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60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten
Alien54 writes "Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems, according to this report. In an effort to meet a deadline of the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas Microsoft has pulled programmers from the highly succesful Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. Much more at the link."
Am I the only one who thinks that things like media and entertainment should not be core parts of an OS, but rather should be handled by applications that run on the OS? We're not buying a television, after all.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I remember reading a good portion of their Rapid Application Development book. I sometimes wonder when I read these articles if they have read it themselves. The main rule in that book is to not set unrealistic goals. I remember hearing the first time about Vista that it might not be out until 2007. I think they should have stuck with that as their original goal. Dropping off features just to make a 2006 rush made them reset their programming team's focus too many times. The cost? Time. I realize that an operating system is not the easiest program in the world, but this is Microsoft. They have existing code to choose from, they have programming geniuses at their finger steps, and they were SUPPOSED to have an idea how to program efficiently according to that book with the Microsoft name on it. Lesson for Microsoft: take your own advice and use it!
My next computer will be a Mac. XP is the last version for me.
I have been installing and testing Vista since the early betas. To the last one, build 5308. I have seen things getting better all along the way, from better graphics, speed and more reliability. It looked like a mess earlier, but then they cut features and made schedules more realistic.
Build 5308 is feature complete, and has not crashed even once. It supports all the devices on my machine. Now why the hell would they rewrite 60% of a perfectly well running system??? Microsoft has said that most of the work remaining is related to security and performance. I trust them, because I have seen it.
I read the article, I could not find the source of this information. The memo that was included does not speak about this 60% figure. They have not mentioned any other sources. Now why is this making news!!!??
Life is just a conviction.
1. Internet Explorer 7 still has major security issues that plague Internet Explorer 6
.NET tools in developing bundled applications that will ship with Vista, instead opting for lower level languages that are more suspectible to security issues.
.. oh wait, we don't have updates because we are delaying ALL of our major products..)
2. Microsoft Office is delayed
3. Vista is delayed.
4. Microsoft restructures the Windows division before a major OS release
5. Daniel Lyons from Forbes is underwhelmed with the Vista presentation and finds it complex and of little added value.
6. Microsoft elected not to utilize its
7. Throughout all of this, the security team at Microsoft decided to school Apple on security (I wonder if no one at Microsoft was paying attention?)
8. Businesses sold on the "Software Assurance" and other licensing gimmicks are getting very aggervated at was could be considered bait-and-switch (get SA, get updates
9. There is the possibility of major rewrites to Vista (though until it is confirmed by another source, I'll take it with a grain of salt..).
Interesting.
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." --Frederick Brooks
... there are big ol' grammar errors and typos, three in the same paragraph. I haven't even looked through the rest of the article to find more.
"Microsoft has also admitted that it has major problems in it's Windows division and has has immediatly initiated a total restructure of the division, a move that comes after a costly delay in rolling out its Vista program."
This would me MS's second try at a sucessor to the NT/2K/XP legacy. Best of luck - I'd rather see it late with the usual problems than 'ontime' and hopelessly broken.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Mini-MSFT wrote an extensive rant about why the Microsoft execs should be fired, and more interesting are the readers' responses.
Clearly. This was supposed to have been Longhorn by now, wasn't it?
They've been announcing later release dates, fewer features, delays in their Office suite, and god knows what else.
When a critical security bug is found in IE6, and then immediately found in the supposedly completely redesigned IE7, it gives one pause for concern.
It is beiginning to seem that Microsoft is becoming a victim of their own intertia. They built a huge, overly complicated beast, based entirely off proprietary technologies of dubious value. They've been promising the moon for years, and now they're starting to promise the next county because the moon is unobtainable.
I asked this yesterday in another thread, but I never got an answer
Certainly all of those shiny Longhorn features they touted have been dropped from it. It sounds like it's a minor evolutionary upgrade to Windows at best. Hardly the Earth shattering, Next New Thing they've touted it as being.
And in the mean time, people might just decide to buy a Mac.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Apple could thrust one hell of a spear into the beast by releasing osx on standard intel now or very quickly. Yes it would be a frigging bold move but sometimes it takes a bold move when you want to make all the bucks. Yes of course drivers would be a big issue but I think that is a problem that could be solved also.
Got Code?
"A good book and it discusses how adding MORE programmers to a task means the project will take LONGER to complete."
You got it wrong. The book says adding more programmers to a task will not increase development speed at an equal ratio. If you have 10 developers working on something that might take a year to complete adding another 10 developers WILL NOT mean that it will now take 6 months to complete - it might now take 10 months to complete - but it sure as hell will not make it longer.
Windows 95 was the start of the tree.. many of you put down 98 gold but it was better than 95 was. 98 SE was better sometimes, but the "support" for IRQ's managing themselves caused me a lot of headaches with soundblaster 64 cards, via chipsets and ati rage graphics! Aside from Windows ME, every Windows release since 95 got better in my opinion. 95, NT4, 98, 98se, Windows 2000, Windows ME (sucked), Windows XP...
.NET 2 runs on both so you can imagine that an app may run on both. Thats how microsoft keeps going. If you hate it so much, start running another os exclusively, write software to replace everything windows has and maybe you'll get lucky. Lets face it, Linux is missing some key software areas like Tax Preperation software (finance in general), games, Itunes compatible players (even if its illegal in US), etc. End users need to migrate what they use over to a new os and if they can't, they won't switch. The Windows to Mac transition is easier but has its own problems. You can get quicken, and WoW runs fine, but if you use rhapsody, ms access, .NET apps, etc you're in for a rough ride. I'm also a mac user and I'm never able to ditch windows because I like to game, write software and websites. I need to test websites in IE, I actually like to code in .NET, and games like Half life, DODS, CSS, most star trek games, and many old games only run in windows. As long as we need windows, consumers will want it.
Of course Vista will suck, they are messing with the kernel. XP was not a huge difference from Windows 2000 and so we're use to a "stable" release of windows (for windows anyway). I'll probably adopt Vista anyway when its released on my Windows machine with a dual boot or legacy install of XP so I can still game. Most likely everyone else will adopt vista as well. Which means we are stuck with it anyway. As much as most of us wish for Linux, OSX or something else to replace windows, its not happening on the desktop. Even keeping an old version of windows, helps keep windows strong. Why? Software will still be written for XP and Vista anyway.
In terms of stable, you need to define a baseline. I'm sure Vista will run better than Mac OS 9 ever did. It will run better than Windows 3.1 did and certainly better than 95 ever did. The standard is at least what people can remember and right now that means XP, 2000, ME, Linux 2.2-2.6, Mac OS 10.0-10.4. My opinion is that all operating systems suck right now. Read the changelog for the latest linux kernel.. time went backwards for christ sake! FreeBSD 6.1 beta's todo list is scary and most of those terrible bugs go back to at least 5.3. Mac OS 10.4 is a piece of shit even release. (all even releases of OS X are less stable than odd releases and often introduce more features) I've had to reinstall OS X several times on my laptop since it came out and on machines at work that I have to administer. People expect bugs. They don't expect blue screens anymore, but serious bugs are ok. Lets all raise our standards and then we can expect more!
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Yes, we are but I wish it was because of Windows, not despite Windows. The fact of the matter is, there are a lot of brilliant people producing commercial software - most of them not employed at Microsoft. Since my job now includes a Windows-only reporting tool, I could not get my work done without Windows. Even if I could, I'd have trouble collaborating with everyone else that was using Outlook/MS Office. If we're talking about an organization-wide change, there'd be a thousand little hooks to the MS platform - my job being one of them. Would I care if I could just open it in OS X or Linux (haven't tested how WINE handles it but no point)? There's not a single feature I'd miss from Windows. I haven't seen one I need in Vista.
The three biggest hooks I see are Exchange, Excel and Exceptions (yes, I made that up to fit the pattern). Exceptions are those kinds of odd Windows-only apps that you would never get around to cloning. I can't number all the Exchange killers that just don't live up to the hype. OpenOffice and KOffice don't match Excel, and half the issue is a ton of existing smart formulas/marcos/system of interlocking spreadsheets. The last you probably need to emulate with WINE. On the home front it's a system by geeks, for geeks because almost all of the upstream projects are that way. The distros try to polish but they can't change the deeper structures. Granted, some things are just clunky and both average people and geeks want to get rid of, but on the whole I don't think they seek the same solution.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've heard that MS is putting a lot of effort into the idea of running all applications as normal, restricted users. Up til now, many legacy (and not-so-legacy) applications had to be run with power user or adminstratrator on XP because they expected to be able to write to Program Files or even to the windows system directory. I understand that Vista will have a very sophisticated virtual file system layer (talk about a kludge) that will virtualize some of these areas of the disk for these bad applications so that they can still function. The app will think it is writing to the windows sytem directory or the Program Files area when if fact it is not. On one hand this seems to me to be a pretty brilliant solution to the crappy legacy app problem, but on the other hand seems to be a horrible hack.
How about they just use a working kernel like say linux, something from a bsd, etc.
Generally speaking, the Windows NT Kernel is a superb piece of code. The problems come in when Microsoft abuses the kernel rather than working with it. The fact that everything runs with Administrator permissions (because all the users run as administrators) is not the original intent of the kernel. Windows Terminal Server Systems tend to be a little more on track, as they default deny administrator privleges to regular users. Unfortunately, they also feel extremely unweildly due to the lack of SUDO-type permission elevation, and the fact that individual desktops are only partly separated from each other. (e.g. Installing new programs is often just as hard as on Unix X Sessions. Many programs don't allow you to install for only one user.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
As someone who works on Windows Media Center for Vista, I can certainly say that we're not rewriting a bunch of code. I'm using MCE for Vista on my living room PC right now.
Now, I must preface this with the disclaimer that I myself prefer operating systems other than Windows. However, this is not an attempt to flame; by all means use what works best for you.
With that said, did anyone actually read the entirety of the article?
To be fair to Microsoft, this article was more than slightly misleading - and for that matter, contains little information relevant to its headline. The only mention about rewriting two thirds of Vista's codebase is in the headline and in the subheading that directly follows it. Whether informed by "an insider at Microsoft" or otherwise, there is simply not enough solid information to comment upon, let alone fill an entire slashdot thread with baseless conjecture.
We're all hoping for an improved operating system from Microsoft. God knows it would make my job many magnitudes easier without having to deal with the joys of insecure machines.
But please, withhold judgement until we receive a finished product.
Reading in between the lines ( and reading TFA ), it looks like a lot of the code has to do with Media ( big M ) and DRM issues. Bring in guys from the Xbox team... gee, what does Vista support that's changed recently ? Something about HD-DVD encryption sounds familiar. And yea, 'rewrite' might be an extreme spin on what's going to go down, but what kind of stuff tends to touch many points of code ? Security, DRM, encryption... oh, and the whole recently-talked-about IE-separate-from-OS thing, that might play a part in all of this as well, and just by looking at functionality you can probably think of places where HTML rendering and other IE-related functionality needs to be available to the system.
So it's probably less an issue of legacy v.s. new, and more an issue of several sets of changes that touch a lot of parts of the code, adding up to a large percentage needing fairly extensive changes and full testing. Just a guess, of course.
help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS
The way I read this, 60% of the code that implements the entertainment and media centre functionality needs a rewrite --- not 60% of Vista. This is much more consistent with the fact that the Vista Business Edition (whatever MS is actually calling it) is still on schedule to release this year. With this interpretation, 60% does not seem totally out of line. Heck, I'd vote for re-writing 100% of media Player if it was up to me!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I wonder if all this negative press will affect their stock price [yahoo.com] in trading today
Not as much as if Vista was released and immediately barfed and/or succumbed to massive virus infection out of the box...
If I were waiting on Vista I'd be annoyed that it wasn't out, but then if I was such as big MS Software user then XP would still likely be doing ok for me, although lacking improved 64-bit/dual-core support. If I got a bunch of Vista machines that immediately started crashing or were infected in the new few weeks, I'd be a lot more pissed than annoyed.
I'd say taking the time to fix things is not a bad plan, and 60% sounds like BS to me. As the article seems to focus a lot on multimedia components it could be that 60% of the multimedia core needs revamping.
David Cutler (project lead for DEC VMS and RSX11) walked out of DEC when management canceled the x86 VMS port.
It wasn't an x86 port. It was a brand new RISC architecture with a complex new version of VMS. The project was called Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine, or PRISM for short.
Supposedly he took the VMS (PRISM) source with him
Actually, it was slightly less illegal than that. Cutler took his entire team with him as a condition for working for Microsoft. They then proceded to redo much of the software work they'd done on PRISM. As you mentioned previously, Digital sued, but ended up settling on the condition that Windows NT be ported to the Alpha. (Fat lot of good that did.)
it was adapted to run DOS and OS/2 applications
I forget the exact terminology, but the kernel has pluggable "personalities" that allow it to function with different user modes attached. There is a decent Wikipedia article on its architecture.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade