings from the CERT list, you would find that a single Patch on one line for like Windows addressing one vulnerability is considered to be equal to a Patch for OSX that addressed 20 vulnerabillties.

And yet people try to take a report like this and say *nix is more secure or OSX is more secure or Windows is more secure, when in fact this list is nothing but crap data that is poorly assembled.

I think every OS vendor should do an honest year end report that has to be submitted, and detail, OS, OS Kernel, OS Layers, OS bundled applications, etc...

Security reporting drives me about as nuts as security issues themselves.

Re:That's It??

[Brandybuck]

when in fact this list is nothing but crap data that is poorly assembled.

Who's talking about a list? I'm talking about real world experience from the guys who have deal with this crap day in and day out. Which OS would a professional in IT security say is the best or the worst, given equivalent experience with the choices? I am not that person, but I do know at my work about a hundred times the resources are spent securing our Windows workstations than our Solaris workstations. I also know that there have been zero malware infections on our Solaris, Linux or FreeBSD systems. Ever.

Re:That's It??

[ichin4]

Drivers for just about any device that runs on an external bus are moving to user-land in Vista. This includes drivers for USB and firewire devices, which run in kernel-space in Linux. Video drivers are not moving to user-land in Vista, because Windows can achieve better graphics performance and GUI responsiveness by keeping them in kernel-space. You can read more about this stuff here.

In any case, given that Linux doesn't even have a driver abstraction layer analogous to the Windows HAL, it's a bit ridiculous for a Linux fanboy to complain about a lack of encapsulation in the Windows driver architecture.

Re:That's It??

[TravisWatkins]

1) I'm not a "Linux fanboy". I'm on OS X right now and think the NT kernel is one of the best in existance (it's that crap on top I don't really care for).

2) The kernel developers are against a standard kernel API/ABI for drivers because then it's easier for people to make closed-source drivers. As in, the best way to make sure your driver keeps working is to GPL it and get it into the kernel.

3) Who said I was complaining?

Re:That's It??

[ichin4]

It was Spinlock, the original poster, to whom I was refering to, not you. Sorry not to be clearer.

Re:That's It??

[ichin4]

The kernel developers are against a standard kernel API/ABI for drivers because then it's easier for people to make closed-source drivers.

Wow, is this really the reason? I had no idea. Isn't that a bit over the top? I mean, I assume everyone would agree that, purely from a software design perspective, an having hardware abstraction layer is a good idea. So saying that you refuse to have one just in order to make the lives of people who would write non-GPL drivers difficult is just... wow.

I knew there were people in the world for whom the raison d'etre of Linux is to be a GPL OS, but I assumed that most actual kernel hackers were people for whom the raison d'etre of Linux is to be a good OS that happens to be GPL.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that's like saying that people shouldn't drive to work between 7am and 8am because that's when roads are most congested. When I drive to work at midnight the roads are all free of congestion, so if everybody just switched to driving to work at midnight like me, they would all get to work faster and with much less hassle. Of course that's wrong because the congestion is caused by everybody driving to work at the same time. The only way to ameliorate the problem is to have people spread out driving to work over the whole day or not drive to work at all. That doesn't work because it causes more problems than it solves.

As a person who has had my Solaris and Linux boxes 0wned, I can quite confidently say no system is free from exploits. Unix has always been a joke from a security standpoint (compared to "real" OSes like MVS, VMS, and MULTICS). The only reason it seems so secure now is that the vast majority of users are now running Windows. That's not to say that Windows is where all of the exploits are, but that's where all of the exploitERs are! I'm sure you could have a perfectly exploit-free time enjoying Windows 3.1 on the Internet. Not because Win3.1 doesn't have any security holes (indeed, it doesn't have any sort of security at all), but simply because nobody is trying to exploit Win3.1.

dom

Re:That's It??

[a.d.trick]

I'm no OS guru either but I don't believe that rewriting everything is a good idea. They're still going to have to maintain backwards compatibility, there's no way around that. In addition rewriting something of that scale would be a lot of work, work that would probably be better spent on auditing things they already have.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

So they discovered software dependencies and configuration management, error handling in the kernel, and reversed one of their previous errors - putting device drivers inside the kernel.

Ah, yes. Because all the other major OSs run device drivers in user mode, don't they? Linux? OS X? No?

This is a great improvement.

I'm no OS guru (I'm just an applications guy), but shouldn't they have thrown the whole mess in the garbage and started over? They're referring to the Vista kernel as "NT"!! It's freakin NT!

Would you care to enlighten the rest of us, with your infinite wisdom, of what is wrong with the NT kernel? There may be lots of things not too good about the rest of various Windows versions, but in my opinion (and everyone who has a clue who I've ever talked with) the NT kernel is excellent.

Seriously, I'm interested in hearing what you think is wrong with the NT kernel. I suspect you have absolutely zero knowledge of what it is or how it works, and are just trying to spread the daily MS FUD dose.

NT's karma has waned (especially this week). God help us - we'll be stuck with MS security holes forever.

We're talking about the fucking kernel. Can you get that into your thick head?

Re:That's It??

[dubl-u]

Biting the bullet & a major re-write worked pretty well for Apple.

That's not what Apple did at all.

What's now MacOS X started as an entirely different operating system from NeXT, and went through a decade or so of development and public release before Apple acquired it.

Apple fucked around internally trying to do ground-up rewrites for years and failed. (See the histories of Taligent and Copland for details.) By the time NeXT got done eating Apple from the inside out, hardware had advanced so much that they could afford to run most of the previous OS inside a virtualization layer within a moderately improved NeXT OS and have it seen as a step forward.

And really, a lot of the NeXT work was firmly in the Unix tradition, so even that wasn't a burn-it-down-and-start-fresh approach to things. The kernel was new, but like Linux, an awful lot of the ideas and user-space tools are borrowed.

Re:That's It??

[cortana]

You should read http://lxr.linux.no/source/Documentation/stable_ap i_nonsense.txt.

Re:That's It??

[TheRaven64]

For anyone wishing to learn a bit more about the NT kernel, I can thoroughly recommend Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. It covers Linux and NT in some detail. In spite of being VMS Lite, the NT kernel is very impressive in a number of ways. Something of a contrast, unfortunately, from the layers of cruft Microsoft have layered on top of it.

Re:That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

Actually the notion of throwing it out and starting over has at least some merit. By far the biggest contributor to the virus "epidemic" we're having is the homogeneity of our computing infrastructure. Whether it will happen this century or next, the only true defense against a virus that does widespread damage is to ensure our computing fabric consists of many operating systems.

At the moment the world is too busy trying to fix the unfixable (for every security measure there is always an attack), and perhaps it will take a few generations before we take the lessons of the Irish potato famine to heart.

Re:That's It??

[man_of_mr_e]

Seriously, Why would you even care about the difference between the kernel and the platform?

Do you really think your boss will accept the excuse "Oh yeah, our entire servers were compromised by hackers, all our customer data was stolen, and pornography was placed on our home pages, but it's Ok! The vulernabilities weren't in the kernel".

It's splitting hairs to argue that the software that runs on your platform isn't just as important as the OS itself. The vulnerability of your system as a WHOLE is what's important, not whether the flaws are in this or that part of it.

Re:That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

Although I work daily on Linux, Windows, OpenVMS and Solaris, I'm really not a rabid fan of any (ok, maybe OpenVMS, but it's got its issues too). Device drivers are done "right" in OpenVMS - only the stuff that has to run in ring 0 runs there. Everything else is pushed out to rings 1,2 and 3. Now Windows, Solaris, and Linux fans might not be aware of this, but there are actually 4 rings of protection available on the x86 processor (as is the case with the VAX and Alpha processors). Windows, Linux, and Solaris (I think) use only 0 and 3. Why they didn't use rings 1 and 2 for further isolation/protection I don't know - trade-offs of some kind (like performance), I suppose.

Re:That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

Would you care to enlighten the rest of us, with your infinite wisdom, of what is wrong with the NT kernel?

For those who can't read, I stated up from I'm an applications guy, not an OS guy.

Seriously, I'm interested in hearing what you think is wrong with the NT kernel. I suspect you have absolutely zero knowledge of what it is or how it works, and are just trying to spread the daily MS FUD dose.

Seriously, I don't think you are interested - it's clear from your tone you're more interested in squashing anyone who has quibbles with Windows. But for a more direct response, I'd say this: the x86 processor has 4 rings of protection. Windows and Linux only use rings 0 and 3. Some other operating systems on 4-ring processors (like OpenVMS) use all 4 rings and segregate the driver architecture accordingly. Since you're obviously an OS expert, you'll instantly recognize how this contributes to the kernel's stability.

The fact that it took until just recently to implement No Execute protection (in hardware and software) shows that security was not a core concern of Cutler or the others that designed it. Other operating systems (albeit older ones) have had that for years.

The fact that this is the 3rd redesign of the driver architecture in 15 years makes me wonder if they got it "right" this time. But since "right" is usually determined by the marketing folks in Redmond, rather than architects trying to do the right thing, I'm not holding my breath.

We're talking about the fucking kernel. Can you get that into your thick head?

For those who can't read, I stated up from I'm an applications guy, not an OS guy.

Re:That's It??

[TheNetAvenger]

Who's talking about a list? I'm talking about real world experience from the guys who have deal with this crap day in and day out. Which OS would a professional in IT security

Well considering 'this' is what I do, from working with NASA to the Pentagon in the past, I do know a bit about managing hands on, as well as managing administrative teams on several *nix server variants, Apple Servers, and Microsoft Server environments.

But even 'my' personal experience is not an actual account of the 'real' world others would experience.

If you want hearsay and the 'word' of self-proclaimed IT security experts, you are going to be sadly misled, no matter how noble or objective the person is.

I would rather have a list that flat out reported #1) the security bugs found and fixed and #2) the reported number of 'known' security compromises resulted from the security bugs. (In fact new reporting systems being built in some of the OSes are even tracking this information, so it wouldn't even have to be reported by human error.)

This would at least be somewhat more straight forward and less objective - although the list of 'compromises' would have to accurately acknowledge if the systems were not up to date with security updates, etc. Or if the systems were not up to date because the automatic updater failed or the Sys Admin neglected the system or even turned off the automatic patching features of the OS. This would be important too, as almost all OSes now have fairly good automatic security update systems, even WindowsXP/2003.

Take Care.

Re:That's It??

[TheNetAvenger]

Seriously, Why would you even care about the difference between the kernel and the platform?

Do you really think your boss will accept the excuse "Oh yeah, our entire servers were compromised by hackers, all our customer data was stolen, and pornography was placed on our home pages, but it's Ok! The vulernabilities weren't in the kernel".

It's splitting hairs to argue that the software that runs on your platform isn't just as important as the OS itself. The vulnerability of your system as a WHOLE is what's important, not whether the flaws are in this or that part of it.

Because as a 'security expert', information like this would be informative to people like us.

For example there are mass differences between thngs like a WMF exploit in the Win32 subsystem that is non Win32 kernel DLL bug, let alone a NT kernel bug.

Not all of us have to 'answer' to bosses about the problems, and are more on the research and reason side of security to prevent future problems or alert people of problems.

Also think of it this way, Linux is basically a *nix Kernel and base Architecture. So if there is a Kernel level Linux exploit this impacts EVERYONE, so this would important to know, where if the exploit was in XWindows or in GNome or an application in KDE are vast different senerios and would change the people at risk.

There are many GOOD reasons why 'splitting hairs' is necessary in the world of security - not everyone is out to just blame someone, but actually want to find who is at risk, how to get out, and alert 'potential' distributions of a possible problem.

The same can be said for almost every OS. Even in the Windows world where the distributions are 100% controlled by MS it makes a difference if it is a Kernel security flaw or something in a Movie Maker DLL.

Even in MS's base of OS, if it is a Kernel Bug, define whether it is a Win32 kernel bug or a lower level NT kernel bug makes a big difference. If it is an NT level flaw, it affect NT4, Win2k, WinXP, 2003 Server, and if it is Win32 Kernel it potentially could also affect the old DOS derived OSes like Win95, Win98, WinME.

So you see, the differences in the bugs ARE important to people in the security world, just for the last examples at the very least for Linux and Windows - where the bug lies can dramatically change what distributions are affected and additionally what problems could be cascading from this problem to other parts of the OS or applications.

Security is not just for 'how does it affect me' for people that do this for a living or are even curious and tying to be assitive to the security process.

Re:That's It??

[ichin4]

Thanks for the link. I read the document, and even sat on it for a while trying to wrap my head around its arguments.

As far as an ABI goes, the document basically says it's impossible and I agree entirely. That's why COM was invented and Linux doesn't have COM. (Well, it has CORBA, but that was never intended to be performant enough for something like communication between a device driver and the kernel.)

As far as an API goes, I think the documen't argument is rather unconvincing. (The document itself admits that opinions on this topic are "volitile" among driver coders.) Basically the document says that encapsulation is the enemy of performance. To whatever extent that argument is true, it applies to all software, and so is basically an argument against ever using abstraction layers.

Instead of the lines of responsibility that an API draws, the document argues for the virtues of a free-for-all pile of code where developers are stepping all over each other in the quest for improvement. Traditional software engineering wisdom is that this is a Bad Idea.

Still, the Linux kernel has obviously been a very successful project. Given these two apparently clashing facts, instead of just accepting one and rejecting the other, I'd hope someone could explain what's special about Linux kernel development practices that allows them to work so well without respecting the normal rules.

Re:That's It??

[Hard_Code]

Are you serious? Did you listen to what they are working on? It's a SHITLOAD (tm) of stuff. They have dependency analysis graphs for over 5000 system binaries, and they have several teams working in coordination to componentize and isolate both the engineering of components, and the configuration of those components, all the while attempting to maintain some semblance of backwards compatibility AND developing a design and engineering ethic so that they can continue such refactoring in the future...not to mention all the "usual" things like re-architecting the kernel and IO subsystems for reliability, recoverability, improving scheduling algorithms for application sets that require low-latency, etc. etc. etc.

I'm no MS fanboy, but damn, you ask a lot. The "Just Fix It Now" mentality is what got them in this horrible mess in the first place, with no consistent guiding principles and long term architecture.

Re:That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

I see your point, but here's some of mine:

1. Dependency analysis graphs for over 5000 system binaries

I'm stunned to learn this hasn't been an ongoing effort over the last 15 years. I had boldly assumed they understood the dependencies between all their code and actively managed it. To call this "new work" seemed silly to me. I gave this part, on a scale of one to ten, a zero.

2. ... developing a design and engineering ethic ...

Another goodie I'd count under "should have been done over a decade ago".

3. ... re-architecting the kernel and IO subsystems for reliability, recoverability ...

Darn - same comment.

4. Improving scheduling algorithms for application sets that require low-latency

This seemed like new stuff to me. But the way they described it scared the hell out of me. I'm having trouble envisioning how you can group threads scattered across processes (and the kernel, probably) such that they can be assigned a very high priority, and thus do the video trick. This has gotta trash quite a few existing data structures, and introduce a bag more. Since I can't picture how to do this cleanly, I had trouble getting excited about this one. Are they making a huge mess? And also, being an applications guy, and an old one at that, I'm more server centric, so playing gapless video didn't strike me has a big win that will change the world. In fact, regardless of who you are, I don't think your world will change because of this. On the other hand, if they have to introduce a bag of hacks to make this one work, maybe it will affect your world, although it may not be in the positive fashion you had envisioned.

5. "Just Fix It Now"

That's a great point. But to learn that backwards compatibility is an objective tells me that they have a large number of contraints they have to respect. Respecting such constraints will limit their ability to do things "right". How well they navigate the abyss between "Just Fix It Now" and "Do It Right" remains to be seen.

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

But for a more direct response, I'd say this: the x86 processor has 4 rings of protection. Windows and Linux only use rings 0 and 3. Some other operating systems on 4-ring processors (like OpenVMS) use all 4 rings and segregate the driver architecture accordingly. Since you're obviously an OS expert, you'll instantly recognize how this contributes to the kernel's stability.

As I understand it, this is for portability to processors where there are only 2 rings. (yes, even for NT) I don't believe there is any significant difference between rings 1, 2, and 3 on x86 anyway, so there isn't that much of a point. Just push all of your drivers out into ring 3.

I was going to check if that's what L4Ka does on x86, but it's late and I'm tired, so I'll just mention it instead. :)

The fact that it took until just recently to implement No Execute protection (in hardware and software) shows that security was not a core concern of Cutler or the others that designed it.

IIRC, x86 (before amd64) only supports hardware no-execute on a per-segment basis... (honestly, I have no idea how this is done in software.)

Re:That's It??

[Anonymous Coward]

??? What is the different of "kernel space" vs. running in the kernel ???

Re:That's It??

[njyoder]

Windows and Linux only use rings 0 and 3.

Windows drivers run in ring 1. I'm not sure about Linux, but I think they do too.

The fact that it took until just recently to implement No Execute protection (in hardware and software) shows that security was not a core concern of Cutler or the others that designed it.

That's because the x86 chips lacked the capability until recently. You can't fault the OS for what the hardware doesn't allow.

The fact that this is the 3rd redesign of the driver architecture in 15 years makes me wonder if they got it "right" this time.

What's wrong with the driver system? NT is and always has been a microkernel design. Drivers were heavily layered around it to provide all the functionality.

Re:That's It??

[Spinlock_1977]

Windows drivers run in ring 1. I'm not sure about Linux, but I think they do too.

Pretty sure this is wrong. Ring 0 and ring 3 are the only rings used.

That's because the x86 chips lacked the capability until recently. You can't fault the OS for what the hardware doesn't allow.

Actually, my mom told me I was allowed to do this. And I'm doing it because in the stuff I design (applications), I try to look forward to the next step and design the current one accordindly. Not to expend great effort on features that might never be implemented, but to make potential future implementation at least feasible, and perhaps easy (depending on cost). What period of time elapsed between the hardware availability of "no execute", and the windows implementation? 2 years was it?

What's wrong with the driver system? NT is and always has been a microkernel design. Drivers were heavily layered around it to provide all the functionality.

I'm not sure I know. But if MS keeps re-designing the architecture, they must have a reason (other than giving hardware makers new API challenges). Vista's redesign of drivers seems focused on reliability and error reporting. Shame these weren't considerations last design go-round - perhaps we wouldn't have this go-round.

Re:That's It??

[njyoder]

Pretty sure this is wrong. Ring 0 and ring 3 are the only rings used.

I checked and you're right, I'm not sure how I got that idea. In any case, the protection modes they run in doesn't really make them part of the kernel, just the "kernel space." If they were part of the kernel you'd need the source to write a driver, but that's not the case. Yes, it's bad to have them all running the lowest protection level, but really ring 1 isn't *that* big of an improvement as you can still clobber and crash the system pretty easily (by accident).

Not to expend great effort on features that might never be implemented, but to make potential future implementation at least feasible, and perhaps easy (depending on cost). What period of time elapsed between the hardware availability of "no execute", and the windows implementation? 2 years was it?

Yes, but if you're already developing the "next generation" product, it doesn't make much sense to put the effort into current one from a business perspective (since that would require a non-trivial change). It would be *nice* to have, say, Windows 2xxx or XP to have it added, but from a business perspective it makes more sense to them.

But if MS keeps re-designing the architecture, they must have a reason (other than giving hardware makers new API challenges). Vista's redesign of drivers seems focused on reliability and error reporting.

You can always improve things, I don't think any OS is an exception. They *should* have done this before, but you can say that about any improvements. The fact is, they're adding significant improvements, regardless of whether or not you consider them late.

Great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

in the last months there are more news about Microsoft Vista than about Linux. It's Linux stopping?

Re:Great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Linux is just a mature product.

Merry Xmas!

[broody]

After watching the video, I won't ever complain about my lump of coal for Xmas ever again.

Registry ain't all that bad

[Trinition]

From a programmers point of view, a registry is just a one level higher abstraction above an INI file. The nice thing about an INI file is that its just text, so you can edit it with about any text editor. But a text editor editing an INI gives you no constraints on what goes in it. So you could but a non-numerical value for a line in an INI file where the system that uses it only supports a numerical value. So a programmer writing a program which uses such an INI file has to take extra precautions and use a bare bones text reading API, or find some existing library which handles it for him.

The registry provides constraints. When you have a DWORD value, you can't put letters into it (unless, of course, you're using the hex mode of the field your favorite registry editor). It's hierarchial in nature meaining you can infer a lot of context, too. And as a programmer, you have a very simple API to go against for 90% of what you need to do.

That said, there are some things I which the registry did better. For one, I wish it were "registries" instead of "the registry". Why not let each program store its data in its own sort of registry file. You could very surely know you've removed a program by not letting it write to the system or user registry, but only to its own globval or user-specific entrues -- and delete those files when you want. I also wish every key and value had a description with it. I also wish there were richer data types, such as "existing file path", "file path", etc. so you could build even better basic tools for working with them. And I wish the registry were an open format that worked on any platform. Then I could take the registry file for application X I configured on my Windows machine and copy it to my Linux machine (granted, there's other cross-platform issues when you start intrereting the data on disparate platforms, such as file paths).

Bad audio quality and bad accent

[oglueck]

Why is the audio quality of the movie so bad? Like this their American accent makes it very hard to understand anything if you are not a native English speaker.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[erikdotla]

Sorry, but what's an "american accent"?

I thought an accent was any difference in the way someone speaks compared to american english. If it sounds like american english, it's not an accent.

I'm from canada myself, but what I'm saying still applies, doesn't it ay?

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Crizp]

An accent would better be described as (dictionary.com): "a characteristic pronounciation, specifically one determined by the phonetic habits of the speaker's native language carried over to his or her use of another language."

My American uncle has an American accent when he speaks Norwegian to me.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[belg4mit]

General American aka Standard Midwestern (I could have sworn it was calle dbroadcast English) is quite different from say a Southern accent. Of course, IMHO California English is accent neutral (not necessarily vocabulary neutral, but accent neutral). See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English
http://www.terramedia.co.uk/documents/broadcast_En glish.htm

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[belg4mit]

That is hardly the same thing as it's in a different language
altogether. I can say from personal experience that it's not as
if your typical frenchman can distinguish between an American
speaking French or an Englishman speaking French. Webster:

1b: speech habits typical of the natives or residents of a region
        or of any other group

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[belg4mit]

To clarify the OP is a non-native speaker complaining about
the comprehensibility of native speakers. He presumably learned
the Queen's English or one of the increasingly common local
butcherings of English (e.g; Engrish). Therefore your particular
preference for a non-standard definition of accent is irrelevant.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Anonymous Coward]

But of course Queen's English sounds much nicer. And it does not remind you of a nation that is hated by three fourth of the world population.

But on the other hand, they do not sound that bad in this video. They almost sound educated.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because it's a WMV.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Anonymous Coward]

surely "American English" is a contradiction of terms

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Triffid_Hunter]

English was well developed long before there was anyone other than indians in america... It developed from latin roots, as are (almost?) all other british and european languages too, many of which english has stolen words and phrases from.

so which part of that would make _american_ english any kind of "standard"? I seem to be missing something there...

I believe the word accent indicates the fact that there are differences in pronunciation at all, as opposed to particular differences vs some given norm, thus all english speakers have an accent, even if a fairly neutral one.

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Anonymous Coward]

It developed from latin roots, as are (almost?) all other british and european languages too
You must be joking :) Ever heard about slavonian languages? Hungary/Finland?

Re:Bad audio quality and bad accent

[Just Some Guy]

I seem to be missing something there...

Apparently you're missing the part where America has five times the population of England, and plays its media for worldwide audiences on a much larger scale.

Then again, by those criteria, India would have a reasonable claim on having the standard English accent.

MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Not to diss the underlying interview [I'm always willing to hear about kernel stuff], but it's kinda odd that the MMS stream originates at a M$FT server:

mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msnse/0512/26042/kernel_ windows_vista_2005_MBR.wmv

[Slashcode tends to put hard breakline characters and other weird white space into web addresses, so you will probably have to paste that address into a word processor and clean it up].

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[Covener]

Not to diss the underlying interview [I'm always willing to hear about kernel stuff], but it's kinda odd that the MMS stream originates at a M$FT server:

It's almost as if this MSDN interview of an MS executive on future MS technology is somehow MS related.

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? I thought that everyone knew that the MSDN was the Microsoft Developer Network...

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[airjrdn]

I couldn't get your link to work, but this one seems to

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/c /81cdb151-0aae-4f50-ab44-654b5f7ae0db/kernel_windo ws_vista_2005.wmv

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[Thuktun]

Too bad "duh" doesn't have "MS" in it.

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[cheaphomemadeacid]

"It's almost as if this MSDN interview of an MS executive on future MS technology is somehow MS related."

I didn't watch the interview but even i noticed it was about MS windows vista...

You'd be right if vista was opensource though...

Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?!

[twitter]

It's almost as if this MSDN interview of an MS executive on future MS technology is somehow MS related.

No mystery there, but I doubt it's news for nerds or stuff that matters. What M$ has to say about their non free crap-olla is about as useful as a Communist tour of Tiennemen Square.

Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[blast3r]

I haven't read this anywhere yet but I did some testing today and found that Windows Vista is vulnerable to the nasty WMF dealio. I am wondering what else Microsoft is importing into Windows Vista? hmmmm

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you loggied in as an Admin or using LUA? What impact can the flaw have when using LUA?

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[blast3r]

Earlier I was logged in as Administrator. I just now went back and logged in as a regular user and got infected. I didn't do any analysis outside the fact my Vista box was trying to load up www.freecat.biz which was listed as one of the evil sites listed. This is kind of funny, actually.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[rcs1000]

I just ran Vista on VMWare to see if this is the case. And it is and it isn't. It causes the WMF viewer to fall over on my build (5270), but it doesn't seem to infect anything. Certainly, my machine is not full of spyware (yet).

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[Matt Perry]

And how did get your hands on this unreleased piece of software to test it?

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[jez9999]

...and in the interview, one of the engineers (the Irish-sounding guy) quotes Bill Gates as saying that "if you throw away compatibility, you're throwing out an asset". Yeah, or perhaps a liability.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[timeOday]

What do you mean "fall over?" Being able to crash a program by feeding it bad data is a pretty good sign that it could be exploited with different bad data.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[Anonymous Coward]

>Yeah, or perhaps a liability.

Yeah, because people are flocking to open OSes for the incompatibility with the software they use.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Vista (Beta) versions are readily available for MSDN subscribers.

No big deal - any serious (commercial) Windows developer probably has access.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[TheNetAvenger]

Earlier I was logged in as Administrator. I just now went back and logged in as a regular user and got infected. I didn't do any analysis outside the fact my Vista box was trying to load up www.freecat.biz which was listed as one of the evil sites listed. This is kind of funny, actually.

Funny we can't reproduce this unless we are logged on as THE administrator. Even admin level accounts get a nice prompt that your system is trying to be infected.

Is it possible you might have already been infected when you were logged in earlier as administrator?

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[blast3r]

I was using VMWare and last night when I retested under another account I'm can't remember if I had rolled back the snapshot. I'll try this again today if I get a chance. It is still bad if M$ is bringing in older technology that may have problems like this. The fact still remains that Windows Vista is vulnerable to this even if it is only under the Administrator account.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[blast3r]

I just rolled back my Vista VMWare (Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.5112]) guest and created a new account called 'test' and logged into it. I went to http://sipr.net/%5Bremove%5Dtest.wmf which is a test that will see if your system is vulnerable. As soon as I loaded the page Microsoft Picture Viewer popped up and then calculator popped up. Then Internet Explorer crashed. So, the code in the WMF file was executed under a normal user and brought up calculator and then crashed explorer.

Re:Vista and WMF Vulnerability

[TheNetAvenger]

Ok the point here is that the exploit allows the code to run, however it will NOT allow it to infect the system, as any system changes (registry, system, service, etc) would require a prompt.

So yes the code is from the NT and Win32 code base trunk, and the ability to display WMFs are very old DLLs within the OS, this is how OSes evolve.

However, Vista is #1)Beta #2)UAP (the new protection security manager) is not even fully functional, and #3) the vulnerbility will allow 'safe' applications like the calculator to run, but getting a trojan downloaded or a system level change is not so easy.

I'm not saying it is impossible, as the UAP in Vista is not even feature complete, but it for the most part blocks this type of activity, and if that even would fail in the beta, the Defender system would prompt for OS changes that would allow a trojan or other 'system' level task to execute.

See if the 'vulnerability' can even launch the Device Manager under a UAP account. It can't without asking the user for authenication - trust me on this...

Unless you consider the vulnerability to be a major security risk under 'beta' of Vista because it launches your calculator, then you need to look up what exploits and vulnerabilities are in 'realtive' terms. If it can install software or modifty protected areas of the OS, that would be a bit more newsworthy.

So even with this WMF DLL exploit code still in Vista, it is already protecting itself from being hacked using the other beta OS safeguards. This is actually a kudos to MS.

PS, what Build you even testing this on? Prior to 5270, UAP was not even partially functional and is still under going major changes.

I see the WMF thing as positive, as it proves that Microsoft is as mortal as any other OS vendor, and they need a kick in the head once in a while.

PS with all the press on this issue, shall I also list the remote code execution patches from OSX from the last two months? And yet this is the first one for Windows in months.

(And the OSXs ones were not so benign, from Safari exploits by browsing a site that are just as dangerous as this WMF exploit, to the Apache in OSX allowing a hacker to take control of the system.)

Don't beleive me, review your OSX patches or goto www.apple.com and look this up yourself.

It is fun to bash Microsoft, but some of the 'pet' companies like Apple need a kick in butt in the media as well to tighten their security.

Apple uncovers 20 exploits, and quietly patches them (and not any more timely than MS), yet the press doesn't jump on them like they need to.

The bad part of this is other Apple users I work with I have to alert to these problems, as they think their OS is immune because it is OSX. And this will someday come to bite Apple in the butt when hackers start targeting some of these vulnerbilties.

slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

"Runtime Error" or it never loads...

mirrordot mirror

but what about...

[circusboy]

all those "Unice Boxen" I keep hearing about here?

Re:but what about...

[bckrispi]

A suffix of -en is common for forming plural nouns in German. That's where we get "Boxen" from.

Oh. I thought it was television.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

I assumed that "Channel 9" was something like the Discovery Channel.

My bad.

Re:Oh. I thought it was television.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok. Many people on /. like to expose their tinfoil hats when articles about Microsoft comes up, and your post is being modded accordingly.

mnb Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shush!
Do you really think you can get modded insightful? Your well reasoned and well documented factual post has nothing on a simpleminded (and factually incorrect )Microsoft attack by someone who didn't even post about the article in question!

But honestly, this is a true test of the moderation system. Your point is based in fact and deserves a higher score than the GP post's tirade based on incorrect assumptions.

We'll see.

Re:mnb Re:Please, kill the registry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jugulator? Is that you?

Re:"Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture!

[nxcho]

But it is this universe, and you have just been tricked by the evil spammers to visit their site (*wierd sounds from the twilightzone*) Get ready for som kernel pr0n (of course in this case it is low quality pr0n, with lots of p00).

And in other news...

[Foofoobar]

Slashdot editors provide free advertising for Microsoft spin doctors. Film at eleven!

Re:And in other news...

[Sinryc]

Slashdot gives Linux spin all the time.

Find something else to bitch about at 11.

Re:And in other news...

[Foofoobar]

And who would this multimillion dollar corporation paying for PR, marketing and press coverage be that you claim is behind this spin for Linux, hmm?

Linux's publicity is due to a social movement... not a billion dollar marketing buzz. Slashdot covers it because to not cover a movement that affects the entire industry would be assinine. Covering a Microsoft executive talking about how they are so great and everything else is CRAP is just more FUD/spin/hot air.

A movement can't be spin. Spin is when people try to divert the movement. Spin is when people try to polish a turd to sell it to you as a deoderant.

Know the difference and you'll be a better person for it. :)

Re:And in other news...

[Sinryc]

Social movement? Hahaha. No. Linux is not a social movement. Linux is more of a "Well, heres something thats more secure. Lets use this!" A social movement was the civil rights movement. Linux is using diffrent software. Also, lets be honest. Something like, 85% of the world uses Microsoft, so it makes sense that Slahsdot would cover it.

Re:And in other news...

[Foofoobar]

Point taken. Open source is the movement and Linux is just an ASPECT of open source and not to be confused with the movement as a whole.

And my point isn't to say NOT to cover Windows news... but this isn't really news is it? It's just some exec saying 'look at me! look at me!' and throwing chairs around.

Re:And in other news...

[Sinryc]

True, true. Then again, its the same thing whenever people read about a linux distros soon to be new features. Oh well. I really do wish Linux was soemthing that would be good for me. :-( All I wanna do is play my games and do my video editing. Hopefully the Intel version of OSX will allow people to play games easier on osx

Re:And in other news...

[Foofoobar]

Actually, more people come to Slashdot to read about distro releases and open source news than windows releases. Keep in mind the target audience and who reads Slashdot. They aren't really hitting their demographic with a story about a Windows exec; it would be better served with an engineer talking about the different aspects and approaches. That I would want to read.

Maybe Slashdot should have a section called 'exec brag' where the heads of Sun and IBM and Microsoft call all bullshit and spin while we are left with the engineering reports. But the sad fact is that in alot of these cases, it is hard to derive spin from fact and it is up the the viewer to discern based on past company discrepancies and trends.

Hence, Microsoft exec = spin. Even if it came from an engineer as Microsoft, my 'spin detector' would probably be going off the charts; they have about as good a record with the truth as George Bush.

Re:And in other news...

[Foofoobar]

I guess this is why it's so hard to believe anything that they say and why it's so easy to believe anyone that says something different than Microsoft; they have established that anything they say will be slanted in their favor no matter how absurd that when someone says Steve Ballmer threw a chair and he counters with 'no I didn't', who do you think everyone believed?

Their spin now works against them as they have been labeled as uncredible. No matter WHO says it. So much so that companies they HIRE to spin for them now get labelled as uncredible if they are even KNOWN to be financed or have a relationship with Microsoft.

Regardless of whether it is true or not, thats the way the industry (and now the press) view it.

They have established themselves as a company of spin doctors and now anything stated by them is taken with a couple boxcars full of salt.

Torrent

[JRHelgeson]

I can't believe that we /.'ed Microsoft!

I just posted the torrent, enjoy:
http://64.226.48.88/kernel_windows_vista_2005.wmv. torrent

Re:Torrent

[ToxicBanjo]

I can't believe that we /.'ed Microsoft!

Yep, and they'll likely blame us /.'ers for trying a DDOS attack.

Re:Torrent

[fsterman]

And they aren't flinching about it. I am still getting 900K/sec.

Vista and .wmf

[QuietLagoon]

the security/reliability of Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

The answer to one question will determine whther Vista is really an improvement in security for Windows.

Is the current test version of Vista susceptible to the .wmf exploit that is currently making the rounds on the internet?

Re:Vista and .wmf

[confusion here]

Microsoft endevours to ensure complete backwards-compatability.

Re:Vista and .wmf

[Anonymous Coward]

sure is

Re:Vista and .wmf

[TheNetAvenger]

Is the current test version of Vista susceptible to the .wmf exploit that is currently making the rounds on the internet?

Yep, although you need to be logged in as 'the' administrator for the exploit to do anything to the system.

Other accounts, even admin level ask for your permission to infect the system, so even with an open flaw, it would take the user to allow it to install. (And even some of the exploits still won't affect the system even with the user's permission with the new UAP system.)

Re:Vista and .wmf

[QuietLagoon]

Yep, although you need to be logged in as 'the' administrator for the exploit to do anything to the system.

That's no better than what occurs with Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Re:Vista and .wmf

[TheNetAvenger]

That's no better than what occurs with Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Ok, re-read my post, as there is NOW a difference between 'the' administrator account and accounts with administrator level privledges.

So there is a mass difference, as Vista does not by default set up users to run as the 'the' administrator, but instead as a user with administrator privledges.

And as you will note from my post, any other account with admin level privledges basically gets asked for authenication when anything tries to perform an administrative task on the system to alter it..

Ok, think of it this way although there are great differences. Administator on Vista is like Root on *nix. If you are running as Root on *nix you are foolish. The other accounts, like on most modern *nixes will prompt you for 'root' or in this case 'administor' authenication.

So it is vastly different than Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Go to www.microsoft.com and look up UAP, and even though it is not even a finalized feature in Vista, it is something that removes users from running as a 'root/administrator', but yet allows them to permit administrative tasks as the OS prompts them for permission.

The UAP is a bit more advanced than the 'authenication' passing of a non-root account as found in Linux for example, as it does more than just prompt for authenication when an application or process wants to perform something that would normally need administrator/root level access.

Just go read up on UAP and don't keep repeat the same FUD that it is the same as XP.

Additionally, if users of XP and Win2k would not run as administrators this problem would not have created problems like this in the first place, but in trying to provide 'ease of use' to the customer base MS made the mistake of allowing default users to be administrator level.

This ALL changes in Vista...

Re:Vista and .wmf

[QuietLagoon]

So it is vastly different than Windows XP or Windows 2000.

It's somewhat different, not vastly.

Re:Vista and .wmf

[TheNetAvenger]

It's somewhat different, not vastly.

Go read up on the UAP technologies being added to Vista. This is an area of vast change. It moves users from running at a root level, but yet has features that go way beyond the 'root authenication' as found in *nix when running as a non-administrator.

Go read up on UAP, even in the current form MS already has a lot of information on it.

And if it just keeps the average home user from running as 'root/administrator' level that is vast enough... :)

Re:Where is the news?

[gooman]

Fri, Dec 23, 2005 6:16 PM

Over a week old? It should have been duped by now.

About the security guy on the far right

[aCapitalist]

I could barely hear the guy and the other architects were nudging him a little about being so quiet. I wonder why;)?

what did the...

[zogger]

...shareholders and their lawyers think about that little disaster? Was in reported in the quarterlies?

Re:what did the...

[Arandir]

The problem was discovered a couple of days before first customer shipment, and was fixed in time so that no shareholder or customer discovered it.

How much you willing to pay?

[hackwrench]

That file is 49 minutes, 11 seconds long, so I'm not doing it unless I get paid. How much you willing to pay? My e-mail address is hackwrench@hotmail.com, and my prices are surprisingly low!

I am taking on audio file transcription jobs in general, so people, if you got something you want transcribed, I might be your man. I don't give quotes, but make an offer. Hey, if a bunch of you want this particular file bad enough, maybe you can scrape together enough amongst the lot of you to make an acceptable offer, or to put it another way, divided amongst the lot of you, you'll hardly miss it.

Re:How much you willing to pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

DIR SIR

GREETINGS TO YOU GOOD SIR, PRAISE GOD. MY NAME IS ABDUL-MUQADDIM, A CIVIL SERVANT IN LAGOS, AND GREAT GRAND-NEPHEW OF EXILED MICROSOFT VP ROB SHORT. BEFORE MY GREAT UNCLE'S EXILE, HE DEPOSITED $20,000,000 (TWENTY MILLION US DOLLARS) IN AN ALGERIAN BANK ACCOUNT. UPON HIS EXILE, HIS ACCOUNT WAS FROZEN AND TURNED OVER TO THE GOVERNMENT OF ALGERIA. MY FRIEND IN THE ALGERIAN GOVERNMENT WAS ABLE TO SECURE ACCESS TO THIS ACCOUNT, BUT WE NEED A MOST TRUSTWORTHY THIRD PARTY ACCOUNT INTO WHICH WE CAN TRANSFER THE FUNDS.

I AM WRITING TO YOU ON BEHALF OF MY UNCLE REGARDING THIS MOST PRIVATE AND PERSONAL MATTER. FOR YOUR COOPERATION AND ABSOLUTE CONFIDENTIALITY, WE OFFER YOU 40% (EIGHT MILLION US DOLLARS) OF THE FUNDS UPON RECEIPT OF THE TRANSACTIONS.

IN ORDER TO BEGIN OUR TRANSACTION, GOOD SIR, I HUMBLY REQUEST THAT YOU SEND $50,000 (FIFTY THOUSAND US DOLLARS) TO THE BELOW ADDRESS, SO THAT I MAY OPEN A FOREIGN ACCOUNT ON YOUR BEHALF. IN ADDITION, I REQUEST THAT YOU WATCH THE FOLLOWING VIDEO, IN ORDER TO KNOW OF MY GREAT UNCLE. YOUR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE WILL BE HIGHLY APPRECIATED.

THANK YOU, YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT
ABDUL-MUQADDIM

Re:How much you willing to pay?

[rbannon]

Where should I send the funds?

Free iPod?

OS/2 failed because OS/2 didn't work well enough

[kendor]

OS/2 did some neat things. I know, because I stuck with it for years with the rest of the crowd on USNET's OS/2 groups. I even played amateur OS/2 evangelist before I knew better.

It serves some people's purposes to suggest that MS killed OS/2, but I think it's safer to say that OS/2's shortcomings helped OS/2 kill itself. OS/2 preemptively multitasked stuff more than a decade before Apple managed to do the same with OSX, and it did some other nifty tricks. But in terms of providing an computing environment that was significantly more useful or usable than mid-90s Windows for most people's needs, OS/2 was a failure.

OS/2 was big and bloated. It didn't ship with many useful apps, or take advantage of the superior architecture of the OS. It crashed. In the end, I switched back to windows, not because I needed X app or Y compatibility, but because there was simply no compelling reason to use an operating system that was more complicated, less compatible, and no more stable than Win9X.

As a personal thing it was a useful experience. It taught me to keep emotions out of the evaluation of a system's merits. In the immortal words of Alice and Bill, the operative consideration should always be "gimmee gimmee gimmeee."

If the tool will "gimmee" enough, I could care less whether it was created by Apple or Microsoft or Walmart. Merit trumps all.

Re:Where is the news?

[gumpish]

recent news (oxy moron? Isn't all news recent?)

"old news" would be an oxymoron.

"recent news" is redundant.

all i can say is

[crashelite]

WHOLY CRAP THAT GUY IS SCARRY... i am going to have nightmares from now on

Re:Where is the news?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget... this is Slashdot.... where pro-Linux stuff is posted the second it is available, even if it is complete garbage, and anything about Microsoft is ancient news before it gets posted. Check out the XBox360 release date news... one front page article about the XBox360 when everywhere else had tons of stuff.... and that one front page article was a negative one.

Image quality...

[curious.corn]

... thank the gods there are alternatives to Microsoft codecs... Chan9 logo blockiness in the video stream is über lame... long live Quicktime!

Re:Image quality...

[Anonymous Coward]

quicktime eats butt

Re:Image quality...

[Jerk City Troll]

If Quicktime was a codec, I am sure it would be fantastic.

Re:Image quality...

[curious.corn]

nitpick... ;-)

Re:Image quality...

[Jerk City Troll]

Hey! Capitalize the first letter of your sentences! ;-)

Microsoft ripping off PostScript?

[PCM2]

One of these videos, for instance, is all about microsoft's new printing architecture, which is basically just a rip-off of postscript.

That seems pretty unlikely, considering that PostScript is a page description language, not a printing architecture.

Re:Microsoft ripping off PostScript?

[Anonymous Coward]

That seems pretty unlikely, considering that PostScript is a page description language, not a printing architecture.

I guess you've never heard of PostScript printers then? Apple came out with the LaserWriter in 1985. This was one of the first, if not THE first commercial PostScript printer.

PostScript is still the high-end printing standard today. While it is a Page Description Language, this refers to the fact that PostScript is a true language which can be used to precisely describe an entire printed page from margins to fonts and graphics. It's also resolution independent.

Re:Microsoft ripping off PostScript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh, people don't like truth.

Re:Microsoft ripping off PostScript?

[TheNetAvenger]

Very good account of Postscript.

In response to the poster above that sees Microsoft as ripping off Postscript, they have no idea what Microsoft is doing and how it is different than Postscript.

Everyone that thinks MS is ripping anyone off needs to just go to msdn.microsoft.com and read up on what Microsoft is actually doing before slamming it with a generalization. (

Even what I say below, don't take my word for it, take 10min and go look at it. Even if MS is your enemy, it is better to know what they are doing, especially if they are doing something that might be unique or at least innovative one particular field.)

Sure there are similarities as MS new technologies can be used to render things on screen, to a printer, or store it in a document.

One thing that is different is MS is using a XML based format that will allow Windows and applications to pass this information internally from screen to printer to clipboard to document. (Although this isn't a giant leap, but will be handy for a more streamlined protocol internally within the GUI as well as doing remote operations.)

MS's technologies are like the next generation of what Postscript was in the 80s.

It is font independant, has more advanced rendering concepts built in, from blending and transparencies and other normal graphical application types of display that are a bit more advanced than Postscript and what you would normally find in CorelDraw or Illustrator and Photoshop to AutoCad.

It also fully handles 3D dimentional space, animation, control and message handling as well as other forms of media like video, ink, audio and is extensible beyond current media concepts of today.

What probably would be the giant leap is that it even inherently handles modeling and things like collision detection in a 3D space with support for user control and interaction, which is kind of cool for a presentation technology. (Envision how nicely this will adapt to printer technologies that blur displays and printed output - i.e. digital ink)

This is a bit way beyond what Postscript does, although what Postscript does, it does well and shouldn't be dismissed.

But don't say MS is ripping of Postscript, any more than Postscript was ripping off the first Vector drawing formats that predated it.

Re:Microsoft ripping off PostScript?

[Alpha77]

Sounds an awful lot like XSL-FO to me. The idea might be nice, but the problem remains the same: what applications can handle what kind of content? Passing XML around may sound like a general solution, but it doesn't do anything at all. There is still the need for the actual components that process the data, regardless of the format the data is in.

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[blast3r]

I guess that would depend. Do they have "idiot managers" bringing things into the new kernel? I thought it was on topic myself. But then again, I'm just me.

Information quality.

[twitter]

thank the gods there are alternatives to Microsoft codecs... Chan9 logo blockiness in the video stream is über lame... long live Quicktime!

It's too bad they don't just publish their source code so someone can fix the problems. A Microsoft Christmas present: If you are very good, we will condescend to an interview. Whoot, I'm so enlightened by the chance to download some non free video codecs to watch someone talk about software. No thanks, all around.

Re:Information quality.

[curious.corn]

It is entertaining though, I've written a comment about it...

Re:OS/2 failed because OS/2 didn't work well enoug

[jejones]

If the tool will "gimmee" enough, I could care less whether it was created by Apple or Microsoft or Walmart. Merit trumps all.

Even ethics and the law?

OMG! WTF?

[fleaboy]

Is this video a joke? Come on guys I know Windows is a pain, but falsifying a supposed technical release just to get a chuckle, that's pretty-well-funny. The scariest thing about this is the fact that the carpenters that migrated from another country(from some uh southern border) could deliver a more technical interview than this crap. It's funny the guy states that there are 30 'architects' working to manage the different groups-how many Indians is that? I wonder whose brainstorm it was to bring the security guy back out of retirement to f*ck-up this version of Windows? Do the words 'from the ground up' mean anything to these idiots-OMG! I am not in the IT industry, as a matter of fact I got my first computer in 2000 (a Comp-USA laptop rl366 running 98se), and it only took me a matter of months to realize this 'tool' as it was termed is broken. When that realization sank in, I started asking about to find out where a decent OS might be hiding. Someone mentioned Linux, it took me a few weeks to learn what a BIOS is(so I could boot from CD-rom), what partitioning was(as I did not understand how the system was laid out), and when I did learn about these things out Microsoft was well on it's way to being gone. I had to continue to use Microsoft to access my distance learning classes at the local community college and that was the exetent of their supposed 'user friendly' experience. After those classes were done, I made my decision not to support these criminals (and just because you have enough money to change the definition of 'guilty' doesn't mean you're innocent) and I figured if I was going to have to spend time learning either OS it really wouldn't matter-I thank GOD everytime I interface with any of my computers that I'm not supporting crack dealers and pimps, oh I mean, Microsoft and its ilk. I don't support ruthless, unethical, criminal, corporations-if I can avoid it and I research any and all avenues to maintain this ideal. I still don't get how this is anything close to an 'in depth' technical interview. Just an observation from a drop-out, GED packing, lowly remodel carpenter from TEXAS. This comment was made using Fedora Core 4 with the help of the Firefox Web browser. BTW Where have all the ardent Microsoft cheerleaders gone these past few days? Oh, my bad! They must be fixing their 'superior' operating systems right about now WMF WTF?

Re:OMG! WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he sweated a lot typing all that.

Re:OMG! WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is teh gay! Nobody cares anymore about your piece-of-shit clone of an ancient 70's OS. You Linux faggots are a joke that stopped being funny years ago. Enjoy your AIDS.

Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[dch24]

Here's a transcript. I'll write up the other half and post it too. Anybody get the name of the interviewer? I'll just call him "Narrator." And the typos are my fault. Everything else, flame them.

Narrator: Alright, so we're here for "Going Deep." We have the corporate vice president and some of his architects and they're going to talk about the Vista Kernel so, hello. Can you introduce yourselves.

Rob Short: Yeah. I'm Rob Short, and I wrote the Kernel and Architecture team for Windows. The Kernel team obviously is the core piece of a system: schedules processes and finds devices, things like that.

The Architecture Team is something that I wanted to talk a little bit about, because about two years ago, we realized that we were in a little bit more trouble in terms of our ability to predict the impact of changes and to make broad, cross-group changes to Windows, and what we decided to do was have a core group of experts that would help the teams and work right across all of windows to really help figure out the impact of changes and make sure things were happening the way we'd like to see them happen, and I have some of the people with me here today. This is just a few of the people on that team. We've about six people full-time, and we have a much broader team of about thirty architects working the different groups, and they all participate as part of our architecture team but they belong to the different teams

Narrator: Okay.

Rob Short: And the idea is to really improve our engineering process and improve our quality of our engineering and be able to predict the outcome of changes that we make.

Narrator: Okay.

Rob Short: I've been in Windows for basically ever, I've been in Windows for about fifteen years. I worked on a couple of other things in between, so I left and came back again but mostly I've been working on where the hardware meets the software.

Narrator: Excellent!

Rob Short: And I'd like to introduce my next partner in crime.

Narrator: (laughs)

Rich Neves: My name's Rich Neves. I've been working here almost three years. I work on the architecture team as Rob just described, and what my responsibility or role these days is is figuring out how to police the dependency between different pieces of the systems so that we can figure out how to compose the system in a more efficient way. By efficient, I mean in a way that isolates developers from the damage they can do to other developers. So basically, Microsoft's a very innovative company, and there's people working on amazing technologies in almost every nook and cranny, particularly in Windows. The challenge we face is delivering that innovation, and what our hope is that we can make innovation itself the bottleneck, instead of delivering innovation, which has been the problem in the past, and to do that, what we're trying to do is isolate pieces of the system from each other, so that developers can know that they can work in a particular area of the system, innovating a technology, without adversely impacting larger parts of the system, that as Rob said we can't predict they're going to be impacted, and in a way that would actually jeopardize our agility in getting those features out that result from that innovation.

So specifically what we've been doing is taking every binary in the system and assigning it a layer number, which is a rank in a directed acyclic graph. There's about 5,500 binaries in the system. And what we've been doing is getting transparency now into every dependency that developers add to any of those binaries, so that we can understand what's going on. And what's falling out of that is not necessarily just the isolation I described, but also, issues. We call them, sort of, conventional wisdom ... controversies. For example, people might be thinking, well, I want to combine a whole bunch of DLL's into one DLL for perf. Well, it turns out that that's a

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[Vladimir]

So specifically what we've been doing is taking every binary in the system and assigning it a layer number, which is a rank in a directed acyclic graph. There's about 5,500 binaries in the system.

oh, they know about acyclic graphs, good. I bet they have only 5500 levels in it. On a side note: Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 15490 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine... (http://www.debian.org/) So why keep re-inventing the wheel, just ship vista with msdpkg/msapt...

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[dorkygeek]

Is the narrator some kind of retard, or does he simply have a minimalistic vocabulary? Oh, wait, it's an ad, sorry.

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[CODiNE]

I smell a DMCA violation here.  Prepare for takedown.  <Buzzes lawyers>

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[zootm]

To be fair, the material on Channel9 tends to be informative and more than just "advertising" in most cases — the technicians and so forth they interview are enthusiastic but mainly wanting to get across the things they've been working on (as technicians do). I've seen plenty of sites with interviews of *nix professionals and so on, and I wouldn't say they were more or less "advertising", on the whole.

The interviewers on Channel9, however, tend to be massively overenthusiastic to the point of hilarity. Note how he replies to I've been working on where the hardware meets the software with Excellent!. It is irritating, but then that's why I don't watch a lot of video online. :D

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[FiberOPtic]

"police the dependency between different pieces of the systems so that we can figure out how to compose the system in a more efficient way. By efficient, I mean in a way that isolates developers from the damage they can do to other developers. So basically, Microsoft's a very innovative company"

makeing Windows moduler is innovative? what wil they inovate next? Free BSD? oh right they did that in NT ...

happy new year

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[clydemaxwell]

You know you're the first person I've ever heard complain about 1) debian package management, which even the n00biest of n00bs can use or 2) dependency architectures. I don't know what you've been trying to install, but unless it's a customized kernel, you just grab the package name, hit + and hit g done. add this to autoupdates and a full dependency checking system which automatically resolves for you, I have no idea what you could want.

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[Anonymous Coward]

So what was he supposed to answer/comment? "Linux has been doing that since 98, so what else can you tell me?" How soon do you think they'd be able to get another interview with that kind of comment?

Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest)

[ultranova]

The Debian package manager is hardly a nice format or easy to install. With 15000+ package it's a nightmare to figure out what packages you need to install if you want X application. Oftentimes you have to figure out the package name, and with many packages with similar names, it's hardly trivial.

apt-get install package

This command downloads and installs the package and any packages needed by that package. How much simpler could it possibly be ? No hunting DLL files or .NET runtimes, since anything that the package needs is automatically grapped by apt.

Of course, this doesn't always work; for example, vncserver doesn't have the proper dependency on font packages, despite needing them, and the bug won't be fixed, since it is theoretically possible that the fonts might be served from a font server on another machine. In this particular case Debian is completely broken.

Guidelines???

[tehdaemon]

There are plenty of guidelines on how to deal with trademark dispute lawsuits, what are you talking about?

(supposed to be funny....)

Most cases of this are resolved long before the programs are installed.

Dependency hell

[curious.corn]

So they're more or less admitting "essentially ... windows is one big binary..." Woah! Low level libraries and frameworks depending on stuff that's higher level, "in the past we've relied on... lockstep... development process..." and "we're now looking at dependencies in the 6 digits range..." Man, these guys are giving one hell of a bashing to the Microsoft codebase.

One guy starts talking about modularity and inserting features and plugins into essential services... and I thought objC. But before that another one gets all hot (I chuckled, this guy is a True Nerd, he really likes fiddling with code... congrats) about semicoop multitask where an app renices itself to 100% resource hog tier for a limited time slot (nice try, but what when all the silly apps do the same trick?), but before that there's a talk about usermode ukernel services... I thought about when I used to renice X11R6 to get better performance (when the graph card module was part of the X process).

I think Bill needs to pull out of tech and sell Microsoft to Apple. These techs are good guys, all they need is a solid process and some decent vision.

Jobs, are you reading this? Watch this video, it'll make you feel good! :-)
e

Re:Dependency hell

[Petronius]

steve@localhost: yeah, I'm watching the video. Only one guy on their team is wearing black. They're fucked.

Um...isn't vista simply rehashed NT 3.x?

[filesiteguy]

I hate to say it, especially since I never downloaded the betas to this "groundbreaking" software, but isn't Vista simply another iteration of OS/2 / NT? I remember being very exited by XP when it was hyped and paraded around like a "new" operating system that was somehow different than NT 5.0 (a.k.a. Win2K).

However, once I got my beta of XP (NT 5.1) I was sorely dissapointed when the ntoskrnl.exe and other nt*.exe and nt*.dll files (I forget exactly what they are named.) had similar architecture and functions to the same ntoskrnl.exe files in NT 3.1, which I recall running like a dog on my DX/66 (particularly compared to OS/2 2.0 which ran great).

Re:Um...isn't vista simply rehashed NT 3.x?

[cnettel]

Vista is more NT.

The OS/2 heritage is far more complicated. There are similarities, but the kernel is quite unlike what you found in OS/2 2.x, while NT at some point could have been OS/2 3.x. It's almost as dissimilar to OS/2 as it is to Win 3.1. It was a new kernel that was supposed to be able to run both Win 3.1 and OS/2 user mode apps, so the kernel provides services suitable for that purpose. The OS/2 support was of course never fully developed, but HPFS was supported until a few years ago and NTFS also shares some ideas with it, while not in the actual disk layout.

If your DX(2?)/66 didn't perform well with NT, I would think about memory rather than CPU. Just the fact that NT is all-UNICODE in the kernel, means that every single string is longer than in, for example. OS/2 and 9x. If all you have is 4 or 8 MB, that alone can be quite significant (especially when you're running Win16 and ANSI Win32 apps and every string needs copying and conversion before really being used in the APIs).

Re:Um...isn't vista simply rehashed NT 3.x?

[drsmithy]

[...] NT 3.1, which I recall running like a dog on my DX/66 (particularly compared to OS/2 2.0 which ran great).

Considering how much more capable and complex NT was(/is), it's hardly surprising it needed more hardware resources.

Re:Um...isn't vista simply rehashed NT 3.x?

[TheNetAvenger]

hate to say it, especially since I never downloaded the betas to this "groundbreaking" software, but isn't Vista simply another iteration of OS/2 / NT?

Not to be rude, but you need to learn a bit about OSes and OS Architecture... Especially the NT Kernel and Architecture, as it somewhat unique.

NT is the underlying technology that was designed to be the low level OS. Win32 (Windows) runs in a subsystem on top of NT. The NT architecture will be around for many many years, as it was designed to be very extensible and grow to support OSes for many more years to come.

NT is the actual OS technology, Windows and the majority of the changes of Vista are in the Win32 subsystem or truly a new subsystem that is evolved from the Win32 system, as there is a new API, Graphics Model, etc.

You see, NT doesn't even have to be Windows, it also run *nix subsystems and DOS subsystems and it even use to have a OS/2 subsystem, and they all ran side by side - being equal. (Win32 got a bit of preference as it was the base Window Manager for the other subsystems. And it has more of a role for managing NT that runs underneath it.)

Even today you can download a full blown *nix subsystem and install it on any NT based OS, like Win2k, WinXP, Win 2003, Vista, etc. It will run on top of NT just like Windows does and provide you with a full *nix OS with no emulation or vitualization and yet take advantage of the NT Kernel.

As for great new OSes, 10years from now, even a full Virtual Reality based OS that has no reference to Windows itself could be released by Microsoft and still use NT technology to run the higher level new OS.

YEEE-HAWWWW

[hostingreviews]

Doesn't this guy that's talking about media glitching remind you of Howard Dean? He's way too excited about program priorities. He's seriously hitting 80dbs from time to time. Sure would hate to work with that fool on something truely exciting.

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[cnettel]

Part of the WMF handling is in Win32K in current Windows versions, so it is in ring 0, yes. It's not in the kernel, though. The current exploit is not in kernel mode, it's about running arbitrary code in user mode, so it is still not a kernel issue. It's an issue in Vista, but not in the Vista kernel. It is about as relevant as checking if the stupid "64 k" notepad limit was still present in WinME as a way to determine if there was any 16-bit stuff left in the kernel of that OS.

reality check

[penguin-collective]

First of all, the video is unviewable even with Microsoft Media Player on Mac, but you can find a whitepaper describing the kernel changes here. Keep in mind that all of this is basically Microsoft advertising for developers; it's not taking a "hard look" at the kernel architecture, it's the kernel developers portraying their work in the best light.

What's interesting is how little innovation there actually is. They seem to be struggling with the complexity of the system and its dependencies (5500 components)--similar to the problems Linus is having, but multiplied many times over by greater complexity of the NT system architecture. Most of their actual improvements seem to be cleanups and performance enhancements.

My impression is that the Vista kernel and system libraries are still playing catch-up with Linux in terms of modularity, performance, and functionality.

Re:reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. What they described early on about scheduling tasks to PREEMPT each other has been in the Linux Kernel since 2.5.(something).

Vista is JUST NOW catching up to technology that has already been in Linux (And maybe MAC, dunno).

I bet they try and pantent it... What a joke...

Re:reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing Linux never has to play catch-up... I mean it's not like the amazing O(1) scheduler has existed in NT for some 15 years...

Re:reality check

[Mixel]

First of all, the video is unviewable even with Microsoft Media Player on Mac

It does work. Just wait for it. Mine took two hours of "Buffering". The good news is that it plays in linux+xine if you have the binary codecs installed.

Re:reality check

[DevStar]

Vista playing catch up to the Linux kernel with respect to modularity and functionality? Are you kidding? Additionally, what is some innovation that we've seen in other kernels, if there is no innovation in the Vista kernel. I'm curious to know about this innovation that other OS people are doing.

Re:reality check

[penguin-collective]

Additionally, what is some innovation that we've seen in other kernels, if there is no innovation in the Vista kernel. I'm curious to know about this innovation that other OS people are doing.

You're operating under the mistaken assumption that there has been significant innovation in any real-world kernels over the last decade; there has not been.

Vista playing catch up to the Linux kernel with respect to modularity and functionality? Are you kidding?

No, I'm not "kidding". I have seen no functionality in Vista that doesn't already exist for Linux. If you have, name it.

The difference is that Linux is modular enough that people can actually pick and choose which kernel and system features they want. Under Linux, features like file system metadata, ACLs, capabilities, transactional file systems, change monitoring, real-time indexing, etc. are modular and independent of one another. And--guess what--once you give people a choice, most of those supposedly "innovative features" turn out to be duds and people choose not to use them.

Re:reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, Linux has never claimed to be "innovative"--it's a reimplementation of UNIX.

Second, whether a scheduler is O(1) or O(log N) or O(N) or O(N^2) is irrelevant; what matters is its actual performance in real-world settings. The Linux schedulers have generally had excellent performance for the kinds of systems they were run on. When an O(1) scheduler made it into Linux in 2002, it's because at that point in time, it started making practical sense to incorporate it.

Your comment is pretty typical of the feature fetish culture that drives NT: you think that if you add a lot of big sounding features to the kernel, it becomes better and more secure, and you are wrong.

Re:OS/2 failed because OS/2 didn't work well enoug

[heinousjay]

What are the legal and ethical problems, exactly? Or was this theoretical?

Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

posting this on /. wasn't meant for information only purposes.

Re:OS/2 failed because OS/2 didn't work well enoug

[Frumious Wombat]

Given evidence from the era of Microsoft hacking with Win 3.11 to make sure that it broke Windows compatibility, OS/2s demise was only partly that IBM couldn't market eternal life in 1993.

We ran it too, used it to multitask DOS programs, run Win3.1 apps more stabily than Win3.1 did, and to run native apps that needed the 32-bit address space. It was great to be able to recompile our VAX apps with Watcom Fortran, run them (and get a speed-boost over the VAX), and still be able to use the computer for other apps. Other research groups had it powering their Mass-Spectrometers, and similar fussy hardware.

More importantly, we never had a problem with frequent crashes. We bought good memory and standard hardware, and made sure that we had 8-16 meg, which seemed to be the sweet spot. It just ran. I didn't leave it behind until NT 4 had a service pack or two behind it, and I'd acquired a PowerIndigo2 with the Cray-derived Fortran compiler at work, pretty much eliminating why I was still running OS/2.

We're still paying for the mistake of not adopting it, as many of the security problems in Windows stem from single-user, insecure, Windows95 getting released and established first, rather than VMS|OS/2 derived NT.

I love the questions they ask.-Gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

"(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing)."*

You mean like Gnome does? Look at how many people disparage that as a "Windows Registry", when it's just XML files in the background, but the design does allow for a database backend as well. Well there's no pleasing those looking for anything to bash, so just ignore them.

*I believe we also had a "/." awhile back were Apple basically did the same, and released it for free.

NT is great if you don't want to do anything

[gatzke]

Right. Don't let anyone have admin access and don't let anyone have removable media. Unplug the ethernet, making the best firewall ever. Turn off sound and run it at 640x480 in 8 bit while you are at it. NT should then work forever...

What?!

[MochaMan]

Being Canadian myself, and being that you not only mispelt 'eh', but also misused it, I'm having a hard time believing this isn't a joke.

But please, don't ever insinuate that Bush doesn't have an accent again.

As others have pointed out, an accent is simply a characteristic pronunciation/intonation in speech. As a Canadian (maybe ;) Americans think you say outside/house/about and heart/bar/car strangely, unless you happen to be French Canadian, in which case they think everything you say sounds funny. Likewise Brits think you sound like a yank and New Zealanders are sympathetic since everyone thinks they're Australian. Australians don't give a shit either way as long as you're up a round at the pub.

Does that make sense?

We are catalysts, it's not just the four of us.

[q3ctf4]

I sure hope not.

FYI

[EXMSFT]

At least one of those speakers - I'll leave it to you to decode which - doesn't have an "American accent", as they are not from the United States.

this guy stole my article

[bariswheel]

I wrote him an email: " Zonk, Don't take this the wrong way, but I submitted the kernel architecture article to slashdot just yesterday...I see you've posted the link that I was going to post....it's funny that this is on slashdot and it doesn't have my name on it....I also see thay you're a slashdot editor...hmm.... Is that how slashdot works? You guys take submissions from people like us and put your name on it? I didn't know slashdot worked that way... I'm bariswheel on slashdot... -baris "

Re:this guy stole my article

[vorok]

Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture
Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 03, @03:23PM
from the from-the-horse's-mouth dept.
Windows Programming
bariswheel wrote to mention an episode of 'Going Deep' on Channel 9 which takes a hard look at the architecture of Windows Vista. From the post: "Rob Short is the corporate vice president in charge of the team that architects the foundation of Windows Vista. This is a fascinating conversation with the kernel architecture team. It's our Christmas present to all of the Niners out there who've stuck with us day after day. This is a very candid interview." Topics discussed include the history of the Windows Registry, and the security/reliability of Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

Maybe that got changed since you posted, but to me it looks like you are being credited?

Re:this guy stole my article

[bariswheel]

Vorok I saw that...it is strange...I either missed it, or the editors changed it after I emailed them. I could've sworn I didn't see my name on it....in any event, I'm glad it's there...not because I care too much about it (although credit is nice), I'd hate for slashdot's integrity to get compromised. thanks for the reply take care

Re:this guy stole my article

[Anonymous Coward]

No, obviously you don't care about the credit at all. You just wrote Zonk and whined about it AND posted on Slashdot whining about AND describing how you had already whined about it to Zonk.

There's nothing shameful about wanting credit for one's work, even if it's something as infinitely lame as a Slashdot story. At least have the decency to admit it, instead of referring to some non-existent integrity of the site.

Also, learn the meaning of proper interpunction. It just might make your post somewhat coherent.

Re:this guy stole my article

[bariswheel]

What does interpunction mean? I couldn't find it on webster...? I've already apologized to Zonk about my comments. I'm putting this issue behind me. Thanks for your reply, whoever you are.

VLC playback broken?

[harmonica]

With the latest version of the VLC media player (0.84a for Windows) I only get sound, no picture. If I use the regular Windows media player (Windows 2000) I do get video, but it smears all the time. Any hints on how to play the video correctly?

Re:VLC playback broken?

[markiv34]

Try using MPlayer there is a version for windows available, I am posting the link here http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.htm l , download from the windows releasess choose the mirror nearest to you, or anyone that works.

Re:Windows becoming more like Unix

[TheNetAvenger]

MS said for years that Unix is so old. Now Windows is becoming more and more like Unix. What a bunch of idiots these guys are that took them so long to realize that their architecture is flawed and that Unix's architecure is superior.

I think it was Cutler or someone from his team in 1991 that made a comment along these lines, but it wasn't about the age of UNIX, it was the inherent problems in the architecture of UNIX and its limitations.

And if you know anything about NT and its architecture, you will surely realize that not only is there a great deal of difference from UNIX by design, but the direction Microsoft is evolving NT has very little relevance to anything in the UNIX world.

UNIX zealots should flame you as well as NT proponents.

If Microsoft wanted UNIX, they had XENIX and Cutler had full control to make NT a full UNIX implementation/evolution. However the NT team did not want the UNIX limitations, and they were from the UNIX world themselves.

UNIX is great in many ways, but by definition, when you adhere to a base operational specification, you are limiting yourself, no matter how good it is.

NT doesn't have these rules, and whether people like it or not, it doesn't have to adhere to anything but what they want it to do or believe works well, so it by definition it will never have these imposed limitations.

Re:Transcript up to 34 min or so

[dch24]

(this is the middle part of the transcript)

Narrator: Fantastic. So can you talk a little bit about what's new in the Vista kernel? So we go from XP; now we're going to Vista. So what are some of the new components?

Rob Short: A term I like to use is probably kind of politically incorrect on TV is, some of the work we do is kind of like sewers, but if we do this work incredibly well, the stuff is essential, but nobody knows that it's there.

Narrator: Yes.

Rob Short: So, if things go bad, obviously you know about it.

Narrator: Certainly.

Rob Short: Most of the work that I've been focused on for the last several years has been improving the experience where the hardware meets the software. Things like power management. We have a team of people looking at power management and working to improve how the system behaves, say a laptop for example.

If you have a laptop, how fast does it turn on, turn off, how good is the battery life? What's the experience when you dock or undock? And we've done a huge amount of work on that. We've redesigned the algorithm for hibernation so that we do a better job of figuring out which pages are already on the disk so you don't have to send more of the pages back to the disk. We've changed the way the power management interfaces to the drivers so that we have a better feel for understanding if we can just shut this thing off, right now. Today, in the older system, in XP, we actually query the driver, say, "Hey, would you, like, mind if we turn off the power?" A lot of times, people haven't coded up the driver correctly. Mostly the drivers don't care, where some really do. A disk driver, it really matters if you, you know, turn the power off in the middle of a transfer. But a lot of other things, you don't care. Mouse, it doesn't really matter that much. You know, you can go across the extreme. So we've done a bunch of work in that area.

We obviously do a lot of work in performance. One example is we had problems with heap fragmentation, and we've redesigned some of the heap algorithms so we can deal much better with much more random requests. We can deal with those and do a better job with defragmenting the heaps. So those are the types of things.

Several people--Darryl works specifically on the multimedia, and understanding how we do a better job of not having glitches in multimedia, but that also goes right through the full length of the system. It's not just buried in the kernel.

We've improved the inter-process procedure call. We have a new sort of fast, lightweight procedure call inside, in the core parts of the system. We ... stop me.

Narrator: (Laughing) He has a whole list! A cheat list!

Rob Short: There's an awful lot going on. One area where we actually make a lot of changes over time that I feel really good looking back is in the memory management area. If you think about the early NT systems, Bill Gates used to beat us up, and say, "How come you don't run in four megabytes?" And when you look at that today, and think, we're running regularly in four gigabytes today, and we have the systems in the lab that run with a terabyte of memory, the algorithms that worked back then, and the priorities back then are completely different than they are today. So we've put in work in Vista for improving the NUMA support, which is Non-Uniform Memory Access when you have a multi-processor where some of the memory is closer to some processors than to others, so we do a better job of doing the allocation, making sure that they're allocating memory that's on the CPU, near the CPU that you're running on, and then you try to run the process on the CPU where the memory actually is so you don't get cache thrashing.

Narrator: Interesting.

Rob Short: We've done some stuff for the graphics. The graphics processors today are more powerful than the CPU'

Re:Where is the news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or tautological, if you insist on being a fully-fledged Nazi.

It's business as usual

[shummer_mc]

I'm glad you at least have your eyes open enough to ask the question.

By way of my explanation I'll take a little detour. Businesses regularly accept crappy products from all kinds of vendors... Let me say that it's not just partners, suppliers, etc. but contract work, too. I can't rant hard enough to demonstrate the long parade of shitty subcontractors that have sold my (and others') idiotic management chain into buying (at some exhorbitant cost) some service that doesn't even resemble 'expertise.' ...but I digress.

Fact is, the reason you are searching for comes to this example of the management mentality....

I'm busy. I have a lot of meetings to attend. I have to produce my excel spreadsheet that demonstrates why I need more resources to complete my projects so that at the end of the year I can justify my own pay raise to my bosses. I don't have time to learn another operating system. If we could just hire someone else to administer the Windows update software, then I could 1. solve a huge company risk (justify pay raise) 2. hire another underling (justify pay raise) 3. save everyone else the pain of re-learning how to do their work (be a hero) and 4. continue to use my stupid excel spreadsheet template without having to read anything by way of training myself on a new OS (justify pay raise). Total time outlay (for me): 2 days. One hiring, one orienting the newbie. Risk to my job: 0. I'm seen as proactive, and if something happens, I have someone to blame.

BTW, hiring an underling is only an option IF the company has been stung by the rather vacuous security model of Windows. If that hasn't happened, then mgr above hires a half-witted subcontractor (at twice the rate) and uses that to justify 'being proactive' and covering his ass in case of a security break-down. Then the next year he saves money by hiring a full-time patch administrator...

On yet another note, it's not as if ANY operating system/software system/product/etc is perfect. M$ sells 'perfect enough'. The realities of business are not what I learned in school. Sure, I'm jaded-- I've been out of college for about 5 years, now. The most precious resources are not $$, reputation, talent, etc. Time is the most valuable resource. Oddly, a manager's time is infinitely more valuable than a workers. Why? Because he has to live with his time constraints, and he makes the decisions. Changing to *nix systems would COST all of the valuable resources: time, comfort, confidence, and scapegoats.

DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a manager in any reasonably sized company. So, my perspective is that of a worker. The views and opinions expressed are derived from observation.

ain't figured it out yet

[Anonymous Coward]

what follows is an honest reply:

when I was 20, I was asking the same questions. then later I realized how complicated the problem is. it took some time but i eventually saw it. maybe someday you will to.

Re:Where is the news?

[JediJorgie]

Back in the day, slashdot had tech *news* and actual discussion; but that was LONG ago.

These days it is just dumping ground for people to rehash old news from more focused sites (that those who are interested have already read days eariler thanks to targeted rss feeds matching their specific interests) and thousands of posts doing one of the following:

1. Bashing Microsoft (no specific reason necessary)
2. Praising LINUX in general (usually threads that have nothing to do with LINUX)
3. Bashing specific flavors of LINUX (in actual LINUX related threads)
4. Praising specific flavors of LINUX (also usually threads that have nothing to do with LINUX)
5. Praising Apple for being the control freak that MS would like to be but can't because they were declared a monopoly
7. Bashing the xbox360
8. Bashing the PS3 (in Nintendo news threads)
9. Praising the PS3 (usually in xbox360 bashing theads)
10. Bashing sony for their DRM
11. Bashing other's posts over spelling/grammar (anywhere and everywhere)
12. And once in a great while actually contributing something to the discussion (hey, a SNR of 1/1000 isn't bad.. oh wait, yes it is.)

Jorgie

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[TheNetAvenger]

Part of the WMF handling is in Win32K in current Windows versions, so it is in ring 0

WMF handling has been in the API of the OS since Win32 was designed. (i.e. it has always been able to inherently draw a WMF to any surface.)

However, this is not Ring 0, not even Ring 0 if you consider the Win32 Kernel as Ring 0, and in NT(XP,Win2k,2003), the Win32 Kernel is far from Ring 0 being in its own subsystem sitting above NT itself.

Just clearing up what you were saying in your post, trying not to nit pick too much...

Ok...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

How old is the veal?

Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture

Don your gas masks.

Re:Windows becoming more like Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you do have a point regarding advantages of creating a new architecture. However, time was on UNIX' side in the sense that there was a lot more time spent designing the system for real workloads. Designing a new system doesn't have this advantage. Again, it is a matter of balancing advantages/limitation. I think M$ went the wrong route way too many times though.

Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore

[tjstork]

The thing that irritates me about the tone of Microsoft is that they still live in this world where they spin everything they do as amazing and its just not any more. Computers aren't "amazing" anymore. Operating systems and things like Windows does, even if new, don't have the same impact as the basic innovations of GUI displays did in 1992. The amazing stuff that is happening is, um, usually at Google.

Re:Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a break. Google spins just as hard as Microsoft does, the only difference is that they're much better at it these days.

Re:Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore

[Keeper]

And what has Google done that is so amazing? All they've implemented is a glorified "edit->find". There was that email thing that ... has more storage than their compeditors. Hmmm ... well, there was that map thing ... that is like all the other mapping services. Froogle? Wait, that is pretty much like pricewatch.com ... Google news? Nope, just another news aggregation website.

I wonder if Google will ever do something that doesn't involve sticking a search engine on top of some existing technology. /sarcasm off

The stuff is amazing because it is mind boggling hard, not because it is a gigantic leap. The easy problems in computer science are done. You aren't going to see fantastic leaps like you did when the industry was still in its infancy.

Re:Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore

[Frizzle Fry]

Just because something isn't amazing to you doesn't mean it isn't amazing to other people, you self-centered asshat.

Re:Windows becoming more like Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to say UNIX's design is great, or that Windows' is horrible, but...

UNIX is great in many ways, but by definition, when you adhere to a base operational specification, you are limiting yourself, no matter how good it is.

Really? So if you build a system on Intel processors, you're limiting yourself to the x86 spec? Well, I suppose that's true, but you're probably not limiting yourself *that* much. Similarly, once you get above the kernel level, it doesn't matter all *that* much if it's using fork() or CreateProcess() underneath. That's what abstractions are for (though some of my coworkers don't seem to understand them).

Remember, too, that "UNIX" is more than just a specification. It's a culture: a culture of experimentation and change. The first systems called "UNIX" didn't have most of the features that we today think of as "UNIX". For example, pipes. Yes, there was a system called "UNIX" that had no pipes. Trippy, eh?

The UNIX philosophy consists of principles like "Write programs to work together" that have scaled remarkably well (it's hard to imagine that one ever becoming obsolete). The UNIX philosophy is more important than any single feature of UNIX -- you can watch the Linux and BSD and Mac folks replace parts of UNIX that don't work, but it's still UNIX.

So rather than UNIX being a "base operational specification" that's "limiting" us, it's a philosophy that continues to guide the design of the system even as it grows far beyond what was ever intended. Think "Space Travel on a PDP-7" to "Mac OS X", and you'll see how far these principles have held up.

Of course, for the reasons I mentioned above, in the long run it doesn't necessarily matter what kernel you're using, any more than it matters what CPU you're using.

Huh?

[EmagGeek]

Windows Vista kernel has architecture? Since when? I thought the windows kernel was just a bunch of amateurish spaghetti code... you'd think so anyway since you need 2GB of memory just to boot it.

I designed the registry

[the ed menace]

...I'll put on the asbestos underwear for this post...

In 1990 at Microsoft there were several requirements that drove the registry. The number of third party applications and application writers was growing very fast. Making this worse, a new object system was on the horizon which could dramatically increase the number of independently-authored "components" that needed to be registered. There was a need to store state in a segregated manner so that apps wouldn't stomp on other app's information. Also there was a "new" notion of remote manageability for the objects, so the access method should be easily remotable early in the boot process. Also the OS needed a place to store lots of very small data items.

It would have been best to use the file system, but the file system at that time was FAT which could not store small data items efficiently. The registry was the first API common between Windows 3 and OS/2 (and also NT), which was a goal at the time. Of course it quickly went out of control, since there was no rational security or ownership model. The registry was kept very very simple in order to maximize the likelihood that the next file system (either the object file system or NTFS) would be able to implement it, including in the NT kernel (which had a very simple API model). It was also the first API from Microsoft that had unused parameters for future features, such as context ids for security, query features, and other stuff. Unfortunately much of that didn't work as planned since very few applications paid attention to the requirement to set them to 0L!

I didn't expect it to be so massively overused, nor for it to survive beyond Windows 3.x. It was supposed to be superceded by an object file system (that was designed and implemented several times, but never released.)

There's a good story behind the registry, though: I designed the registry while on a bachelor party for a friend, mostly on a car ride between San Diego and Las Vegas, and faxed in the design from Las Vegas the morning after the party to the responsible program manager. Which might explain much about the design... ;-)

As the MS hype machine gears up....

[Joce640k]

Will they recycle the stuff they told us about Windows XP ("The most secure OS ever") or will be be new material.

But seriously: You should expect a whole lot more of this "Windows Vista" coverage in the next few months. Note that none Of it will be negative and none of it will mention the features which should have made it in if Microsoft actually paid any attention to people outside their payroll.

Re:As the MS hype machine gears up....

[Manitcor]

actually its a quite candid interview and they even take pot shots at quite a few things they realize they could have done better in previous versions as well as covering quite a few of the major reasons for system instability and bloat of past code.

blue screen of death?

[ebooborg]

i found the video quite interesting,

these lads are not he marketing types they are software engineers, u can see it by the way they communicate.

the memory management and the hardware error catchin sounded good,
so indirectly they trying to tell us that they working on showing meaningfull error messages not the dreaded blue screen that i still get due to bad third party drivers on my laptop

Re:blue screen of death?

[Hasai]

....they trying to tell us that they working on showing meaningfull error messages not the dreaded blue screen that i still get due to bad third party drivers on my laptop

....And the reason you get the "dreaded blue screen" is because on NT4 and later they moved those "bad third party drivers" up to Ring 0, where any hiccup will bring down the whole machine, all so they could show that NT4 was just a wee bit faster than 3.51. Of course a big chunk of stability went flying out the window, but hey; lusers are dumb, right, Microsoft?

I yam a german -- don't shoot me

[Anonymous Coward]

What about "boxen"

My God

[segedunum]

This shows just how far they are behind. They've now discovered modularity, dependencies and running stuff in user mode, and they think it's the second coming? The stuff on page files will have the Linux and BSD people rolling in the aisles.

vista

[luminoso]

marketing... ...

I don't understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Microsoft kept GetPrivateProfileString/WritePrivateProfileString (the INI functions) in System32.dll as far forward as 2000 (haven't checked XP yet), why aren't people who hate the registry using it instead? That's what I've been doing for years...or was it actually deprecated in XP/Vista and I haven't found out yet?

Re: I don't understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that you had to write to the registry to get the "Supports Windows XP" label on your software.

Re: I don't understand...

[klui]

Because Microsoft says "Note This function is provided only for compatibility with 16-bit Windows-based applications. Applications should store initialization information in the registry."

I bailed because of the registry

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations - the registry is what drove me to a Macintosh a few years ago.

I had a Windows box with a registry that was so large it couldn't be handled by the system image preservation tool (name forgotten, happily.)
One day something corrupted the registry, and an expert pal said it was hopeless and time to start over.

I did, but with the more robust MacOS X. Thanks!

OT: Sig

[LordMyren]

If The Register is the National Inqurirer, what is The Inquirer?

OTOH, their useful post count has rapidly converged on zero. They were the next one off the RSS reader island anywho...

Re:OT: Sig

[Matt Perry]

If The Register is the National Inqurirer, what is The Inquirer?

I haven't read enough of the Inquirer to form an opinion yet. But the Register is most definitely an IT gossip rag, thanks in no small part to that terrible writer Andrew Orlowski.

On the Office

[LordMyren]

Just doing something different is not innovation, thats differentiation. Innovation involves a certain level of enhancement as well. And I'm not seeing where the ribbon actually innovates.

Most people have no problem knowing where the icons they use and want are. Making them bigger and smaller with use and resizing and reorganizing the toolbars will be nothing but an annoyance.

If its any good, I expect it to be replicated. I really dont think you'll see many other apps doing likewise. Toolbars work fine, thanks much.

Myren

Toolbars don't work... sometimes.

[AnEmbodiedMind]

If its any good, I expect it to be replicated. I really dont think you'll see many other apps doing likewise. Toolbars work fine, thanks much.

No they don't - sometimes.
In the case of office they have so many features that there are over 30 toolbars, and many of the newer features weren't even being included in the toolbars because they were becoming too overloaded.

The ribbon is an attempt to hierarchically deal with that chaos - for a program with very rich, very deep functionality.

Also, standard toolbars are very small, and often contain a large number of farly arbitrary symbols which most users don't understand. The ribbon is designed to scale, so that when possible (most of the time) it displays labels.

Also, with 30 toolbars, you can't keep them all within easy access on the screen because you have no screen space left for your document view. The ribbon provides a way to navigate the new replacement for "toolbars / menus"

Finally, the ribbon also allows live previewing of results in your document breaking the 'menu-select-apply-check results' cycle that can be a huge pain in the ass.

The OS X implementation of toolbars is pretty good, but won't scale well. Great for simple apps though.

Of course you might reply that e.g.. MS Word has too many features. Well for some people that is probably true - stick with Office 97.

On the other hand, the ribbon (in testing) is letting people find functionality they wanted, but never knew was there.

Watch some of the demo's of the Ribbon. It is working towards solving some very real problems that cannot be solved with toolbars. Sounds like innovation to me, but time will tell if it really works well.

Re:Toolbars don't work... sometimes.

[LordMyren]

I'll have to look for the demos. I wasnt aware of heirarchy. I thought it was just a size scaling replacement for toolbars. Helping people find stuff is defiantely important.

Anyways, we all know screen editing is the one true path, right? ;-]

Darryl?

[G3ckoG33k]

Darryl Havens, is that you?

lies.

[Anonymous Coward]

it works on my mac

Stupid WMV

[aliquis]

I just wanna complain about the stupid video choice (I know it's not your fault and the url seems to point to microsoft so it's quite obvious), but please, no more wmv-links on slashdot? Do you listen everyone?

(atleast rip it to a better format... (no way i'm propusing that!))

Totally off topic but...

[aug24]

...your entire post is interesting and I'm enjoying it, then you go and use the phrase 'very real' which so far I have only ever heard used by marketeers and politicians, who don't seem to understand that there just can't be a 'partially real' problem ;-)

Other than that, convincing, ta. I shall go and find a demo of The Ribbon.

Cheers,
Justin.

They let slip something they shouldn't have...

[jonadab]

This one really got my attention. Rich Neeves is talking here, but I think from what is said just before this in the interview that it's something Rob Short wanted him to talk about. In any case, the problem isn't directly with what's said here, but what it implies:

> And, one of those technologies is something that Microsoft has
> had in its back pocket for several years now, which is technology
> from research that allows us to analyze binaries and understand
> their dependencies.

Okay, right, so you can take another company's application and analyze what parts of Windows it depends on, right? Sure. Except, that's apparently not why they want it...

> So this means, this is very significant because it means we can
> look at compiled, engineered code, the binary, and determine what
> are the functional, and then of course, binary, dependencies on
> other binaries, even if it's dynamic dependencies. So for example,
> we can look at a binary, and the tools that we have allow us to
> do data flow analysis [...] not as it's executing, but analyze
> it statically, and find that, oh, this has a COM dependency on
> this other GUID over here, or class ID, or we have a load library
> dependency on this function name in this binary. So we can find
> what nobody thought that we could be able to find, before,
> very very ... pretty accurately.

Wait, hold it. He said, "we have a ... dependency". He's talking about analyzing Microsoft's own product with this, finding things out about dependencies within Windows by analyzing the binaries. Looking at the broader context in which he made this statement, it's even more clear that he is, in fact, talking about analyzing Windows itself in this way.

Does that seem strange to anyone else? To me, it implies that the architecture team, at Microsoft, in charge of the architecture of the kernel for future versions of Windows, does not have access to the source code for Windows. Well, they might have access to certain parts of the source code, but they don't have it all; if they did, they could analyze the dependencies in the source code, which ought to be both easier and more accurate than analyzing dependencies in binaries. He's excited about being able to analyze the dependencies within Windows "pretty accurately" based on this binary-analysis software, the owner of which would "get mad if I claimed a percentage" of accuracy. This guy is one of the six core members of the architecture team working directly for a VP, and he's excited about this, which I suppose means the VP leading the architecture team probably doesn't even have access to the source code for all of Windows. (Maybe nobody does; maybe each little team keeps its own source code private... maybe even over the years some little parts of the source here or there have been entirely lost, as nobody knows which employee had them.)

This, this is why Vista is going to ship in 2008 or so, rather than in 2002 or so as was originally planned when Longhorn was conceived as an interim release on the way to Blackcomb. No wonder they're late; they probably had to rewrite practically the whole kernel, so they'd have code that didn't depend on code they don't have! They definitely should not have let this gem slip out. Now we can confidently predict that the next big release after Vista will be several years late too, and Microsoft definitely didn't want us to know that. The marketing department is going to wish this interview never happened.

Re:They let slip something they shouldn't have...

[platypus]

Maybe it's easier and more reliable to analyze the binaries of a complete built.
Let's say they have legacy binaries leftover from NT 4 or 98 or whatever, which,
during development of newer windows versions, got ported by inserting conditional
compile-time includes etc.

But I have to say that I still get the same impression as you have, reading the interview
I'm surprised about the huge amount of complexity they have in their system compared
to for instance linux.
For instance it sounds like they have a whole team doing the work of someone
like Ingo Molnar and maybe one or two other developers on linux. And from what
I read, they aren't even ahead of linux concerning this soft RT stuff for multimedia.
The reason might very well be also the huge complexity of the system they are working on.

Re:They let slip something they shouldn't have...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wait, hold it. He said, "we have a ... dependency". He's talking about analyzing Microsoft's own product with this, finding things out about dependencies within Windows by analyzing the binaries. Looking at the broader context in which he made this statement, it's even more clear that he is, in fact, talking about analyzing Windows itself in this way.

Does that seem strange to anyone else? To me, it implies that the architecture team, at Microsoft, in charge of the architecture of the kernel for future versions of Windows, does not have access to the source code for Windows."

Reliably analyzing C/C++ dependencies from source code probably is way more difficult than disassembling binaries. To determine e.g. macro values, or functions called, one will have to do preprocessing of the sources in exactly the same way the stuff gets compiled. It is safe to guesstimate that not all Windows code uses the same compiler settings.

I also think that looking at the shipping binaries is the best way to guarantee that programmers do not secretly work around component boundary problems.

Re:"Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture!

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

pr0n?

What kind of English word is that? Does the true word, porn, scare you that much?

Re:Where is the news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a pleonasm (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pleonasm ) if you insist on using fancy word ;)