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Why Windows is Slow
hype7 writes "The New York Times is running an article on why they think Windows is so slow. They boil it down to one key factor - legacy support - and they hold up Apple as an example of a company willing to make hard decisions around legacy support in order to provide a better product. From the article: 'Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down ... That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.'"
We saw this just a few hours ago.
Wow, good things the New York Times is there to tell us what is wrong with it. After all, I am sure they have direct access to the source code.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
I'd have had first post if windows wasn't so slow. :-(
This article was in a link in an article from yesterday!
-Sj53
Interestingly, I've found Apple to be very willing to integrate backwards and forwards support in their OS. In the transition from 680X0 to PPC, Apple made sure to include some very clever programming that allowed a native and non-native apps to co-exist. In the transition to OS X from Classic, they included Classic as a virtual environment and in the transition from PPC to Intel, they are working very hard on Rosetta, another environment that preserves people's investment in their software.
In contrast, I've had a fairly difficult time getting older software on Windows to even run sometimes. We kept a Win95 box around for the longest time because of some very specific software we needed that would not run on anything else.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
So this kind of stuff will make Windows faster? =P From the article: "In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and "widgets," an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps."
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
the many unneeded software one ironically has to run along with windows: ...
- antivirus software
- antispy software
Steve Jobs made the decision to move to a robust, open framework, using the a MACH kernel.
While it may have broken some legacy applications, they can still run under emulation - all new applications run much faster then their windows counterparts.
Its about time Bill Gates realised Vista is fundamentally broken, copy Apple (again) and port the win32 API over to *BSD.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Let the flames begin.
Windows Vista is coming out as a 're-write' of the code, but I don't believe they are recoding the real legacy parts of the Windows code. I think Microsoft needs to do away with native legacy support like Apple did, but keep it around with emulation. If WINE can reverse engineer the Windows layer, than why can't Microsoft, with access to the source?
--sig fault--
But this doesn't seem to do anything to address the core Windows problem; Windows is too big and too complex
Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP ProfessionalPC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space
Mac OS X Version 10.4 requires a Macintosh with:
PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
At least 256MB of physical RAM
At least 3.0 GB of available space on your hard drive; 4GB of disk space if you install XCode 2 developer tools
Nice try, but Apple and Linux have far more complex operating systems that don't slow to a crawl every time you click a mouse.
And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one
They fail to mention that their use of the word "software" only applies to M$ products. Legacy support for other applications is still as flawed as it is on any OS. Either way, Apple does come out with universal binaries and Rosetta support to solve these issues. Also, Apple lets you run OS X in "Classic Mode" as long as you have OS 9 installed in order to support legacy apps.I personally think Windows' biggest flaw is its file paging. Its done so poorly that it'll eat up your memory in a flash. Then you're sitting there for 2 minutes listening to your hard drive going crazy trying to copy it all.
And that is an excellent graphic in the article of a very confused Gates.
--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Can we ban together and just refuse to comment on duplicate articles? I was hoping that the NY Times ran two similar articles in two days. Why hope.....
Slashdot is like a drug. I complain and want to quit, but I keep coming back. (I'm sure you more creative types out there can come up with a better analogy)
The issue is deeper: OS X was designed to make the best operating system possible for users. Windows was designed to be the best operating system possible for extending Microsoft's monopoly. And the horrific problems plaguing Windows (the Registry, gaping security holes, malware, etc.) are all a reflection of the resulting fundamental design flaws.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
They emulate a part of their os because it was developed for a different cpu
Ubuntu definitely ran more quickly for me than my XP machine. Not sure where you're getting that. In fact -- I've hardly ever seen an XP machine that runs 'great'. I remember when we upgraded our windows 98 machine -- it ran amazing 650 Mhz, 128 mb RAM -- I've never seen an XP machine run as quickly as that 98 machine of mine. (Not saying it can't happen -- it's just rare.) And christ -- have you seen most manufacturer basic loads? Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. machines are frequently nearly unusuable right out of the box, because of the garbage programs that come out of the box. In fact, currently my G4 Powerbook runs (1.5 Ghz) runs more quickly than my 2 Ghz Dell with windows XP.
Is this not the reason why cpu's are also slow and expensive (compared to gpu's)
Don't they have to replicate "faults" and less efficient designs found in earlier x86 chips to retain compatibiity?
I read this somewhere, nay not be accurate.
well, try installting a year 2000 distribution on the stated hardware... works pretty fast doesn't it?
Boot time again, try to compare hybernation not boottime. http://www.suspend2.net/ for Linux...
I mean: apples and oranges anyone?
firstly i think the same could be said of pc hardware - we are still limited to the pc architecture designed decades ago, noone is willing to go out on a limb and produce truly flexible hardware given that it simply won't work with anything else. This is partly the reason why games consoles can put out much more power than an equivilent pc - they can be designed from ground up to be super-efficient without any legacy concerns at all (obviously the fact their hardware never varies makes it easier to code things more close to the steel)
secondly, i wonder whether it's not microsoft being obsessed with legacy support, more that they don't want to spend $$$ on getting windows developers to root through the code and take it out. They simply carry legacy support through windows versions as they're always working from the same base. As always with ms it's $$$ >> quality. I'm sure a lot of their coders get irritated with legacy issues..
Insightful? I have a P2 350 with 128 MB RAM running the latest Debian, and another with the same specs running Core4. Both are more responsive than my 1.5 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM when it's running Windows.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
I have never gotten Ubuntu running significantly faster than XP. On my slow system it runs just as badly, if not worse. Xubuntu (Xfce4) works an absolute treat though, although I since started experimenting on the system and it's not there any more.
The article made much of how many million lines of code are in XP and how many will be in Vista. At one point the authors state that OS X has roughly as many lines of code as XP, but the programmers made better choices and didn't have to support legacy hardware, so OS X is a better operating system. Does anyone have authoritative information on how many lines of code are in XP, OS X, and some Linux distro respectively?
it has to support.
Maybe Windows is slow because it allows programs to load themselves up in the background. When someone comes to me and complains their computer is slow, the first thing I do is put on MSCONFIG and uncheck the the startup of the hundreds of programs they have running in the background all the time. Buy a computer from Dell and it'll come with at least five or six of these "always on" programs sitting next to the clock.
Windows letting programs do this is gumming up the works. Windows programmers don't think about it because they're techie enough to keep their taskbars clean, but the average user is running litterally like twenty programs all the time that they don'at actually use more than once a week.
Firstly, windows is not that slow... OS X takes longer to boot on my MacBook Pro than XP does... Quake3 UB runs slower on my MacBook Pro than on my old DELL notebook. When it comes down to it, the more eye-candy, the slower the machine... that's a trade I'm wikking to make with CPU cycles to burn...
:)
Secondly, legacy support is a sign of success. MS's Office 2004 on Mac is quite a nice program, mostly because they don't have much government users and thus little legacy support. MS's products need to be stable as MS cater for a huge amount of relatively computer illeterate users who cannot handle change.
The difference is that lately most OS X binaries are going to get more and more bloated with the UB support being added. So soon you will see a new type of problem on OS X... until then, sure things are just peachy.
Apple closed its standards so it can of course not have to be backward compatible.
And of course lets not forget that windows has software that is actually worth being backward compatible with. There's a few reasons a mac version of a game or program takes a few years to to be written from when it was released to the PC.
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
Why there are so many dupes in /.
The only really successful microprocessor companies have made their processor architectures backwards compatible. DEC tried to innovate with the Alpha Architecture, but the departure from VAX eventually put the nail in the coffin. If you look at PowerPC (68000 family replacement) and Itanium (attempted X86 replacement), they never really took off as intended.
On the otherhand, the success of X86 processors may be tied directly to Microsoft. And now even Apple has folded in the face of X86. Despite all its backwards compatability warts, it still manages to perform quite well. Maybe Microsoft can learn something here.
And just to be a stick in the mud, Apple's current success isn't really based on its operating system.
As long as we're comparing windows to linux, lets do it properly. Windows 2000 looks and has the functionality of Sawfish or equivalents. Even XP is the same functionality, mind you it looks a little smoother. Comparing Win2k/xp to Gnome or even worse, to KDE is your first mistake. Also when you install windows, you get windows, it shouldn't take up that much space at all. If you install just Linux, with X, Sawfish, an editor, GAIM, a Calculator, then you basically get what you get when you install windows. Default install of most linux distros include about 100 programs, which is nice, but shouldn't be used when comparing windows and linux install size. As far as hibernation goes, Linux doesn't have to be rebooted, and can stay running for days. I use XP at work, and I shut down every night. If I don't then I know i'll run into bugs like everyone else at work that refuses to shut down their machine, After 3 or 4 days, weird things always start happening.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Please tell me more about the great services/products that your company offers!
RTFA -- the article is about why Windows' Vista development and Office development is slow, not why Windows XP runs slowly.
And don't support legacy hardware or code base !
The problem is elsewhere !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I can run 10 year old binaries yet my system is no slower.
Maybe this is why Vista is taking so long to come out. They are programming it in Windows.
Windows is just so slow because all the virus protection sucks so much CPU and disk performance. When a scan is running halve the performance is lost. When a file is written you have to wait several seconds. Whenever the virus protection thinks it has to work anything the workstation slows to a crawl. I really would like to switch to Linux just because of a better protection, if only the applications there would be better usable (see http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index.h tml).
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
The old new thing, describes some of the hacks win32 uses to stay compatible with badly written applications. Things like dummy events, hidden windows, duplicate event stacks, etc.
Your Debian system performing a different function from your Windows system runs differently?
Nooooo. I'd have never guessed.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
I'm not a fanboy of any OS - I spend 90% of my time in xterms in WindowMaker on Linux writing C code. But I have a Mac Mini and I have to say, launching programs and navigating through menus on the Mac is slow. There's a 500ms+ delay between the time you click on something and get a result. Actually I think there's something wrong with the eventloop of the UI. Hopefully it's something they can fix. But launching programs is pretty slow too. At least I perceive it as slow compared to Windows.
Come on mods, you can't mod something as 'troll' just because you disagree with it, that's not what 'troll' is for!
I use Win2K on my laptop (servers run linux - keeping windows away from them!) and I have absolutely no problem with it's speed.
Yes, I'm using 2K not XP. XP, I do find slow. Not in it's actual "doing stuff" speed, but the fact that you get so many "are you sure?" warnings and "yes, really / um, maybe not" dialog boxes, that it slows things right down.
And most of the time, on equal hardware, windows DOES feel more responsive than a linux desktop. Of cause, IRQ/threading issues can mean that a windows machine may seem to be slowed down greater when using slower devices (eg, getting something from CD/network/USB etc in an explorer window can mean you lose responsiveness of the whole taskbar/start menu), but at the same time, windows seems to handle losing a mounted network share much better than linux (in mine and by the sounds of it, many others experience).
The gap's certainly closing from both sides performance wise... if you want to have a go at how slow Windows is, let's all point at it's development/release time. Lagacy support, it's huge codebase etc, all play a role here.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
There is something wrong with your XP machine if you NEED to shut it down every night. I use XP at work too and never shut down my machine. The only time I need to restart it is when I install programs that need to change something that is already running and as it does not happen so often, I'm sure there has been periods over months that I have not restarted or turned off my XP machine. It is my second computer at work and the fifth year that I'm running XP (used 2000 before that) without turning my machine off during the nights. Guess SETI is very happy with me :)
This is also the same reason that Windows is currently more popular than Mac OS.
As we move forward and more (business) software is written as thin client applications the requirement for a particular OS is greatly reduced. At that point Microsoft is eventually going to have to put out a product that no longer supports legacy software and hardware in order to compete with operating systems like Mac OS.
They hold up Apple as an example of a company willing to make hard decisions around legacy support in order to provide a better product.
It's easier to make hard decisions such as these, when there is only a small number of people using the legacy products & a even smaller number who aren't willing to upgrade.
Plus, IMHO, amongst corporate users, I think much smaller percentage of companies
have custom apps running on the Apple Machines.
This is why distrobutions like DSL and vector (vector less recently) are good, they challenge the "Hey lets put everything on there" attitude.
Yes, I have to agree. Development work on a windows box will kill it.
(who cares when, it will be awesome anyway)
Man, that is a Microsoft Weenie comment if I ever heard one. Didn't Microsoft stock drop over 2.7 percent when they announced that Vista would be late? Someone cares.
As I know that the GP post will be moded really down because of slashdot linux zealots I have to backup his statement, I use Windows XP in my HP Pavillion ZV5000 with 1024 MB of ram and I runs really good, including the Ati 9100 igp the Wifi and the modem. Oh! and the buttons to increase or decrease the volume.
I have not been able to make all those things work with ANY Linux installation out of the box, and I have tried with quite a few including FC4, Ubuntu, Mandriva and SUSE.
Who said only Microsoft could spread FUD!?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
But even stupider responses below illustrating just how many people don't read the article.
Fo those who simply refuse to RTA I will summarize, to wit: the article deals with the pace of Wiindows software releases and the recently announced delay of Vista... not the speed at which the OS loads and executes applications.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Please don't feed the troll!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
And christ -- have you seen most manufacturer basic loads?
I'm a big Linux advocate but this statement is hardly fair since Microsoft isn't the ones adding all of the "crap" to the OS. Also, have you ever loaded up Redhat or Fedora or whatever with what it calls "minimum install" and then gone through to see what it installed? There is over 200-300 meg of crap. ISDN services, modem, etc. Anything installable from the CD shouldn't be on a minimum install by default. Fedora is noticable faster if you go through and remove anything unnecessary.
And before someone says it, Gentoo fixes this and yes I use it. Spending a day emerging KDE wasn't very feasible for a workstation at work though.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
. As far as hibernation goes, Linux doesn't have to be rebooted,
Yeah sure, please tell me were to buy that Tesla coil adaptor for my laptop pleeeeaase, btw, I hope there are Linux drivers available for it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
So you go months without patching or driver updates?
AFAIK, XP requires reboots nearly every patch cycle, and at MOST those are monthly.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I boot my main dev win xp pro maybe once every couple of months. I don't know what errors you're referring to.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Insider deception? Microsoft will drop support for a wider range of drivers and api's...??? that would suck.
Would developers still be able to use them? Or would they just make it harder for dev to implement? No I didn't read the artical, my comment is on the slashdot summary, read my op3ning statement.
I tip toe like rats on vouge runnways.
It's not about windows being "slow" as in "OMG!!! SOLITARE LO4DZORZ ZLOW11!1!111!", but as in "Geepers! The Windows development cycle sure is taking its jolly time!".
...the bulk of your revenue comes from selling iPods and music, not computers or their operating systems.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Strange that I was able to keep my work machine on for a solid month with XP Pro installed and had no problems??
The article's not about how fast Windows runs, it's about how long it's taking MS to develop Vista. Yes, I hate them too, but must everyone be so eager to bash Microsoft products that they can't RTFA?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
Do you think 90% of desktop hardware was born yesterday?
Of course they have to support legacy hardware.
Whoever said it's performing a different function? Sure, the Core4 one is a server, but the Debian box is used for [my] everyday desktop things. Browsing, editing, ssh'ing.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Ok, this is probably one of the biggest mess of haphazard comments I've ever seen on slashdot. I guess this is a good indication of how many people RTFA. This article has _nothing_ to do with the speed of Windows itself, but the time lapse of release cycles. Please mod accordingly!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
First, hibernation in Linux is as necessary as a GUI for a server. At least for me. I couldn't care less about boot time, if that 5 minutes once or twice a year matter to you, your time management does sorely lack efficiency. Sure, if my system required me to reboot it whenever I change a detail in its configuration, startup time would definitly matter to me. But the way it is, rebooting the computer every 2-3 months for good measure or a meditative moment is good for karma, but no necessity.
What matters is responsiveness during work. Sure, if you insist to run the latest Gnome/KDE with all the graphic features and gadgets turned on and offer it only a P2 with 128mb of ram, it grinds to a crawl. So does XP with all the graphics features turned on. So, when you compare Ubuntu with every single graphic goodie on with a stripped-to-the-bones XP, it's like comparing the van version with the ralley version of a car.
What I don't get is where Ubuntu is supposedly using more space than Win2k/XP. Maybe when you add the development tools and other gadgets (aka the "normal install" of a normal Linux distry). But then you're comparing "system-only" on the Windows side with "system+office+devtools+database" on the Linux side. Dunno how it would look like if we add Visual Studio, MS-Office and MSSQL server to the fold...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Too bad you posted as AC - I thought this was great.
;-)
You're absolutely correct - my personal opinion is that if you don't use it at least once a week it has no business in your system tray. Reminds me of the guy who drives around all summer with half a dozen bags of sand in his trunk because he might need them next winter - and then complains about performance
Computing resources are limited resources - the more crap you have running on startup the worse your machine's gonna run. For me the most intrusive (and offensive) of these programs is RealMedia's player. That damn thing puts hooks everywhere.
On legacy hardware - I have a 300MHz Thinkpad i1400 that I rescued from my mother-in-law and replaced the dead 4gb hard drive with a 40gb drive with an 8 mb cache. Increased RAM to 256mb and tried to install no less than seven Linux distributions. I'm comfortable in both Linux and Windows and my mail/web/irc server runs FC4.
Anyway, I installed FC4 and the current releases of Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy Linux and Vector Linux. None of the installations went without pain - mainly because of the opl3sa2 sound card and NeoMagic video. The only distribution where I had all the hardware working at the same time was with Vector Linux (damn nice distribution, BTW) - but the 2.6 kernel would crash on shutdown and the 2.4 kernel didn't like my soundcard. Fortunately almost all distributions saw my wireless card and that part worked flawlessly.
So - after much pain I installed Windows XP from CD and Service Pack 2 from my USB flash drive. Popped in the WLAN card (had to obtain and install a driver for it) and everything works.
I'm a big fan of xfce as a window manager - lotsa features and reasonably fast but not as bloated as KDE or Gnome. Sorry, guys - but XP ran circles around any Linux distribution I installed.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I was thinking about this, and it basically boils down to a simple proposition:
People buy Macs to run OS X
People buy Windows PCs to run Applications
Because of this Apple has a lot more leeway on compatibility. They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run. If Microsoft breaks Windows application support, they've removed the main reason people run Windows in the first place. (Maybe there is a hardcore 2% of Windows lovers out there, but apps are what counts for the vast 90% of the market.)
The other issue is that Apple is heavily consumer-based and therefore can totally focus on quick-turnarounds and user-centric features. For example, there's been various complaints over the years about poor I/O speeds on OS X. This hasn't been a huge priority for Apple to fix because frankly they don't sell that many corporate server systems. Much better to put those resources into developing 'widgets' or something the end user can see. Microsoft has to spread out resources across Server systems, Tablets, Media Centers, Corporate Desktops, Consumer Desktops, etc etc, so that Windows is the single solution for every problem.
The end result is that OS X is a pretty damn nice solution for the home or SOHO user. But whether Apple's approach would work for the market as a whole? Don't think so.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
RTFA. It isn't about "slow" as in execution speed, it's about "slow" as taking a long time to come to market and introduce new features.
This is a dupe. See http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/121 1220
And anyway, they're not saying Windows runs slowly as an OS, the article is discussing why current Windows development is so slow compared to earlier releases and offerings from Apple.
Well if that's all you're using your Winbox for as well, I might suggest you learn how to configure a Windows system properly if you're noticing any lag at all.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
Both are more responsive than my 1.5 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM when it's running Windows.
You should check out Windows XP for Dummies
I've used all 3 of those for years and find your statement very funny. A P2 350 with 128M of RAM loaded with comparable functioning apps is never going to be more responsive. Booting up, loading Gnome/KDE and Openoffice alone is going to take like 4 minutes on that thing. Now if you're saying it's more responsive booting up into init 3, I can get DOS to load faster than your P2 350 with 128M RAM on a 486DX4 with 4 meg of RAM. AND it'll be more responsive (notice I'm leaving out which functions will be faster)
It's all about perspective and I happen to make a living delving deep into both sides.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Another anecdote or two. I took a trashed Win 98 computer which was dog slow. Reinstalled Win 98, and now it is fine (I use it for Taxact and games). My sister keeps a good copy of Windows XP on a backup partition. When XP starts getting doggy, she restores the XP system. Presto, snappy again. My theory about Windows slowness is that it is entirely due to malware.
My Ubuntu boot times are very comparable to the XP times on the same box. Oh, and both suspend and hibernate worked flawlessly right out of the box.
Throw the bums out!
Hmm... hibernate support built into Windows which "just works" out of the box, or an unofficial kernal patch set that works most of the time, if you're lucky. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but there are a few things where Windows is still far ahead.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
If you check out the benchmarks of XP running on Apple hardware, they are generally better than what runs on dedicated PC hardware, even with the extra layer of EFI-BIOS translation. Why is that? I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the only drivers which exist are the drivers needed to run on that platform. Therefore, the drivers loaded are minimal, and are only what are needed to run on that system. Likewise, the only services running are those which are needed. I'd guess that these builds, they have some .dlls and other things tweaked for the build in order to keep things simple. This also makes things faster and more secure.
So why can't PC manufacturers tweak their builds to do these things? Do computers come with PS2 and serial ports anymore? Is there a point in loading 50 SCSI drivers in a SATA system? Nope. For that matter, some of the larger companies like Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc. might could get Microsoft to make a custom kernel for their hardware, leaving out support for things that clearly aren't needed. But I would guess that the Windows XP kernel isn't modular enough to do this. My guess is that the major PC manufacturers don't really CARE how fast things run on their hardware. In fact, if things run slowly, they like it because it fuels consumers to upgrade their hardware sooner. Of course brands like Alienware and VooDoo probably do tweak their builds, because their business models are different -- quality over quantity.
These things are exactly what happens when Apple makes a computer, or when a Linux geek tweaks out his builds. As a Windows guy, I can tweak my build out so that it runs faster (and MUCH more securely) by disabling services, dlls, etc. I've never gone so far as to take out drivers, but it wouldn't be that hard (use Autoruns from Sysinternals.com if you want to do it).
Just my $0.02.
"20 years ago to talk with the graphics card (X11)"
Yees. X11 is much slower than windows' inventions, yeah?
All somewhat modern sound cards have several PCM subchannels that operating systems use in order to play several sounds simultaneously, and, yes, it is perfectly supported by Linux. Last I tried (admittedly, that was some time ago, but I can't remember just how long), using Windows with a single-channel sound card meant that I could only play one sound at a time.
/dev/sound input to the /dev/sndcard001x1alsa or whatever. If it does not works, it does not works. I do not have to do those kind of things on Windows.
Please, stop using Linux as the operating system, as it makes your comment a balant lie. No, it is not well supported by Linux, neither wifi and other things, it may be supported by one or two distributions.
Personally whenever I have isntalled Linux I could not use XMMS and play another game with sound at the same time, I just got an error about some kind of blocked channel. And no, I do not care about redirecting the
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Troll is the ugly sibling of a Flamebait. He is "trolling" as the troller ships for responses by making loose statments as "properly installed" and comparing windows "distros" from 1999-2001 to modern Linux distros. A lot of the "facts" are pulled from a certain dark area. Just the other day we got a couple of DELL comps here at the office. I finished the install of XP just to see what it came with and how it compared to Debian Sarge with xfce. XP was _slower_ compared to my "properly installed" Debian for the tasks run here.
What makes windows slow then? IMHO it's all the standard crap that is turned on, even the "themeing" is run as a service FFS! And if you want your install to stay clean from viruses, troyans and other attacks you also have to be running a lot of "protection" software of which AntiVirus is the most damaging for performance.
Cheers..
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
When the article says "Slow", it means "Slow to market". It's not talking about how fast your computer boots. It's talking about the endless delays getting Vista out the door, while Apple meanwhile has shipped several new operating systems and beat Microsoft to the punch on just about every new feature.
">still lacks kernel audio mixing
So does Windows, though. Neither Windows nor Linux uses kernel audio mixing -- they rely on hardware mixing instead. "
Kernel audio mixing under linux is by dmix.
It's part of alsa, and part of the kernel.
It also works. Shame no one seems to know about it, I would love if it was the default setting on all Linux installs.
Windows is looks like a victim of its own pride. They have to develop all software necessary, they cannot utilize advantages of Open Source. Microsoft undermined the Open Source movement so much in public even with full page news paper advertisements.
See Apple, its core is FreeBSD, window system is Unix X window system, etc. Thereby, saving millions of lines of code and time.
I'm currently evaluating a multimedia Linux named Tomahawk Desktop. Its amazing to see how much Linux has now progressed.
ALSA's software mixing has actually been around for a few years, but because it was not turned on by default, hundreds of web pages sprung up to provide faulty advice on how to enable it, so until recently it was quite hard to get working properly.
Judging from the posts on this story (almost all of which are debates about system performance), we can draw the scientific conclusion that less than 3% of slashdot commenters actually bother to RTFA.
I think a better solution would be a legacy-free OS that would have XP-level compatibility but would provide a VM layer configurable as DOS, NT4 or Win2k, depending on the need of the application.
If this isn't practical (having to run one each of the above layers could gobble tons of RAM), then at least providing a way to do a legacy-free installation with the option of adding support for older environments later. Systems that didn't need it wouldn't have to have it added, perhaps improving performance.
Problem is, you have to combine hardware upgrades with software upgrades with Windows otherwise you'll never see significant performance enhancements. It's just another case of keeping up with the Jones'.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I'm no fan of Windows by any stretch, and I wish it would disappear, but let's not fool ourselves, ok? Seriously, have you really had any major problems getting older software to work on Windows? Very likely no, and if you have, it's not been a regular problem. With OS X you have to INSTALL A SECOND OS on top of OSX. That's no easy task for the novice. And then it runs in an emulation layer which is quite slow. Don't lie to yourselves - Windows, Mac, and Apple focus on different markets, so this comparison is just plain stupid. Microsoft DOES have to consider a lot more tahn Apple when it builds it's OS. You have Soccer Moms and grannies who may not have a local geek to help them out, so things just have to work. You can't go around pulling the rug out from under them - they might fall and break a hip. Or just leave the party all together.
Comparing Apple to Windows is like comparing, well, uh, apples to balls of orange shit with corn and peanuts mixed in, uh, but what was my original point? Oh yeah, uh windows needs to "digest" all of the various consumer needs and uh, uh, ok windows sucks, sorry.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
The American stock market rewards growth, and to a lesser degree cost-cutting, not mastery. When a company already owns a market, it's supposed to look for ways to maintain that ownership less expensively. All the real work is then directed to taking over another market.
Applied to Microsoft, that means you can expect Vista and Office to be back-burner projects, while the XBox and Media PC stuff gets lots of love. What are they supposed to compete against, if not Microsoft's own earlier products? I'm well aware of the options and have used them professionally, but I haven't seen anyone big enough to get Microsoft's attention deploy them as an IT-sanctioned desktop solution (OSX excluded).
That being said, Vista does have some aspects designed to take over new markets, such as more onerous DRM. It's also confusing because a back-burner project on Microsoft's scale is still bigger than most projects any of us have ever worked on or near, but I don't think that either project is really a priority item for them.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
To paraphrase Guy Kawasaki:
Get it working.
Get it working right.
Get it working fast.
Sounds right to me.
Windows is slow because Windows is Windows.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Ah, I love the smell of MS-fanboi in the morning.
Try installing latest Fedora Core, SUSE, or Ubuntu, and not only will the space they take up greatly exceed that of a proper Windows 2000/XP install
Does Windows come with an Office Suite? CD Burning software? Image editing software? A development IDE? A variety of games? How about vector graphics software? Or a database?
What do you think takes up those 5 CDs in the SuSE install? The kernel?
, but they will be much slower, because while hardware advanced, Linux still uses technology from 20 years ago to talk with the graphics card (X11),
Those who do not understand X11 are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. X11 is a high speed, fully network transparent architecture. The Xfree86 people let it languish on the vine, but the Xorg fork has gotten things into gear again, and we're seeing the API move forward at a breakneck pace. Xorg 7.0 is really far more sophisticated than anything else on the market, including WGF/DirectX 10 or whatever MS is calling it, and even my beloved OS X's Aqua/Quartz.
Don't underestimate the extensibility of Xorg, and don't underestimate its performance. It's a lean, mean, high-performance and full featured windowing environment.
still lacks kernel audio mixing
Bzzzt.... dmix runs at the kernel level. Modern linux distributions enable it by default for all users. You can turn it off if you want lower latency audio. AFAIK, you have to call dmix from userspace, but the plugin is running directly "on the metal" of the alsa subsystem.
still lacks in PnP department (removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?)
Huh? Go to media:// (or click on the "Desktop" icon in Gnome, or click on the "Drives" icon in KDE, or go to the file browser). Right-click on the USB stick icon. Press "Eject" in the context menu.
Nay, Windows lacks in the PnP department. What the _hell_ is this concept of drivers, where I have to log in as administrator to install new hardware on my system? On Linux, I just plug it in, and the device node just appears, be it USB stick, WLAN card, ethernet card, or whatever. With a proper desktop environment I get a nice little pop-up asking if I want to configure it.
Oh, and Windows is braindead in the filesystem support department, as well. NTFS, and FAT32 are NOT enough for everyone's needs. Some people use modern journaling filesystems. Some people need to access HFS+ (that's the OS X file system). Some people need to access a wide variety of filesystems (don't forget the commercial UNIXes, which have a substantial marketshare in the server/workstation market). Perhaps someday MS will find the cash to hire a few more developers, and maybe even add a filesystem driver or two. Then again, given the ugly nature of the Windows Driver Model, this might not happen.....
still has abysmal support for various multimedia devices (no, the few tens reverse-engineered audio/video capture/etc drivers don't really count), etc etc
This one is half true. Unless, of course, your a professional, and use firewire. Firewire, of course, works perfectly. I capture whatever I want directly from my HDV camcorder, or from my cable box. Oh, and my ATI and Happenhauge TV tuners work out-of-box, too. Without installing drivers.
But yes, you do have to be careful with what capture cards you purchase on Linux. Stick with good name brand stuff, however, and you'll do okay. Sorry if your crap-o-matic generic capture card doesn't work; shell out the $35 to go get a supported one. Here is a short list to get you started. None of these require drivers; they are integrated into the kernel. You can get other stuff that's not integrated into the kernel, but I wouldn't recommend messing with that.
Sadly, ATI and Nvidia have not released their VIVO (All-in-wonder) drivers for Linux yet. Both have committed to do so, however. All-in-wonder and VIVO (nvidia) support are avaliable, but only for older card
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Alas! The slashdot crowd had already written dozens of comments around how the OS is slow; while the article is basically talking about a slow and inefficient process, and legacy baggage leading to complexity. Why dont you RTFA first!!!
[One article is even saying its because of the Windows paging mechanism problem, of course modded +5 insightful!]
Sigh. When will things get better over here.
Life is just a conviction.
Windows PCs are plagued with viruses.
The office has converted to using Firefox, and OpenOffice is climbing up the side of the desk, but the operating system is still Windows and the viruses they picked up before moving to Firefox are still there.
The Anti-virus software is often disabled by a virus, and Internet Explorer can't be fully removed. It can't even be fully disable since it's needed by Windows Update. (Although Windows Update is blocked by viruses on half of the computer).
I'm seen as "the tech" because I fit the profile, but I'm actually more of a lobbyist, but I still get asked for tech support.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
That's not "just works". It's "just plain annoying".
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
DUPES!
http://www.worldsoccerbars.com
>> With instant-on, even faster hibernation, and with new Intel CPUs/chipsets which support deeper sleep levels with more power savings, you'll never even notice your PC being slow. It will be always ready to use whenever you want.
Seems to me I remember the same promise for Windows 98. And ME. And 2000. And XP.
It's fine if you like your Windows box, but don't go singing the praises of vaporware. People will think you work for Microsoft's marketing department.
On a brand new laptop with Win XP installed by manufacturer (HP), my hibernate often does not work and I am left with the boot option of "discard saved settings/data and reboot"
So, saying Windows has well working hibernation is a farce in my experence.
I know there is a strong Linux v. Windows arguement, but what I think it really comes down to is that Microsoft people don't have a clear goal with their OS anymore. I think they should refocus on clear, simple, usability and security rather than 3D windows.
Mmhh... I used my Pentium II/266 for 7 years, until mid 2005, and Linux (Slackware up to 9.1, KDE up to 3.2) worked faster than Windows 98 (compared with older linuxes) and 2000.
Most of your other complaints are misguided or plain wrong. Modern X has alternative, high performance ways to comunicate with applications, like shared memory and DRI.
And up to date KDE have point and click USB drive extraction.
Got Pike?
Not necessarily so. I've been here for years, and when once in a while a both pro-Windows and anti-Linux post gets written intelligently with sources or well-recounted personal anecdotes to back up otherwise flagrant conjecture, the mods can tell and they will generally give it points as it deserves.
Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX and Windows XP all just tools and some are better at some task than other. Windows XP is more than useable and will run on just about any x86 beyond a PPro, and in my experince its faster than linux on the desktop. On this little laptop for example, a PII366 /w 128megs of ram, windows XP is slightly faster running apps like firefox and will play mpeg2 video in vlc while under linux it chokes. Windows on x86 hardware is better for multimedia and gaming.
Windows XP is usually slow because people install all kinds of spyware and other junk. In my experince antivirus software is worse than the malware its trying to keep out. It slows computers to a crawl. I've used windows on and off since win3.1 and I have never used antivirus software. I got one bootsector virus back in the day and the msblaster worm a few years ago. It just comes down to having a hardware firewall(well just NAT) and not using outlook, IE, word or hotmail. Basicly MS OS + MS APP = trouble !
Linux is great on server where you need the latest and greatest, *BSD where you need alittle more stablity and security. I'd never trust a closed OS wide open on the internet.
Personally I think Linux on the home desktop is a lost cause, there is no real advantage anymore. Windows XP is secure enough and has far better hardware suppport. Alot of the FOSS that was orginally written for linux usually runs on winxp, if not better on winxp. Firefox, thunderbird, vlc, ethereal, the gimp, etc... I'm yet to install linux on a machine and have everything just work. I'm also getting really sick of reading somewhere that something is suppored and then when I go to use it, its not finshed, missing features, unstable or just dosn't work at all.
You start putting linux on the desktop's of the general public and its going to run into all of the same problems you have under windows. Atleast under linux I'd hope the damage would be limited to the user's account but how many average joe's are not going to use the root account or give up their root password to a malware program promising free porn.
Now linux dose have a place on the desktop in big business, where you have someone to administer the systems. Diskless systems custom built with linux friendly hardware. All that is needed here is a polished up version of Open Office, firefox and thunderbird. I think we will see a web based solution the way things are going.
God, root, what is the difference?
Donald Knuth
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
I'm not sure what world the article writers are living in, but in the business world, having to update and upgrade business software just because the OS manufacturer doesn't want to support something is unacceptable.
Although I'm not going to pretend that keeping backwards compatibility is an issue, it's not as big an issue as some think. The Windows API has been stable for some considerable time now (or at least it should be), and I've never seen any device drivers that were compatible between different versions of Windows. The problem is the amount of new crap that they've been adding to Windows without any thought, which means that backwards compatibility becomes an issue, as well as the insistence of tight integration with other products. With Vista, it's the changing goalposts caused by marketing and irrational management people in the company who insist on trying to react to what Apple does, what open source software is doing and going off on massive fads regarding media, films and music. There's also the parallel development of .Net, which should really be a part of Windows, but it's not.
Oh, and don't give me all this 'modular', 'we're reorganising Windows' crap. Windows was supposed to be 'modular' years ago, and indeed, it that was the kind of marketing rubbish that came about with Windows 2000. Those stories tend to get wheeled out on a regular basis.
The problem is that nobody has been controlling overall development and direction of Windows and looking at how things should be structured, at the same time as keeping the marketing and management lunatics responsible for other things and products out. No one is looking at the base and layers of the system, and treating components and other products as add-ons. Everything is being thrown into the same cooking pot, as usual, and the marketing bullshit of new markets and products is making it worse.
So apple got out a few more releases. So what? Not to be a M$ champion or anything but M$ is a company that let's face it has got a bigger picture view of the market than the simple nerd shit we are concerned with. I can tell you that the 'temple of linux' and the 'posse of apple' can't even come close to that mountain of M$$$. Maybe one day but now.... umm.... Ok so I wasn't first post. But at least I read the article, took time to think about it rather than go a quick windows bash. 6 years without an upgrade. What am i todo....
I have to agree with you for older hardware. I have an old Pentium Pro laptop (133 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 1.01 GB HD) That I dual-boot Damn Small Linux (installed to the harddrive) and Windows 98se. I still don't have sound working in Linux, or any power-saving (which is nice to have a really freaking old laptop) while both worked with no problems on Windows. 98se also boots faster and executes applications faster. Now compared to BeOS on the machine Windows is very slow though, but for some reason I can't get BeOS working on it any more :(
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I have a Powerbook and I have to say: OS X is pretty sluggish as well; that dreaded color wheel cursor sometimes hangs around for a long time for something as simple as switching applications. And it's not surprising: Mach and Apple's display architecture are not exactly low overhead.
I dual-boot a lot, so I get to compare Linux with other operating systems on the same hardware; in my experience, Linux with Gnome, KDE, or XFCE is considerably more responsive and efficient than either OS X or Windows. Also, in terms of innovation, I don't see much difference between the three systems: they have similar architectures, similar toolkits, and similar window systems at this point.
I'm guessing you have a hardware or driver issue. It 'just works' on most machines.
Vista is, by all benchmarks, very slow if you enable any of the touted graphical features.
On the other hand, I love such features so I use fluxbox on debian + novell's new XGL system. On a P3 and a P2, and neither have more than 128MB RAM. They run lightning fast. My editor pops open in under a second.
Windows, for whatever reason, runs much slower on average. I administer hundreds of windows machines, so trust me on this one.
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no hidden comments and I only mod UP
Being someone who has spent hundreds if not thousands of hours using both Windows and Macintosh systems, I find it funny that most of the die hard Mac users I know are some of the most computer illiterate people I have ever met... Which helps me understand why they need to buy a 3000 dollar lava lamp that locks them in to only use hardware and software that apple approves of. Some main things to keep in mind here would be...
A.) I can let a 6 year old install software on a Windows system... But I have to train someone who has 20 years of computer experience on how to find their files on a Mac.
B.) A Mac system that runs comparable to my desktop system (which is only a 2.2 AMD with 2 gigs of RAM) that I spent about 1100 dollars building would cost in the neighborhood of 3000 dollars.
C.) Asking a virus writer to take more time away from their freshman biology homework to code worms and viruses for a system only utilized by an estimated 16% of computer owners seems just silly. It seems there main intent is to affect users... They sure get a bunch more going the Windows route.
Not that Macs do not have their benefits... They sure are pretty! But hey, shame on a company like Microsoft for trying to make their OS support hardware and software people might want to use. I hope for a day when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs get to make all my software/hardware decisions for me! As long as my system boots quickly, I don't care what it does when it comes on... Brilliant!
Yay choice!
It's amazing how an article comparing Windows excess baggage to Mac excess baggage, gets a first post about how Linux sucks. Would all Windows users just migrate to Digg.com. Also, get this guys, people who've migrated from Windows to Linux and stayed probably know how to properly set up a Windows box. In fact we're probably better at it than you. Not only can we do that, though, we can also properly set up a Linux box. To the idiots comparing a Windows install to a Suse install, try comparing it to a Damn Small Linux install or a Frugalware install instead. A full Suse install would have tons of applications that you won't find in a standard Windows install. As for performance, Linux is probably just as backward compatible as Windows. There will be some flavors that are as slow or slower than your XP install. There are also flavors that are much more fast. Examples of these would be Gentoo, Arch, and Frugalware. You can also compile your own from scratch optimized for your system. You can't do that with Windows. So why don't you argue about Windows and Mac.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
my editor is abiword, in case anyone thought I might have been talking about rgvim :p
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no hidden comments and I only mod UP
So, is this Microsoft's way of justifying the high minimum specifications required to run Vista ("dude, you're getting a new computer"), or getting users to buy new, Vista-only "legacy-free" versions of their existing software? Or both?
"As I know that the GP post will be moded really down because of slashdot linux zealots I have to backup his statement..."
Dude, you have been trolled. And if that guy gets modded down it is because he is a troll, not because those evil Linux guys got him. Look at his post history and his home page -- gnaa.us? Dead giveaway.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Personally, this is why I think is better that Gentoo has moved is default install to Stage 3. You can have a full system up and running with KDE or Gnome using the GRP packages in about the same time it takes to install any other Distro. Then get to doing whatever you want to do. Adjust your cflags, use flags, etc. and install screen, "emerge -e world" as you go home.
Without much work you can setup a cron script to update portage tree, fetch packages to install, and using the "B" switch have emerge build the updates but not install, and have it done overnight.
Those two guys are incapable of designing and running a firm as big as Microsoft.
EOS - Bo
I say end legacy support for anything pre-AGP/ATX. This is the one area I have been saying (nay, screaming) for YEARS that Linux should have been focused on. Linux folks thought they were being so handy making that old 486 hang on a little longer, but instead they were shooting themselves in the foot. Apple listened to me (prior art? :) and it has been a big success.
Linux was shipping optimized for 386 all the way up until PIII's were the norm, and if you have even looked at the kernel options when you recompile there are some that are archaic at best. I know that is part of the allure even, but of all the distro's out there none of them cust the cord and have a fully optimized non-legacy system. This is a place where Linux could gain some ground, but no one wants to make a decision and pick a hard and fast set of apps. Ubuntu comes sort of close by only including Gnome, but too much legacy crap is still present there too. With choice and indecision comes weakness and inefficiency. Instead of having 100 different distro's that do nothing particularly well, I'd rather see 100 distro's created for specific causes and be the best they can be for that use.
Apple stepped up and did it to some extent, and the market is wide open for another player to do it better.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I'm the (once) proud owner of an Apple Blue and White G3. Released in 1999.
It has since been upgraded to a 500MHz G4 and 1 Gig of PC 100 RAM. (I know, its so high tech, its slashdot!)
With the upgrades, I can still run the latest version of Mac OS X. I can still run the latest version of iLife. I can (just barely) play iTMS TV shows.
The computer is 7 years old. It predates AGP, DDR, and PCI-Express. Its USB 1.1 and Firewire for connectivity.
And it still works.
Oh, and I haven't had to boot into classic since 2002, when Jaguar came out, and OS X was finally usable.
"Slow" is a subjective assessment. Without any benchmarks to back that up, this discussion is moot.
However, in general, I think Windows, as a GUI-based system, is more efficient at resource usage than Linux+X+Any equivalient Window Manager (KDE/Gnome).
Learn to set up a PC... then you won't have those problems... I have built 2200 + XP systems for the city government users where I work. I have nobody that complains of slow systems (many are Mac users at home) maybe I just know what I'm doing.
To say it is rare to see an XP system running quickly, you're just silly.
The errors listed here:
support.microsoft.com
And I'm a Mac user since 2003 (and I also used several free Unices before that), so I can compare.
Windows isn't slow at all. Maybe it accumulates garbage over time and *becomes* slow, but that's another story...
...depended on OS9? Lets be serious for a second. While I'm sure it's a painful process nonetheless, you can't really compare Apple forcing Adobe/Macromedia and a handful of other software makers to rewrite their packages to OSX' new API, to Microsoft forcing, say, the DOJ or Siebel to rewrite their software deployments. A Microsoft deprecated API could easily cost hundreds of billions of dollars. So for Vista MS is tasked with reviewing and security testing the heck out of whatever legacy components they cannot remove. And they do often take out legacy functionality that couldn't possibly fit our security model. But the major stuff, for the most part, has to stay in some form or another.
That said, I do wish more were done with virtualization to clean out the main OS.
Why should I have to go looking for this product. Shouldn't something like this be "built in" by now? I mean, it is 2006. I'm kind of a linux newb and something like Suspend2 I probably wouldn't have discovered for a long while. Anyway, as an anecdote I have had problems resuming from suspend on some older Dell laptops when trying to resume from hibernation while redocking the machine. Other than that, it has been a great feature for me.
Maybe if you RTFA? They aren't claiming that Windows is slow in performance but that Microsoft is slow in bringing a new product to a market..
Now, granted, the headline on this story is a bit misleading but it appears that very few people posting here even bothered to RTFA. The article's not about Windows running slowly or booting slowly or any of those things most of the comments here are dragging on about. The article talks about the Windows pace of development and Vista being delayed and all that. According to the article, Windows is slow to release and slow to innovate.
/. if people bothered knowing what they're talking about...
Please, friends, read the articles before posting. Or not, I guess. I suppose it wouldn't be
Go find yourself a working 4-5 year old PC. Single CPU, about 1.8, maybe 2.0 GHz. 40 GB hard drive. 256-512 MB of RAM. Decent but not too impressive old graphics card. Next January, install the very latest version of your favorite Linux distribution. Pick one that has been updated very recently, with the latest versions of the kernel, X, KDE or Gnome, etc. Play with it and make sure that everything works. Yup, compared to your newest hardware, apps will seem a little sluggish launching, but they will launch and they will run fine.
Now remove that hard drive and replace it; you'll want it later. Install Vista. Don't forget to install anti-virus and anti-spyware tools and turn on the firewall. Let me know whether it works at all. If it does, I'd be interested in some performance comparisons.
About three or four years ago I had to make a decision about what framework to use to develop a hosted subscription based application. Additionally, I was used to Java, knew how reliable Unix was (well at least Solaris) and was on a tight budget. After looking around I decided to give Apple a try because of WebObjects. I figured if it worked for iTunes it would surely work for our new subscription application. So, I went out and bought a 17" Powerbook, 1st edition. WebObjects back then was around $600 (today it is free). Of course my partners, who are afraid of showing up at a corporation with anything other than Microsoft of course bought a couple of Dell laptops. Well I have to say, I am still writing this on that same laptop, have been all over the cafe's in Chicago, client sites, etc., and have to say that this machine has been incredibly awesome, virus free, rock solid, and incredibly productive. I love the Unix underpinnings. WebObjects coupled with Eclipse has been an incredible framework that has definitely given us a HUGE advantage. We have been rolling out updates, improvements, etc., while people I had interviewed earlier are finally just getting their apps rolled out. Meanwhile, my partners have had to upgrade their "flaky" machines.. now to IBMs and are now experiencing other problemss. Then their is IE... yuk.. always something to code around for that, however, having created our app on OSX makes it work on Safari, IE, FireFox and Opera. So while I don't believe the "sheep" of corporate america will change anytime soon.. I don't mind anymore... as the combination of WebObject, Eclipse, Open Source, etc., has given me and my companies a definite, certifiable advantage. You mileage may vary.
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
I don't know the author of the article and I can't say anything about it's bonafide, but in my experience windows problems are not really related to speed. I'm sticked to Linux, but I really can't say GNOME or KDE are faster than explorer.exe. What is good to Linux is that you can switch to very fast and lightweight windows manager (I use window maker), although you miss file manager, but it is not my problem: I'm used to xterm (and love it). ;-)
To get back to the point: windows is fast for office and gaming, faster than GNOME/KDE-Linux (afaik) and Mac OS X. For graphic works it's by far slower than Mac OS X, and for CPU-intensive processes is by far slower than Linux.
That's said, in my opinion the real windows problem is the unreliability of the entire operating system. It so buggy that for me it is impossible to use it in a production environment (I work as netadmin). Maybe the reasons for such odd behaviour is related to legacy stuffs, but as a user I don't care. I still use it for gaming, but that's it. I don't loose money if Trackmania sometime crashes
wow, you just listed off everything most of this community is aginst...congrats pauco.
What I've never understood is why a company as large as Microsoft never tried to create a second operating systems team with the goal of having it produce a new operating system from a clean slate? The original Windows team could still remain active for the short term and produce the types of updates that they have been in order to at least keep some reveneu from operating systems. This way the second team can work as long as they need until they have a good product. Even if the second operating system is a complete failure, which I don't see happening at a company with so many smart engineers, they would still be able to salvage at least some of the technology for use in the currect Windows code base. Microsoft spends a lot of money on R&D, so it doesn't seem completely far fetched that they would consider an approach like this. I know they have produced operating systems purely for research in the past (called Singularity, I think?), but why not create a second team to come up with something new, something that can avoid all the problems they've learned about developing Windows? The NT codebase won't last forever (at least I hope not), so I find it odd that Microsoft hasn't at least tried to start fresh again. I can't see NT lasting much beyond Vista and in a lot of ways I think it was a mistake to build Vista on top of NT. There has to be some point to break backward compatibilty and now is as good as a time as any. With ownership of VirtualPC, it wouldn't be hard for MS to run previous versions of Windows along side whatever new system they built, much like Apple did with OS X and OS 9.
SIGFAULT
Please, stop using Linux as the operating system, as it makes your comment a balant lie. No, it is not well supported by Linux, neither wifi and other things, it may be supported by one or two distributions.
Actually it is...you just don't know what you're talking about. ALSA is the new, primary sound driver for Linux and as been for some time now. The problem is, a lot of cards are still half duplex and/or single channel. These cards require software support. ALSA automatically falls back to software audio mixing when the hardware is not up to task. The problem is, many applications still only support the OSS sound interface, which hogs the audio interface. While OSS applications are using the sound card, ALSA is unable to provide its richer interface to native ALSA applications. This means, one sound at a time...or speak but can't hear....hear but can't speak.
This is why, for example, Team Speak sucks ass on Linux. If Team Speak would just spend a day converting the Linux Team Speak client to ALSA, suddenly it would work full duplex and share audio with other ALSA applications. To fill the gap, there exist sound daemons, such as arts and esd. Both of these are able to perform software mixing on a single, crappy sound card. The problem is, it requires software specific API support which in turn, talks with the sound daemon.
Long of the short, things work perfectly at the kernel level. Linux has excellent support for audio...yes, even crappy sound cards. The problem is....many applications are still behind the times. So, if you want to point a finger, point it at application developers and not Linux of the Linux kernel.
You have a modern system running Linux that can run a binary that was compiled 10 years ago? That's honestly pretty hard to believe. Can you give an example? And I mean a ten-year-old binary, not source code that's ten years old and will compile and run today. I suppose it's possible if we're talking about "Hello, world", but otherwise, I would imagine that every single library that any given program depends on has changed considerably.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
If your system will be used by more idiots than intelligent people, you should take adequate precautions. I shouldn't have to buy a hardware firewall to secure my computer; I shouldn't have to manually disable ports or services that I probably won't use. And I shouldn't have to work my ass off in order to make sure the operating system doesn't get a virus just because there's an infected computer in the area.
So, for instance, Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships with SSH installed, which means SSHD is on every Ubuntu computer (unless it's been manually removed). Few users will actually use SSHD on their machines, and it's simple enough to add the init script to start it when booting. So should the init script be enabled by default? Hell no; SSH is one of the main targets for remote attacks. Neither should Apache be active by default.
It's a matter of sane configurations, and I wouldn't trust a company that has an unencrypted remote desktop service to have sane configurations.
You didn't read the article. The article talks about MS getting Windows Vista out the door and it talks about why innovation at MS is so slow: They waste tons of time just to keep all the legacy stuff working.
The point of the article is that the code base have grown hugely complex and dificult to maintain and MS refuses to rip out legacy code to get a leaner code base that will enable them to move forward and innovate.
There is no mention of the OS itself being slow.
Could that not be a problem specific to your PC? Mine works fine.
I didn't know Windows was slow.
On similar hardware it outperforms any other O/S i've seen doing the same tasks.
Try starting up KDE and launching OpenOffice.Org and tell me how it responds compared to Windows XP and MS Office.
Try starting up MacOSX and launching Office or OOo and let me know how it is compared to Windows XP.
Try checking email, browsing the web, watching movies/media/audio, and show me where the performance is better.
Find me even a company that can release this mammoth software with such huge software and hardware support in the same amount of time, while also releasing quality development tools and fighting several massive lawsuits requiring them to remake versions of their software.
Hey I don't really care for Windows much, I'm a Ubuntu and MacOSX person myself, but what is with the New York Times FUD'ing Microsoft lately? Maybe they should try to find something to write about that they actually have some knowledge of.... like best selling book lists or something.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Of course, legacy support is vital if you want to keep your old customers.
;)
Say you just released a new version, System X, that's incompatible in some minor but vital ways with old System Y. Your customers will have to pay extra to also upgrade those other office and database applications to follow the upgrade. Maybe the office and database vendors offer an upgrade to the competitor's System Z for the same price as upgrading to System X. In this case, how can you be sure your customers will stay with you?
Upgrading is a constant compromise between compatibility with older versions and a cleaner, better system.
Now of course, there are a slew of applications that don't pass the compatibility checks, but I'd like to point out that being able to play The Incredible Machine (a 16-bit DOS game) on 32-bit Windows XP (which has a different approach to hardware) is quite a feat.
Apple has put a lot of effort in providing a proper emulation environment when it went through its hardware upgrades (68k to PPC, System9 to OSX, and now PPC to Intel). Their changes was major enough for legacy support in the new software to be impractical compared to emulation.
I just won't talk about Linux' legacy support, there's too much to say
PS: If God created the Universe in just 7 days, it's only thanks to the lack of existing user base
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
I actually only read the article because the title is so misleading. I have a Mac G5 with OSX and a Pentium 4 with WinXP at work, and the Pentium 4 is easily faster than the G5 (though granted it is a year newer). The OSX GUI is smooth as silk, but Photoshop takes ages to resize things...
At any rate, would it be at all possible to get Zonk to change the title from "Why Windows is Slow" to "Why Windows Development is Slow?" It would cut down on stupid posts and system wars.
And on that note, I don't think MS has a problem with being overzealous in supporting legacy hardware... I think they support any and all hardware as best they can so that they don't get sued for antitrust again. Not supporting certain hardware could be seen as exerting undue influence on the industry. Apple, however, not only doesn't support legacy hardware, they also don't support a wide range of current hardware. I've always seen that as a problem, personally.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Actually it is slow. My WinXP machine "feels" about as fast as any Windows box I've ever used, since the mid to late 90s. And yet the machines themselves have gotten several times faster in the interim. Windows bloat matches or exceeds hardware capabilities year after year. The only reason it's as good as it is now is that it's been 5 years since a major revision. Vista already has science-fictional hardware requirements.
I have nothing against Windows in principle. I use it for 90% of my computing (Mac OS for the other 10%) and see many virtues compared to the oft-worshiped Mac and Linux desktops.
But don't tell me it's not slow and bloated. Many is the time I've dreamt of running Windows 3.11 on my AMD Dual-Opteron 3D Workstation--just to see how fast my computer *really is*.
(removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?) You mean how in Linux you have to unmount your usb flash stick where as in Windows all you have to do is go to the systray, right click on the icon and then select the option to stop the device?
The up and down buttons handle the volume because you have a third party app handling them. You can do the same on Linux. I have Dell laptop, but I assume you can handle the multimedia buttons in the same way. If you press the button and then run dmesg, the last message will say something about unrecognized scancode and then some hex. There is some way to register a scancode with a command to be run. I don't have time to look it up now, Google for it.
Un fair business practices are often given as the primary reason Windows is the most popular. I have to say legacy support is one of the biggest reasons. I'm still using software that is five years old. On a retired machine I recently found an old DOS phonebook that I had still been using four years ago. Apple tends to be pretty draconian in it's OS system upgrades. Basically upgrade your software when you up grade your OS whether you like it or not. I was thinking about switching over entirely when the Mactels started coming out. Well one massive problem. They jumped the gun on releasing them and there was no native software availible. Well they were boasting for fifty dollars you can upgrade to native versions. Okay I'm going to spend a few grand on a Mac that has no native software availible. Then I'm going to buy thousands in software only to a month or two later have to spend hundreds on software upgrades so they'll run properly. People talk about the Microsoft tax but they rarely talk about the Apple tax these days. I would have switched over years ago but Apple's motto always seemed to be "we cost more". The vendors finally killed a lot of the Mac taxes by making hardware and software that was compatible with both systems. Before that every single item you bought cost more because it was for a mac. The excuse was always yeah but it's better and we're paying for quality. Sorry, a lot of the products were rolling off the same assembly line a percentage got apple labels and the rest got PC. I'm mostly talking support items but the hardware was almost identical but always costed 10 to 20 percent more. It's like in the early days of camcorders. I was shopping for one and happened to talk to a friendly sales rep that pointed out there were only four companies at the time making consumer camcorders. The insides were the same they simply were back then putting different cases on the machines. I checked them out and sure enough the buttons were even in the same place. I remember saving several hundred over the more respected name and getting essentially the same machine. A little legacy support isn't a bad thing. The Mactel debacle didn't impress me when I found that I would wind up having to upgrade my software days after buying a system, some upgrades won't be availible till summer. Don't buy the software? Well without it you're buying a bloody paperweight. Could you imagine if Microsoft had systems shipping with an OS that wasn't compatible with any existing software? Imagine the flack they'd get, Apple got off easy. All this is from some one that violently hates Microsoft, hardly a day goes by without me cursing the name of Bill Gates. I just think on this one issue they need to be commended not criticised.
Yes, but nobody has anything insightful to say about that, so we talk about something more interesting.
All the article generated was about five +3 informative comments saying the exact same thing as yours.
I agree completely...
I'm currently running XP MCE on my desktop and it's currently displaying an uptime of 32 days, and I know that the last time I shut it down was because I was installing a new capture card. It's not uncommon for me to go a whole month without shutting down.
I've been very pleased with more recent releases of XP (SP2 and MCE 2005). My Win98 machine was NEVER this stable. I keep my software down to a bare minimum, the only apps on the machine are the ones I actually need an use. Keep your Antivirus, mal/spyware, and windows updates on an automatic update and sweep schedule. Don't open any emails from people you don't know and don't browse around websites that could potentially mess up your stuff.
It's pretty simple, the key in all of this is keeping the GF off my desktop less she'll go clicking links from her friend's live journals and downloading every flash game in sight. I keep a T20 Thinkpad around with WinXP SP2 I've got a hard drive image taken directly after a clean install every 6 months I format it and re-image it... she can use that.
Collector's Edition
Windows isnt slow.
:)
Its just the default settings in XP suck. If you turn off all that themes crap. Uninstall norton and install a fast av that normally gives u a massive speed up
I've run windows XP on a Pentium 100Mhz 192Mb ram - now there i would say the performance was slow, but still it ran faster than on some machines (1Ghz +) i have used because of the amount of crap on them.
On anything over 1Gz processor there is something wrong with your computer if u find windows slow.
Maybe this is the problem (spyware/ crapware (ie nortan av/all those programs u have running at startup/background))
Windows isnt slow until u fill it full of crap.
Even on a brand new system, XP always feels sluggish to me. Perhaps some tuning is possible to help the situation, but the out of box experience is very important.
Compare that with the Mac where I've had the load into the 9s and the GUI was still as responsive as ever. Windows with a load that high would be totally unusable in my experience.
I guess now we get to see what fraction of Slashdotters actually read the linked articles.
(Hint: the article makes no reference to the performance of Windows compared Mac OS X)
Also:
"Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers,..."
Isn't it traditional to have a similar number of testers as developers? I know we mostly do, anyway.
Not all patches call for a reboot. It all depends on what is being run on your computer when the patch is installed. For a computer that is not being used for gameing, like most computers at the offices, you won't need to update the drivers every month (or every week!) once you're system reaches a stable state.
It's happened on a couple of laptops I've owned, one a thinkpad and one a vaio.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The parent has got to be one of the most successful troll in the history of /. Just amazing how many took the bait. Not only that, he was off topic (TFA is about slow development of Vista) but avoided to pick the obvious "Dupe!" comment. I'm so impressed.
Following in some form is part of loading up executable...
for X in listOfFixUps
if executable==X.exename
X.fixupfunc()
break
What kind of fixups there are in windows...
One of them is that simcity in windows 3.11 uses some memory AFTER it is freed, but since windows 3.11 isn't too quickly deallocating it,
it didn't hurt it. But with windows 95 they changed that to more reasonable working way. The application compability was sustained simply by using lazier memory management when simcity is detected. So there are paths in memory manager to handle that specific case, and in application loading detection when that is needed.
Problem with windows is that it interacts with million little program, and it has leaky abstraction. So basicly they are emulating old bugs to work with old software that relies on those bugs.
Then there is new API:s in each generation of windows. API:s that come from win3.11, win95,win98, win2000,XP and the new API:s on newer windows, they *ALL* should work.
(I now understand why Linus has policy of not adding syscalls too quickly)
Another problem is throwing everything and kitchen sink to operating system, and that they rely on each other for different functions. They end up with such a dependency mess, with those bug fixes included in the mess that the code base probably is pretty hard to work with.
Then we add the complex process of getting things to committed to main repository, reduction of testing staff and other things MS employees have told at minims blog.
There is no wonder that vista gets delayed, and the operating system works slowly. The slowness maybe dependent on few things, there are too many things that need to be optimized, and there is too much code memory footprint for cache&TLB.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Your missing the real test. Web browsing and email are not taxing on the system. But games are. There in lies the real test.
Quake 4 chugs along at 15 FPS in Windows, while in Linux (stripped down in blackbox) I get 27. A far more playable speed. All without that $300 upgrade.
I find Linux to be faster because it's not a one-size-fits-all deal. Linux I can customize, and tweak far more then windows, which is designed for just as you said; web browsing, email, exel. Making it do anything else without pretending to be a hard-core hardware buyer is a different story. Then its bloat shows.
...Windows XP Professional SP2 and it takes about 15 seconds to hibernate or resume
My Mac running Panther takes about a second to resume from hibernation.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Nope, they want the apps to be as closely coupled to every single system level .dll if possible.
No sig today...
I know that I've seen problems where a laptop's power settings are set to standby when the lid is closed. Then the owner of the laptop (yeah, I've done it) hits start, shutdown, then hibernate. It appears to start the process, then the user shuts the lid. I'm not sure exactly what happens there, but it seems that it has sort of a race to either standby or hibernate first, but either way, it appears successful. When you power it back up, it comes back to the process of finishing the other one. This nearly always fails, causing the computer to crash.
It could be looked at as a stupid user, but a case could also be made that if hibernate and standby were simply seperate runlevels, then this problem would not occur. For me, I absolutely save before standby or hibernate.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Insightful? Perhaps you should actually read the article. It isn't Windows that's slow, it's the development process of it that's slow.
Well NY Times is looking to WRONG example IMHO. Windows client empire on enterprise is because of backward compatability.
Here is a random quote I saw on a $10 level (yes TEN) OS X shareware. Not naming it of course but developer is hopeless, he/she can't simply code for both 10.2.8 and 10.3.9+. No time and OS X is literally a moving target.
I "learned" this evil backward compatability as an end user flaming "developers" for a fault they didn't make.
"This is in response to some of the guff directed at me over the last several
weeks for having the audacity to complain that those of us still using OS 10.2.8
have been abandoned by the (removed) developers in their updates and to suggest
that a refund of our purchase price for the software would seem appropriate."
(addition)
"Not only do the updates not work on my OS 10.2.8 system, but the preferences on
the version (removed) does not work too".
This happens for a cheap software coded by independent developer. Now imagine company names like "Adobe", "Lotus" etc.
NY Times _must have_ a software, client coded in VB 6 somewhere. For example, they want it ceasing function so it will run on "new windows"? They may look for accountant department etc, VB 6 clients are common in such stuff. Oh BTW, it is common and it works, no "code elitism" please.
I work at a company where the entire IT department (me) supports a DOS legacy app. This program was written 20 years ago, but it's still the best in the market. We aquired a simlar company last year, and they still use it as well. I was told 5 years ago that the vendor was upgrading to a Windows SQL based product, but it's not here yet. As long as these programs are out there, DOS rules.
The NYT titled the article "Why Windows is Slow" - it should have been titled "Why Microsoft is Slow". The article talks about the slow delivery of new versions of Windows relative to Apple deliveries of Darwin. It's got nothing to do with the performance of Windows itself.
They are a few, indeed.
Heck, I'm not a computer programmer, intellect etc....just your basic computer junkie who's tinkered with computers for over 16 years. I've been saying this since windows 98SE came out that the reason it is slow, is because it still supports win3.1 apps. Same thing can be said for windows XP. It still supports windows 98 apps. That is one of the reasons apple OS X runs so much faster. It ought to be that if you want to take advantage of a faster OS, then get off the pot and run hardware/software that takes advantage of the newer technology. Yes, it's expensive, but if you want all the whizz bang features, dump the old stuff. Wouldn't it be interesting to build a new windows OS, take all the legacy support out, and see how it would run? Heck, I bet that it would sort of run like linux....from a CPU requirement. You wouldn't need a dual core 2Ghz CPU and 2gig of ram....it would probably run on a P3 quite well!
Isn't it true that most users install a distribution rather than doing some kind of Linux From Scratch thing? Ergo, the vast majority of users have these things available to them out of the box without needing the user to do anything.
The Linux Kernel is infinitely configurable. This is how the same basic piece of software can run everything from a watch to a PDA to a PC to an enormous cluster of PCs. Linux as distributed in every distribution I've used in the last few years supports both WiFi and sound mixing out of the box.
As usual, you seem to be one of those people who once tried Slackware 10 years ago and still spout opinions based on that experience. Linux has changed immeasurably even over the last 2-3 years. Try a recent version of a good Linux distro (I recommend Ubuntu) and you'll see all that Linux of today has to offer. Yes, that includes WiFi (my laptop works out of the box) and sound mixing (my motherboard's on-board sound can play XMMS and OpenTTD simultaneously). Try it.
You gotta be kidding me if you shut down your XP machine every night. I dont shut down my PC for weeks together and I have never run into any sorts of problems let alone any bugs...
When your installed base consists primarily of smaller groups of art-related positions within a larger organization, it's not hard to make the switch is it? The corporation's custom apps, business apps and network apps all reside firmly on Windows machines.
The Mac machines, in contrast, are small in number and largely standalone. All they have to do is replace the machine, upgrade the commercial software (largely Adobe suite and/or Quark), and you're done.
I can point to stuff that as long as the Kernel hooks stayed the same and the glibc hooks stayed the same (which is the case for up to 10 years back...) that the code would run. Didn't mean it was a good idea, mind, but there are ways to accomplish running 10 year old binaries out of the box on a modern machine.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It's not just legacy support, it's legacy support of the FUD kludges they've built in over the years.
Warnings about certain apps "not working", when in fact they do. MS doesn't WANT them to.
That's what takes up the space...probably have all kinds of logical trees of responses that need to be updated in order to maintain the FUD.
Yeah, I got a tinfoil hat...
But I don't click hibernate and then close it, I just close the lid to reproduce this problem
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I don't know, that seems mostly like an incoherant an "Apple Rulez" rant.
But, you're right, I over-generalized things. There is a small part of Apple's market that comes for *only* the Professional apps (Final Cut, WebObjects, etc) and doesn't care about the hardware/OS/etc. But for the most part, Apple sells machines on the base system and not the niche pro apps.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I use USB drives all the time. I have no problem with removing them at all. Automount on Suse, Ubuntu, and Debian systems all work just fine. I also use Linux on an 600mhz Celeron system. Again it works just fine. Your complaint about Linux using 20 year old technolgy is funny. XP uses the NT kernel. That is well over 10 years old. XP still has a DOS api in it. How old is that? Yes X needs improvment but then so does Windows GDI
The point of the article BTW wasn't that Windows is slow! The point is that Windows development is slow! Look and all the new versions of Linux and OS/X that have come out. Look at the massive improvements they have made. XP was Windows 2000 with a "pretty" interface. Windows has been slow to innovate not slow to run.
Finally how do you know that Vista will be awesome? I have it right now and I really don't like the user interface. The eyecandy seems to make it slow. The effects get in the way and I always feel that I am waiting for them. The test machine we are using is an Athlon 64 3200 with a gig of ram and a good Nvidia card. Not a top gaming machine but a good fast box. I also have demo of the new 3d accelerated Linux. I actually like it's user interface better than Vista.
Microsoft has a lot of talented people so Vista might be good but then it might be another Microsoft Bob. The next version of Ubuntu Linux might suck. The next Athlon-64 might be a total waste of money. Why should anyone have blind faith that a company next project will turn out "awesome"? Computers are tool not religion. I take nothing on blind faith.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Boy have the M$ haters turned out, in full force! lol. Although I want to get my hands on Vista, I really don't care that Windows Vista has been delayed. Honestly, I'm happy with XP. It has been much more stable than Windows 98. Since 2001, no need to reformat. I don't find myself worrying over the lack of apps because it has everything I need, and it runs it great. and games =)
It almost makes you wanna feel sorry for how embarrassed M$ must feel over this recent slip...almost.
I find myself smiling, because articles now are coming out showing the reasons for the speed (or lack thereof) of development of Windows Vista. However, Vista has been in development since OS X was first introduced. OS X has had 4 upgrades since then.
Unfortunately, these articles might have airs of truth in them, however given the fact that Microsoft has done a *horrible* job at managing their developers, motivating and innovating, they are producing Vista, that even their own employees, and I quote "Wouldn't buy with somebody elses money." Comon folks, I understand the necessity for Microsoft to provide legacy support... but the speed of this development isn't because of the legacy support... it's because Microsoft is a far too overmanaged company, with developers that are underpaid and mistreated. People aren't leaving Microsoft because Google is so much cooler... it's because there's more money to be made doing what they do, and brilliant engineers should be greedy and sell their skills to the highest bidders. If that happens to be Google, then so be it. Microsoft's pay scale (and raise/bonus structure) is horrendous, as I've heard from friends within MS (two of whom have left to Yahoo!).
Unfortunately the saying is not "if you build it, they will come" but rather, "If you pay them, they will build it." Short of really motivating their troops, money is a great motivator as well, especially if you encapsulate it into a bonus structure.
Ah well... Here's to seeing Microsoft Vista some time in 2009.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Linux on the other hand, IME, is not quite as easy to get running too well. I've tried several distributions, but have not tried Xubuntu as of yet. Even on a fairly modern system (2GHz, 1GB RAM, etc, etc) it seems that Linux is lacking in a few areas. As someone else said, it still uses a 20 year old (is it really that old?) method of talking with the video card, while the kernel is set to talk to most of the other hardware.
Going along with a few posts up, Linux is great and all because one can make their own OS, technically, and not get fried for it. For those of you that want some more customization from 2000/XP/2003, get http://www.nliteos.com/
I've used it on a few of my machines to add drivers and whatnot before installing XP, and they work just great! You can even add some security by taking some components out before installing it, even. With Linux, I believe that's a little harder, since you have to do everything yourself before you can do anything with it.
Mind you, I am all about open-source and everything, but Linux is not as easy to setup and use as Windows XP, or even Mac OSX, for that matter.
Unix in general (and Solaris in particular) have backwards compatibility through POSIX going back quite a bit.
The ABI hasn't changed in over a decade. I know of some kernel drivers written for Solaris 2.5 that still work under Solaris 9 (SunOS 2.9). Even graphical applications work fairly well using things like X11, Motif, and even OpenGL. Even running mixed 32- and 64-bit environments work pretty well.
FreeBSD has compatibility layers going back to the 2.x releases, though personally I haven't used them so I don't know how well they work. If you need the compat stuf you install it, if you don't, it doesn't take up any resources.
While I commend Microsoft on trying to help users keep their applications, it seems that they didn't think through their architecture thoroughly enough.
New York Times pulling shit out of their ass? NO WAY! With such stellar journalists as the Keynesian hack Paul Krugman and the "Kevin Mitnick = Russian Terrorist" John Markoff, how could they possibly be wrong about this one?
Wonderful! Now taks a Windows XP disc with any service pack slipstreamed that you may want, reinstall the operating system on that laptop, and tell us how many of the special features still work.
I am not against Microsoft, and I make quite a bit of money developing software for their operating system, but I have found that more stuff works out of the box on my systems with various linux distros than what works with a vanilla install of Windows.
Apple had A/UX at that time, and it runs decently on my IIsi with only 17MiB of RAM, which wasn't "extravagent" at the time. Apple could have built on that foundation. I wonder why they didn't. The biggest problem I'd see with adoption going forward was that it was the crufty old MacOS bolted on top of Unix, rather than integrated into it.
Constitutionally Correct
The problems lie in GNOME and KDE using far too much memory (and probably CPU cycles as well). That's GNOME and KDE, though -- not X11. Try any alternative window manager/desktop environment, and you're likely to see a vast speed improvement.
Agreed, but that's not a valid answer. Ditch KDE and Gnome and you're left with a desktop environment that is nowhere near as friendly to most people. Sure, advanced users can use it with no issues, but that doesn't help people who are trying to get into Linux, or get others into it.
And the KDE/Gnome issues come back if you want to use a program compiled with their libraries -- at that point you have to load the libs into memory and you're now worse off than you would be if you were running KDE or Gnome already (longer load time due to loading the shared libs, possibly a larger overall memory footprint). Don't use those programs? Uh... ok. There goes most of the recent GUI programs for Linux.
The point I'm trying to make is that XP and OS X can deliver all of the eye candy and usability in the given memory footprint while still being faster than X (w/ KDE or Gnome). That's fairly damning. Both KDE and Gnome are bloated projects (as you note) and could benefit from exactly the same kind of total revamp that Windows needs. Hell, just moving to the STL (instead of recreating it from scratch, or attempting to do OO in C) would help reduce memory footprint, improve speed, and (most importantly) increase development speed.
Everyone likes to think they are experts on technical design by relating to physical manifestations. Saying that a piece of software is big and bulky with lots of patches and duct-tape is really convincing when you are trying to tell someone that it is slow and onerous. (Just the other day, I heard someone commenting on the radio that “They” are building a “New Internet” because the one we have is so patched and jury-rigged that it cannot be fixed. See all the confusion you people with your “Web 2.0” terminology are creating?) Fortunately, that is just not the case. Software is not a bridge or a house or a car or a toolshed.
I am no Windows apologist (hate it), but just because it has nine hundred million gazillion lines of code (oh noes) does not mean it is slow for the user (and in fact, Windows is not slow). Consider the 90/10 Law which states that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of the code, and you realize that all that so-called bloat does not matter that much. Two decades of legacy libraries which remain unlinked and unloaded are not going to cause the system any headache. (There are caveats here, but for all intents and purposes, the win16 libraries in WindowsXP are not causing slower frame rates, or making Office users less productive, or taking floating point operations away from mathematicians. What does, if anything, slow down Windows is the presence of many services which the user simply does not use (or want). When you install Office, for example, its libraries are preloaded at start up to help make the program load more responsively when requested (this is also the case with Internet Explorer). This takes up memory, which in many cases will cause swapping. Furthermore, a principle cause of sluggishness in Windows is all the garbage users add to the system after it is installed. This is hardly to blame on Microsoft.
These arguments that software performance is inversely proportional to the amount of code in it are nonsense, and is demonstrated in many areas. A practical example would be found in how much code is in your average Linux distribution. An academic example might compare the tiny implementation of a Bubble Sort to the much longer implementation of a Radix Sort. I suppose the experts at the New York Times would have us believe Bubble is faster because it can be as small as four lines of code (or less).
Now, do not get this confused with the maintanence of software. Yes, indeed, as software grows in complexity, it becomes much more difficult to change it and fix it without causing additional problems. But this is not necessarily a factor on runtime performance.
Join Tor today!
Maybe it was a bit incoherant as it was early for me. However, I was just trying to expose one particular area where Apple does rule particularly well and which very, very few people know about and that is WebObjects. What can I say, but, for an Internet application developer the combination of Unix/OSX, OpenSource (jFreeChart, mySQL, postgress) WebObjects and Eclipse is amazingly productive, scalable and darn cheap.
It is the only place outside of media/graphics/video/streaming where Apple has an incredible story to tell.
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
Windows has to run on 90% of machines on the planet earth, and with literally millions and millions of hardware combinations - completely flawlessly (which rarely happens to be fair, but it's the thought which counts).
Couple this with the Windows philosophy that stuff 'just works' like new devices, software, and backwards compatibility, and you'll see why Windows development cycles are slow.
That's not to say Linux doesn't go some distance towards this 'it just works' holy grail, but I can summarise by saying didn't have to compile my Windows NVIDIA drivers like I did my Linux NVIDIA drivers (yes, I know you can download pre-built modules but sometimes they just don't play ball).
throw new NoSignatureException();
"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down ... That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.'"
And in the process has a consumer base several magnitudes larger than Apple will ever see? I mean come on, let's tell the whole story here. Just who are these people that think Windows is too slow? Obviously not the few million world wide who don't care enough either way to switch. Ok, take Apple for example... This comparison means what again in light of the formentioned fact? What, exactly has that alleged edge in innovation done for them? Sure as hell hasn't put them on top of the market place.
Maybe... Just maybe that backwards compatibility has helped MS some. Maybe even decided the tradeoff in performance was an acceptable loss in light of what the marketplace gain. But feel free to mention unfair business practices and all that. One of these days you'll realize it's not the sum total of M$'s success.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Anyone else see the irony of dozens of people screaming, "Dupe!"
No, you can just pull the fucking thing out as long as you arent actively writing to it, its been a "feature" since XP, and it worked in 2000 but popped up an annoying warning. I haven't gone to systray to pull usb flash sticks in windows since at least 2002 (the year XP came out), and I've never had lost data, EVER.
In linux, if you pull a mounted usb stick, you get a crashed scsi subsystem at best, and a series of oopses or a hard lockup at worst.
Go figure.
Your "mac running panther" goes into what is called a "sleep" or "suspend" mode.
CPU and memory are still powered, while most other components turn off.
Nice, but has nothing to do with hibernation, which saves all state to disk and completely turns off power.
Look, ANYTHING Microsoft does, it is held under scrutiny and generally people will bitch and complaining about it.
Apple CAN exclude legacy support largely because they control every aspect of their products. Apple is their own monopoly.
If Microsoft deiced, hey, lets abandon serial ports you would have an uprising of epic proportions. First, slews of customers that rely on serial port items like data entry devices or signal sampling, or a slew of other legacy devices that only support serial ports will be up in arms over the loss of support.
Second, slews of companies will be up in arms over Microsoft deciding to drop legacy support of serial ports because they will be forced to have to redesign their products and possibly find solutions to send out to existing customers so they could continue to support that product.
Remember Microsoft is installed on over 90% of the world's PC's. If Microsoft makes a decision to drop Floppy support, or any other legacy technology, they have to answer to BILLIONS of customers. If someone doesn't like the fact that Apple dropped floppy support, then they just won't buy a Mac. If Windows drops support for floppies, then what will that customer buy?
It is so trite to say that Apple should be lauded for dropping legacy support while Microsoft should be reprimanded. Regardless of how people believe Microsoft owns a monopoly and controls every aspect of the PC, this couldn't be further from the truth. Microsoft has to cater to millions of consumers that can't drop their DOS games, or 10 year old devices, or legacy printers, even those applications and equipment belong in a museum (or landfill).
I am sure that Microsoft would love to end legacy support for a slew of devices. Do you actually think Microsoft WANTS their OS to be slow? Are some of you so delusional to think that Bill Gates sits there in his office wringing his hands and finding out ways to make his OS more insecure and slower????
If Microsoft made a grand decision to drop, say, analog CRT technology, or floppy drive support, or whatever, the uproar would be defining. Apple drops a legacy product, and largely the market say, so what, I still won't buy a Mac regardless.
Overall, this doesn't slow down Windows while running, only on installation of the OS and installation of device drivers. If you don't have certain legacy hardware, Windows isn't slow because it is trying to detect them, or running devices drivers for non-existent hardware. At least Microsoft has made their OS efficient enough to unload drivers for devices not found.
What truly slows down Windows is Microsoft's reliance on virtual memory, and even if you have 2 - 4 gigabytes of RAM, Microsoft still insists on a swap file. HARD DRIVES are the major bottleneck in performance on computers today, and when Microsoft forces gigabytes of data to be swapped to the hard drive, this reduces performance, PERIOD!
I can't stand the double standards imposed on Microsoft. Apple always gets a slap on the back anytime they do something, but if Microsoft does the same thing, they will be chastised. Microsoft gets brought to court for installing media players and browsers in their OS, but Apple is celebrated by including iTunes and Safari in theirs.
I am no big supporter of Microsoft by any means, I think they need to start getting some balls and telling their legacy clenching customers to drop DOS apps and old hardware and say enough is enough, but to laud Apple for doing that is just down right troll bait.
The problem is Microsoft is damned if they do, damned if they don't. Millions of people complain that Windows is slow because of legacy support and complain while millions more will be very vocal against Microsoft if they ever touch that floppy interface or serial port. Microsoft can't please anybody at anytime. Microsoft has had to support millions of devices and configurations, and guess what, they have done a good freakin job of it. Apple couldn't do it, Linux can't do it. The only reason why Windows has 90% of the market is because they have supported and will continue to support millions of devices.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I've got XP running on a PII 350 and it works fine... I can browse, Office and even play Unreal Tournament. The pc had only 128Mb RAM too (which I only recently upgraded to 512Mb)... so don't fool yourself in thinking that XP demands super computers.
The end result is that OS X is a pretty damn nice solution for the home or SOHO user. But whether Apple's approach would work for the market as a whole? Don't think so.
For SOHO or home use?!?!?! I have been using OS.X in a corporate (Largely Microsoft) environment for years now! I do aggree that Apple is a package solution and it won't work for the market as a whole, I don't think Apple even means it to be. The real threat to Windows in the competition for the love and loyalty of the ushaven masses of desktop PC users is Linux and the first manifestation of that is Novell's desktop distro. If Linux does start to take off on the desktop and I expect it will since emerging IT markets in Asia, Africa, S-America and elsewhere are much more likely to be open to the prospect of Linux desktops as opposed to the Western Microsoft only world. Also keep in mind that governments in these areas are actively encouraging Linux use for reasons ragning from cost to security (and not just malware, they plain don't trust Micorsoft). If Linux does take off as a desktop system in a big way in Asia, Africa and S-America expect this to force changes here in the West. This wil happer for a variety of reasons. For example because of a flood of proprietery applications (including the all important video games) made for the non-western Linux market alluvasudden becoming available in the west but also because there is a generation crawling out of schools in Europe and the USA that have grown up around computers. These kids will be the managers of tomorrow they have grown up seeing Linux (and OS.X for that matter) as a real alternative and they won't hesitate to switch unlike their parents who often spent year getting over their pathalogical fear of computers and are thus be more conservative in matters IT. I'm not saying Microsoft will crumble and fall away into the depths of bankruptcy hell in the next 10 or 15 years but I do expect that Microfosts dominanace will be steadily eroded.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Someone needs to send that man a copy of Mepis or Xandros right away. They should load it up with Cross Over Office and Parallels, so he can have all of his precious Windoze programs confined to a nice little X window where they can't rob his system of too much performance. With a few moments reflection, he will realize that free software is not hard to use, that legacy support of hardware and software is possible and that something radical has happened to the world of software development. In a month or two, he may realize that "consumer" is an insulting term.
Windows is no longer second rate, it's third rate and that's death for Microsoft. "Good enough" is not good enough when superior free alternatives are more than good enough.
Vista won't change anything. It's going to be XP times ten in terms of underwhelming customers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
MS caught up within a year or two of Apple (as far as technology and overall quality) when XP came out and the early OSX was not a step up from OS9, to put it mildly, but Apple has been pulling away pretty strongly since.
.NET originally looked like just such an attempt, but they don't seem to be very interested in it now, compared to the Steve Jobs Scorched Earth Policy for old versions of MacOS (which worked.)
Copland choked and died around 1996; Vista would be dead now if MS didn't have unlimited resources to keep flushing down it and no good way to escape.
So, Is MS now about (2006 - 1996) 10 years behind Apple again?
If so, can MS pull off an OSX-level migration of their own to try to catch up, and would anyone care by the time they did?
I do dev work in VS 2003 on a Athlon 2800+, 512M ram and it certainly does not kill it, I can have 2 or 3 VS sessions open, and mediaplayer, firefox, what have you, and it still runs just fine
...than it fixes it. How many times have you found .net foundation issues installing something? Some want 1.1 then you install something 2.0 and it get overwritten next time a 1.1 thing gets installed. Hell, I've had this with office productions that are off version from each other.
.net version of the JVM) is way too each to jump out of, and most programmers do so quite reguarly. By doing this, Microsoft has created a new kind of "dos interrupt problem" like the one that prevented them from moving to a true 32 bit operating system for so many years -- and ended up inflicting windows 95, 98, and FSM help us, Windows ME.
The CLR (Microsoft's
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I've even got the notoriously balky Mechwarrior 3 running on Win2k/xp. But it's not well-documented like Apple's classic mode, and it isn't automated.
But you make a good point. For all that Windows touts backwards compatibility, Apple is in some ways better. On the other hand, I have the latest Mac OSX and it won't even recognize my old Starcraft discs.
It only really matters on the business end, and Windows' history has been so much more stable. Give Apple another 10 years and if they don't screw up, they'll be popular here. But Linux will gain overseas, as bad as it is, there's nothing that's more backwards compatible. You can run and re-compile anything from OTHER DECADES on Linux.
Technically, Apple has this same advantage for server applications, but I doubt they'll ever put together a competent, well supported program for businesses. They're too distracted with high-end consumers. That's why I've always thought they should acquire Sun, ditch Solaris, integrate/open source Java. But Sun's CEO is too stubborn for this to happen prior to bankruptcy.
In my opinion, part of the problem seems to be with Microsoft itself. The corporation has so many levels of bureaucracy that to get anything done with efficiency is like jumping hurdles and cutting through red tape. I'm sure that most of the programmers have been employed there long enough to know that it's better just to go with the flow and follow the status quo rather than fighting the beast for innovation. Microsoft needs to work from the inside out. They can't perfect the product until they fix the problems within the corporation.
to emphasize your point, i'd like to add that with the JACK Audio Connection Kit http://jackit.sourceforge.net/ one can get professional quality, low latency mixing and routing between a growing set of ridiculously cool audio/video production tools, so that with (currently) a few custom distributions, and (seemingly soon) out of the box with newer distributions, one can produce a full musical artwork for only the cost of hardware. will the next version of windows include a thousand band equalizer?
"Windows sucks" is an interesting, novel, subject? Just a recipe for a classic OS religious war.
All the article generated was about five +3 informative comments saying the exact same thing as yours.
Not to mention about 300 saying the exact same, off-topic, thing as the parent.
But I do have to say the original submitter (if you can say that for a dupe), either deliberately or stupidly, I can't tell, made his summary suggest it was actually about execution speed, with his talk of drivers and such. Since the Slashdot editors seem to go for the obvious flamebait spin on stories (eg, anything that mentions "evolution") that was almost a guarantee of having his story accepted.
If this development cycle is so onerous, and slows everything down, then how/why did Microsoft decide to push the date back only a couple of months. If you are going to tell the public that you are going to push back, why not be realistic and tell them 6 months or something, rather than 2 months? Honestly, how much difference can 2 months make when it comes to such a huge product?
has a much smaller market share...
Everything I say is a lie.
Except that. And that. And that. And that.
nicely put,
Apple makes a nice product and uses marketing to inform people that it exists.
Microsoft makes a product and uses marketing to inform people that they really need it.
My reaction to the marketing from each of the companies is generally that when apple makes a product, the marketing is trying to make it look 'cool', 'fun' and a 'neat thing to have', but rarely as 'you must have this', 'you need this', 'you can't live without this'.
Apple's marketing is generally geared towards "isn't this a cool thing."
Microsoft's seemed to be more "wouldn't owning this make you cooler."
sorry for the repetition, it's early and the internal editor hasn't kicked in yet...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
And that is the main problem with Microsoft as a company. It is neither providing for its customers (Why use Vista?), nor for their shareholders. Microsoft could have solved the legacy problem, the same way Apple and others have done it (even Microsoft did this!): Fork the damn thing. Create two OSes one with full backward compatibility one with limited backward compatibility. If you need to use a legacy app, you'll suffer the consequences (less feature, less stability), but those that can use only modern applications, get a modern, secure, stable OS. The fact that this option isn't even discussed at Microsoft, show how unoriginal their thinking has become...
Despite the fact that this article has little to nothing to do with the "slowness" of Windows loading/execution (which is, of course, debatable depending on the app in question), I'll indulge the M$ haters and throw this into the mix.
If you want faster Windows, use nLite. It's a beautiful tool that lets one take a Windows XP installation CD and make any number of modifications to it: remove unwanted components/drivers, preset Windows settings, slipstream hotfixes and service packs...even completely automate the installation process by presetting all installation information (license key, etc.). Then, it generates a brand spanking new ISO for you to burn and use for installation. It's glorious.
After nLite-ing my personal XP installation, I must say I have never been happier with Windows. I've left it running for weeks with no problems. A fresh installation of my nLited XP is just over 1 GB of HDD space (whereas the typical XP installation can top 3 GB). It could have been less, but not without removing several components that I wanted to keep.
Granted, this tweaking is not without its quirks. I do occasionally get a warning about "unrecognized file versions", but thus far ignoring them has not caused any problems. I would suggest the following though: I know it's tempting to remove IE right off the bat, but trust me when I say don't. It is needed for some very important functions (such as updates). Also, I would caution against removing Windows Media Player as well. Sure, you may never use it (hell, I never did), but if you remove it, it takes its codecs with it, which can cause other apps to not function properly (such as Winamp). I guess you never know what you have until it's gone. If you're bound and determined to remove it, then I highly recommend the ACE Mega Codecs Pack as a replacement.
Happy hacking!
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
FTA: "Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP."
And they are rewriting 60% of the code?
Do the mathz!
Wow, +5 on a totally BS comment? Try 386 or higher.
I googled and some site claims an 8086, but it obviously can't run on an 8086.
Crapware isn't currently a serious prolonged problem in my opinion, just scrub it with Spybot and Adaware, disable active scripting in IE and install Firefox or Opera as the default browser. It's a temporary fix but a very effective one.
Almost as crippling as crapware are Microsoft's and the OEM's diabolical default configuration of the filesystem. It's bad enough that OEM's install bloat and poor quality software but when a 160GB drive is entirely allocated to C: it just ends up fragged to hell.
I 'fix' alot of friend and family PC's and moving the swap file file to a new partition, creating a data partition (or better yet one for each user), and giving the system drive a good offline defrag (system files, MFT and pagefile) with something like PerfectDisk (not free, but there are free ways to do this) does absolute wonders.
Even with the almost nameless chipsets on cheap OEM boards it can also be worth updating drivers, which OEM support sites rarely include and Windows Update doesn't always provide. For example Compaq tend to be prompt sticking OEM BIOS and CD/DVD RW firmware updates on their support site, but never drivers for graphics, sound or other onboard chips.
Windows is not slow, but it takes the grooming hands of a local computer nerd to make it not so. It has little or nothing to do with legacy support either.
I was an intern for a couple of summers at Microsoft and heard some interesting stories about legacy support while there.
One of the changes in Windows 2000 was fixing an API call that was not behaving strictly to the documentation. Upon testing it was discovered that this fix actually broke WS_FTP (a small utility program) which was relying on the incorrect behavior? So what is Microsoft to do?
1. Let it break and hope noone calls complaining.
2. Contact the WS_FTP devs and tell them to release a new, corrected version (and hope people will upgrade).
3. if process_name == wsftp.exe:
use old code
else
use correct code
Needless to say they went with option 3. To my knowledge this ridiculous cludge is still in the Windows kernel to this day.
It is amazing how quickly people bash MS. The very thing they are complaining about is what makes this system so good. If I wanted to buy a product that I cannot easily upgrade I would by apple and pay apple prices. With all of the legacy support and hardware vendors out there there is no way apple can compete without standardizing and allowing for clones of there own. This will eventually lead to a "slow" apple system as well when they try to support all the options available. I will stick to building my inexpensive clones and gladly wait for Vista to whip up on apple again.
Some of the content of the article seemed to imply that, but maybe I just had a knee-jerk reaction. One quote I zeroed in on was “Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base ... just slows everything down.” Looking over it again, I read too much into this statement. So while you are correct to point out my error (and thank you for doing so), I think it is nonetheless true that people blame the size of any give piece of software as the cause of poor performance.
Join Tor today!
Microsoft have made a rod for their own back.
Despite the hype, by no means all establishments are using 100% Microsoft supplied software. There is a lot of dodgy legacy software out there, running on Windows, written using a variety of questionable techniques that most people don't get to know about, simply because the source code is kept hidden.
Every new version of Windows has to support all this old, broken software, because someone, somewhere is using it for a critical business application. Some of this old, broken software does things like control laboratory instruments. Engineers, technicians and scientists are often unable to use Windows-driven equipment to its full potential, simply because the software does not allow them to do some particular operation that was easy enough with its manual predecessor -- and they cannot modify the software, nor write their own. {We tried, at my former employer; we did successfully reverse-engineer one or two things; but on the whole I, and our development manager, found it simpler just to ditch the computer-controlled test equipment and build manual, analogue test sets.}
Yet more of this software is device drivers. Manufacturers in the Far East develop driver software on pirated Windows using pirated development tools. {They could easily develop Open Source drivers, but they don't need to: as far as the authors are concerned, Windows is available gratis anyway.} Windows needs a full complement of device drivers, otherwise existing hardware becomes obsolete and its owners become annoyed.
If Microsoft introduce a new version of Windows which breaks compatibility with old versions, then they will lose customers. It is as simple as that. If there is some important piece of software that cannot be used anymore, then alternatives will be evaluated; and questions will be asked. One of those questions might be "Why have we been paying money for this, when this does just as good a job for much less?" Another of those questions might be "Whose freaking saved documents are these anyway?"
So when it comes to backwards compatibility, Microsoft are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. If they keep backwards compatibility, it makes Windows slower, harder to test and more prone to errors. If they eschew backwards compatibility, it makes Windows a lot less attractive.
It's important to point out that these problems do not exist with Open Source software. Although binary compatibility will break from time to time, when it becomes necessary to add new features to a kernel or heavily-used library, source code can always be recompiled. Sometimes a patch may be necessary; but at least it's possible for someone to figure out how to patch a piece of software, even if the original author is no longer supporting it. And since file formats are open, migrating from one Open Source application to another is invariably less painful than migrating from Closed Source to Open Source. If the new application doesn't already have a suitable import filter, then one can be added; or a conversion tool can be written.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Weird things do start happening, but I hibernate and resume hundreds of times before rebooting. Eventually the system crashes, but certainly not after 4 days. But that's just my experience. I've also had the experience of needing to reboot Ubuntu quite often because it didn't always survive hibernation. For me, proper hibernation is critical, which is why I almost always use XP on my laptop.
I am not exactly sure what substance you are using, but it must be some pretty good stuff.
I have 3 machines in my house setup with nest drives that I use for testing releases (AMD 1800+ 128M, Intel P4 2.3G 512M, Athlon64 1G RAM). I also have my personal laptop with a PentM with 1G; however that is strictly an XP load with an occasional boot to Knoppix Live.
My nest drives (20-30G drives) have the following loads:
Windows XP (fully patched)
Windows 2k (fully patched)
Windows 98 (fully patched)
Fedora Core 3 (KDE)
SuSE 9 (KDE)
BSD (not sure of the build our local xNix guy built it for me)
Out of all of them Windows 98 boots up the fastest, followed by FC3 - the rest are in a muddled pack with XP traditionally trailing that pack. None of the Windows boxes have hibernate turned on because they all suck at it. XP will come back properly 4 out of 5 times, but that 5th time it is completely screwed up and hangs the system - so it is best just to leave it off.
My favorite Windows build is 2k. Its support for modern hardware is good enough and it is not nearly as bloated as XP (faster response and smaller footprint). However, its support for USB drives seems flakey.
Of course, I would have loved to have VMWare for this type of sandbox stuff, but this company had surplus drives and the nest equipment from a previous task - thus it was effectively free for them.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
Solaris 10 has probably the best officially supported backwards compatibility guarantee of any operating system out there. Yet it also holds many world record benchmarks. I had a customer mention only a few days ago that they are still running SunOS 4.x binaries on Solaris 10, those were built over 10 years ago and still "just work", whats more they now run faster on modern hardware and get to take advantage of many of the performance improvements un the underlying system.
Its precisely Windows' legacy support that it holds the market share. Make a new binary format, take away all the previous apps ability to run, and suddenly Windows has lost the real edge, the real reason why everyone doesnt switch to another OS. Linux/BSD are awesome, except too many apps run only on Windows. Many apple and Linux fans are sitting on Win32 machines right now because theres that one app that has no equivalent in Linux/OSX. Games are a significant part of those apps.
Say Windows switches to a new binary format for a new processor and asks all other software and driver vendors to follow suit. Many of them wont rerelease their apps. Others will not care. Many driver makers will not bother to produce the new version (I've tried running the AMD64 Windows XP... so I know all this). The result is Linux has the edge suddenly. You dont need to have vendors rerelease drivers, except for the few proprietary drivers (like nvidia).
Microsoft will never do that. AMD64 is giving em enough headaches as it is... and AMD64 actually supports x86 32-bit in-hardware. Take away DOS support, and all the older API in Windows, and suddenly there are more apps available for Linux than for Windows. Suddenly, MSFT stock seems overvalued.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
And that 97 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Windows is slow because it executes too many instructions in order to perform a task. This is because it has too many non-essential features and is inefficiently coded. Next question, please.
better is the enemy of good
"Windows Is So Slow, but Why?"
So we assume it's slow and build an entire article upon it.. What if.. it's not "so slow" though? In my experience OSX and XP have comparable performance and there's definitely not something in XP that makes me say that is is "so slow".
What may make it slow is tons of startup programs, bulky drivers and software, licensing services and so on and so on, all 3rd party stuff.
What makes Windows so slow in the end though? Third party software does. I suppose OSX is really a lot better in that department, having a lot less software to cram on it, unfortunately.
I used SuSE before that, and I freely admit that Windows was noticeably faster then.
So I conclude, Linux can be a lot faster, but you have to know what you're doing, and of course, want to spend the time. I couldn't be happier now. I have a mac-mini, a XP widescreen laptop and a super-speedy linux box which uses pretty old hardware (1800Athlon-XP, NVIDIA Geforce 300 or something).
Compare that to the source code based architecture of UN*X systems. UN*X is fast and runs programs from before the first line of UN*X code was written.
The way to make no source architecture faster is to change to a new system. Right now Apple is the best known main stream no source architecture. But perhaps its time for basic architectural change.
Its portability on the source code level that allows UN*X to run on so many platforms.
Is it time for you to modernize?
"Hmm... hibernate support built into Windows which "just works" out of the box, or an unofficial kernal patch set that works most of the time, if you're lucky."
I've had good luck with both XP and 2K. I don't get BSODs. I rarely reboot. I've used both on a wide number of machines and feel quite comfortable saying this. However, I have NOT had hibernate or Standby work reliably. Sure, when I get my shiny new laptop both modes work just fine. Then, a month or two later, stupid things start happening. Windows won't come OUT of either mode properly. It'll either hang or just plain behave stupid until a reboot. Windows rot.
I don't think modern versions of Windows resembles the unstable piece of crap it's made out to be here on Slashdot, but standby and hibernation are features I just plain cannot rely on. I look at Mac users with envy on this point.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
it's possible there aren't any drivers for your wifi, graphics card and modem for gnu/linux. what you're doing is shooting someone in the legs and then laughing at them because they can't walk.
howie
How long did you have to spend getting all the drivers for the hardware in your windows machine? And how many reboots did you have to go through?
So it looks like windows didn't work out of the box either.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I've been using MS Windows since Windows 2.0 back in the late 1980s.
Office has always been a pig. Whether it is Word, Outlook or Excel. Even up to Windows NT 4.0, notepad.exe was the single most used application on Windows. notepad.exe is one of the few fast applications on Windows precisely because it only contains features one uses, as opposed to Word which tries to be everything to everybody.
Microsoft has *always* been slow, under engineered and buggy because Microsoft has always been business first, computing second.
...it's your HARDWARE that's too slow.
My Windows is so slow because I've got so many games installed on it. But unlike my Windows box, my Linux box flies, even when I play Tetris.
Instead of taking on the whole infrastructure, let us just look at the process of install and configuration.
.net applications are directory based and discovery of binary and resources can be rule based relative to that directory. Configuration is now done using XML files (but with lots of clever "tokenization" extensions to allow flexibility and confusion). But even here, there are shifting rules and different schools of thought. Is the application supposed to be delivered relative to directories served up through a web server, in a separate directory for the application, or in some shared area?
Look at what has happened to windows over time for install and configuration.
First we started with all shared binary going in C:\windows\ or C:\windows\system32 (or for real old stuff C:\windows\system - already backward compatibility is confusing the issue). Configuration for applications was usually found in "ini" files in the C:\windows\ directory.
The next step was to have a global registry. Binary now could go wherever you wanted, but a new typical place was under C:\Program Files. In order to place the binary where you wanted, you had to create not only randomly generated unique Ids (GUIDs) for the identifying the application, but also for any interfaces, resources, and so on. This made registering even a simple VB COM control require 12 separate registry entries that shifted on each rebuild.
In order to support this crazy hodgepodge, the operating system had code that automatically updated registry entries if you rename a COM control (or an OCX for some familiar with those instead). A very bad idea if I ever heard of one.
Today, Microsoft has finally gone back to a solution that Unix started out with. Now many of the new
If Microsoft had a chance to rewrite windows and all 3rd applications from the ground up, do you think for a second that configuration and installs would be anywhere as confusing and mish mashed as it is today?
I am glad Apple is finally providing a choice to consumers. Either you get a vast complicated OS full of support for backward compatibility for a huge army of old 3rd party applications or you get a clean brand new single solution but with good support only for brand new shiny applications.
Apple doesn't support much hardware that's new either. Talk about Easy Street!
That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation.
So explain why Apple didn't have a proper multitasking OS until years after NT was introduced to the market. They couldn't even develop it inhouse (witness Copland/Rhapsody) and had to pick up the Next developers to get people who had a clue about OS design.
Quartz isn't exactly the paragon of efficiency either.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
You just posted my emotions right there! I was gonna start by pointing out errors in people's logic, throw a bunch of lite distros (DSL, Puppy, vector) for them to try, but I would have to post the same old stuff again and frankly I'm bored. Then I stopped and thought that it was a losing cause. These people don't want linux, they want an excuse not to use it. So I defaulted back to choice. Let them use windows for all I care. It is probably the only system they deserve. I've optimized a ton of windows systems, but couldn't ever get one to run faster than an optimized linux installation on the same hardware. The only drawbacks I have found that sometimes hinder linux's performance in comparison to windows is generic drivers for graphic cards. But the funny thing, is that even then the performance is on par with windows, if not better (this is the case for my trident cyber 9388 gpu laptop) in video playback. I just stopped wanting to reply alltogether. I actually love how people are amazed at the speed I get out of this old laptop with linux, using modern software. It's better to see real reactions.
You deserve an insighful or an interesting atleast mod for your proposition: Ship them over to digg. People like these are why microsoft is still in business.
I'm curious as to what you're basing this on. The most obvious methods of measuring apps' 'memory usage' on linux are completely wrong and give a very false figure, because they account for memory which is shared by several processes. The gtk+ libs for instance will get counted many times on a gnome system, when they're all (mostly) using the same area of memory.
Even the amount of 'free' memory on a linux system is misleading, because linux doesn't like to see memory being wasted and hence fills 'free' memory with disk buffers.
So how are they using 'way too much' memory? Are you getting oomkiller problems? Is your machine going into swap after loading minesweeper?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
This is moded Insightful? This proves that it is not only the commentators, who don't read the article, this proves that the moderation system here is stupid, because it gives +5Insightful to a comment that is OFFTOPIC.
Topic in question is 'Why is MS slow in releasing the next version of Winodws.
Read the freaking article:
The company's marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers -- and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.
You can't handle the truth.
I think I've been saying this for over 4 years now.
What Microsoft needs now more than ever is a NEW NT. The Original NT project (the one XP is based off of) was in 1988 a very modern, and expandable OS. It was fast, reliable and built from the ground up to be better than the previous incarnations of Win DOS. Now in 2006, it's time to start fresh.
The first thing they need to do is look at the current versions of windows and chuck it out the window. The Next Gen OS shouldn't use any legacy windows unless it's just simply the best way of doing that particular job and can be recoded to be native to the Next Gen OS. With computers having multiple cores, virtualization on the CPU die, and huge amounts of memory, there's no reason why MS couldn't emulate anything legacy (either with CPU partitioning or a Connectix Emulation like solution) on this new Theoretical NT. Then, build this new NT using modern day practices.
From there, you release the product with those other OS versions built into the emulation kernel of the Next Gen OS. That way, when this new NT detects a legacy application, it will run in a protected virtual subset of the previous generation's OS instead of running native. Yes, there will be a performance hit, but most office apps won't be affected, and if coded correctly, the system would be able to translate hardware calls to make games run relatively fast for an emulated system. This Emulation situation will only get better as processors get faster and with more cores.
The time is now MS. It's time to put your engineers to the task of rebuilding Windows into the secure, reliable and robust OS it should be.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
+5 Informative? This is OFF-TOPIC. The article is not about MS Windows being a slow OS, it is about the time it takes MS to release the next version of the operating system.
The moderation system is broken, it relies on people who don't bother to read the text themselves.
You can't handle the truth.
Since the earliest days of the PC when people were doing anything they could to eek out some performance and speed from the machines on peoples desktops, programmers have been 'breaking the rules.' I don't know where it started, but from my observation, it was with programmers bypassing the BIOS and doing direct writes to the screen to get reasonable speed. As the underlying OS evolved and improved, the software that didn't follow the rules (and even some that did) stopped working properly. Microsoft was faced with some pretty tough business decisions.
Microsoft was (and still is) hell-bent on getting customers to buy upgrades and to keep them locked in. If their old apps don't work on the new OS, they will not want to upgrade... at least not until their apps are upgraded to work on the newer OS. So they wrote into their OS code that will behave in certain ways for specific programs... even specific versions of specific programs. This, in my opinion, is all part of MS's strategy to keep people upgrading and to keep them locked in as much as possible. What's wrong with that strategy? Nothing... not at first. But now, decades later, we're seeing what that practice is leading to.
It really must be tough to manage all that legacy code like that. If they just refused to support software that didn't comply with documented API standards and refused to support software that doesn't work their newer OSes, the result would be a leaner, meaner and possibly more secure OS... but people would definitely be slower about upgrading.
The GP post, just like your post should be moded down to OFFTOPIC. The article is not talking about the speed of the Operating System, but about the speed of MS releasing the new OS into the world. So here you go, you did not read the article and if the GP gets moded down, you already assumed that you know the reasons behind it. What if a miracle happens, and a moderator reads the article and mods the GP down, should that mean that you are also flamebaiting?
You can't handle the truth.
"Mind you, I am all about open-source and everything, but Linux is not as easy to setup and use as Windows XP, or even Mac OSX, for that matter."
To make a that statement means you own a Windows, Linux and OSX box and have used them equally. Few people accomplish that. I have Linux, OpenBSD (mostly embedded devices) and OSX boxes at home but forced to use a Windows box at work. So I fell I have a lot of time on all those boxes. And my experience on ease of use finds the OSX box unmached.
And I find Linux and *BSD to be the nicest to use in terms of being free from commercial bull crap and lock-in to file formats. Also, though Linux may be less than stellar at 2D video, try moving, say, 8GB file(s) from one directory to another on Windows, OSX, Linux or *BSD. You'll see a difference on the Windows box... slow.
Actually, I have a zt3000, pretty close specs. I run both Ubuntu and Windows, switching depending on what apps I need (usually Ubuntu, CAD work and Guild Wars in Windows). On a fresh install of Ubuntu, everything works except the SD slot (well, it will read MMC or whatever the gimpy SD is, but not the improved SD spec). Other than that annoyance, every feature and button works perfectly.
I suppose they could have changed the way they spec the buttons on the 5000, but I can't see a good reason why.
Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinantly rich and their technology inordinantly influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yor look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly poisition turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Seastead this.
HAHAHAHAHA... /me shakes head in disbelief
oh sorry you were being serious?
Well, most of it will likely work regardless or their OEM sent them a disc of drivers with the laptop that will make them work.
But holding Apple up as the example for dealing with legacy code is hardly the answer. The Mac OS through OS 9 bent over backwards to work with legacy code. Mac OS X includes an entire virtual machine architecture to enable users to run old Mac OS 9 programs. That virtual machine's main characteristic is that it's SLOW.
But even when you're not running legacy code, OS X is still slow. As I've reported in my blog recent article on Ars Technica showed that Mac OS X, running on the same hardware as Windows XP, is substantially slower at doing the same software tasks.
And OS X isn't just slower than Windows on the same hardware. OS X is slower than Linux on the same hardware.
Worse, OS X has little performance problems built into it, like the World Clock Dashboard Widget that can (if you leave it up long enough) drag your system to its knees. For just a CLOCK!
Give me Windows or Linux any day. OS X isn't ready for prime time as far as I'm concerned. Neither one locks me into any specific hardware configuration, both offer the software I need and want, at prices I can handle.
Well-played, timecop. Well-played.
Definitely don' delete IE :-)
Windows XP Embedded lets you do a thing similar to what you are describing - you can create an image only with the components you select and the tool keeps track of component dependancies so it prevents you from creating a broken image by requiring the missing dependancies.
This is where the fun starts. There are dependancies you wouldn't imagine. I wanted to create a very minimalistic XP image with basic API functionality and TCP/IP networking. Impossible. The DHCP component requires the SNMP component, which requires the HTML Help component, which requires, yes you guessed it, Internet Explorer !!!! DHCP client -> Internet Explorer : it makes perfect sense.
Then I foolishly wanted to add SP2's firweall support. The firewall required all kinds of COM and DCOM components, including Microsoft Transaction Server (!!!) or similar crap and of course Internet Explorer as well. Why, oh, why, does a network firewall require Microsoft Transaction Server ?
Of course these dependancies are not always critical - I am sure I could have deleted IE from the image and DHCP would still have worked - but nevertheless it is funny that MS claims IE is not a part of the OS, while it must be present in the simplest OS image :-)
Getting back to the subject - I definitely wouldn't use a tool like nLite - you end up with an unsupported custom version of Windows and you never know what is going to break, which service pack or update is not going to install, etc. It is not worth the hassle.
I have not been able to make all those things work with ANY Linux installation out of the box, and I have tried with quite a few including FC4, Ubuntu, Mandriva and SUSE.
Is it because you eat n00bcakes?
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
I believe the point of the article is not to point out any performance deficiency in windows but rather how "fast on their feet" MS is when it comes to innovation in windows.
TFA was about how fast they could build an OS, not how fast the OS ran. Nobody read TFA? Well, this IS slashdot, after all. The original slashdot blurb could have been a bit more precise. Did the submitter even read the article he submitted?
/Y APP 3) when the registry is corrupted, whether by hardware failure, vurus, adware or whatever, you're hosed. You have to reinstall Windows, reinstall all your apps, and restore your data from backup.
It seems neither hype7 nor Zonk read the farticle. "The New York Times is running an article on why they think Windows is so slow." No, that's just plain incorrect. The New York Times is running an article on why they think Windows development is so slow.
However, since what Zonk asked why Windows is slow, not why its development is slow, here you go:
The Windows registry!
I recently installed XP over 98 (could no longer get drivers, so much for legacy support). I'd reinstalled 98 in a new, clean slate. During XP's install it said "Your computer will boot faster!"
Well, sure, if you have a 5 year old install of 98 with a 10 gig registry. But on a clean 98 install vs a clean XP install, XP boots far slower than 98.
I miss good old DOS for two reasons: 1) software installation/deinstallation. Just make a new subdirectory and dump all the supplied files there, and it runs. 2) uninstalling an app is as simple as DELTREE
Ten years later I'm still trying to fuigure out why anybody thought the registry was a good idea. Anyone?
Well, the other one is a Celeron! I wouldn't expect that to even run Windows 3.1 very well.
Developmentally challenged.
;)
Oh...pun intended.
here's what i think Microsoft should do: (at least, what i'd do in their shoes.)
scrap MFC. drop ActiveX. remove GDI+. get rid of everything. rewrite the kernel. or, maybe use the Linux kernel - for the irony.
port Wine and use that for the compatibility layer. they're good at making things easy to use, so they should be able to figure that out - and improve its support for more windows programs. it'd be nice if they contributed to Wine in return, but no matter.
design a whole new API from scratch: gear it toward simplicity and scalability. POSIX has worked for a long time, so maybe that?
retool DirectX to operate lower-level. more on terms with OpenGL. slim, light, programmable pipeline, lowest common denominator, but extensible.
...
ah, hell. fuck that shit. they should just contribute to the Linux kernel, X.org, Wine, and write their own DM. that'd be easier.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Suposedly Windows is slow since it has to support legacy hardware. But Linux supports more legacy hardware than Windows. So, by that logic, Linux should be slower than Windows... Since that is not the case, I don't think support for legacy hardware is the reason Windows is slow...
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
"Neither Windows nor Linux uses kernel audio mixing -- they rely on hardware mixing instead."
0 29 for some video discussing the new solution.
You're simply incorrect. Others have covered ALSA on Linux so I'll not touch that here. Windows 2000 shipped with something called KMixer which did software audio mixing six years ago. Windows Vista is getting rid of this and going with something new called the Audio Engine that does the mixing is user mode. See http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=146
Before you pay attention to NutscrapeSucks check his posting history.
Windows XP will run on a machine with 128mb RAM, and it is usable. but not for very long
Even if you are a windows fanboy you will feel like throwing the thing out the window after a few minutes because how slow it is. And I'm talking about just XP running on that machine, nothing else that would slow it down.
If the people with mod points actually read the article themselves 90% of the replies to this article would be modded "Off Topic".
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
/ducks!
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Every new version of Windows has to support all this old, broken software, because someone, somewhere is using it for a critical business application.
I'm not sure I buy this... If this old, broken software is being used for a critical business application, who in their right mind is messing with it by upgrading the OS?
I have a feeling the backwards compatibility in Windows, in practice anyway, actually serves to benefit the average consumer more than it does the average business.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
I know the listed speeds are dramatically different, but I've noticed that celeron processors are dramatically slower than their full-priced counterparts. I'd like to see that comparison against two equally-spec'd "350MHz" machines. THAT one, I'd believe.
It just backs up my longtime axiom: "Friends don't let friends buy celerons"
And you see the difference on Mac something like 10% of all apps need a patch to run after even minor OS upgrades.
Care to name a source, or even give an example?
I have never had to update an app to work after a minor OS update.
10% might be more accurate for major OS updates like Jaguar to Tiger, which changed a number of system level things that required updates of some lower level tools like disk repair utilities. However that was the first major release that broke much software in that way, normally I'd say 10% is high even for major updates.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can grab the statically linked binaries off of my Simtel CD set that includes Slackware 2.x and run them. The old statically linked a.out files will run if I put that executable support in, and any statically linked ELF binaries also load fine. Both of those existed 10 years ago (right around when most people had switched to ELF).
Dynamically linked ones can work, too, provided I install the libraries that support them (and I can install them concurrently with modern libraries, since their names include the versions of their interfaces). Only libraries and programs that directly use the Linux system call interface (not the POSIX interface) are unlikely to work.
Quake binaries of that era function. The OpenGL 1.x interface they use is provided via my OpenGL libraries. OSS is emulated by Alsa. I can use fancy new binaries given by the Quake source code, if I want, but it's not required.
In fact, the best part about Linux you could say, is that I am not locked to archaic binary interfaces because most of my code is available in source form to everyone, including people who are willing to recompile it for me and provide it in a nice distribution (Kuuntu) with minimal interaction on my part.
So we can support legacy, but we choose not to. This choice is important in software use freedom.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What has boot time to do with responsiveness? And what has DOS to do with runlevel 3??? You really make me wonder about your perspective now.
While MS is spending money and delayed, I doubt they are in as bad a shape as Apple was. XP, even 2K are stable operating systems. What will Vista offer? More Eye Candy?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
hmm, i fear that the word have become worn out...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Don't buy consumer machines. Buy small business machines. Nice and clean.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
I guest the parent comment its very informative, please mod up.
-Woof woof woof!
Backwards compatibility, and even testing constraints cannot account for Microsoft's sluggish release cycle. This can only be accounted for by an architecture that does not admit to easy expansion.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How many reboots? Clearly you need to reboot your brain my dear fellow. I installed xp on my lifebook a week ago and it needed one reboot to get the drivers installed, as you'd expect.
it really is amusing to check in on slashdot nowadays- at this point in time there's no doubt that the majority of contributors are suffering from real delusions.
We all listen to the sad clowns who wastes thier money on a Mac and insists that they've gotten value for money in terms of computing power. BTW have you noticed how how quickly the look of apple computers date; even the famous Mac design flair is a bit lame if you happen to tire of translucent plastic or something that looks like a cheese grater. Of course you can always swallow the marketing crap and get your wallet out (again!)
But check it out, unless you use IE and allow your machine to be burdened with malware, a properly configured pc with xp is lightning fast with any application you might need a computer for. Turn off all the the eye candy and it'll piss on any other os.
You might not like it but its true.
When Mac OS X was released, there was a 'compatibility layer' for OS 9 apps, but it was slow and kludgy as hell. That was a clear message to the users and the developers like 'Hey, this is a new OS, you'd better buy/develop apps that are specifically written for it!', and within a year every major app was modified to run natively on OS X, and the OS9 layer could be removed.
Microsoft is way too nice for the users and developers. They make things just too compatible. If you want to develop in VB now like you did back in '96, you can, and people can run your software. This is not how it's supposed to be and this is killing Windows development. In one of the comments on the Minimsft blog I read that Vista will have 86 different technologies like RPC/MAPI/COM/OLE/OLEDB/VB/VB.NET/.NET 1.0/.NET 1.1/DTC/COM+/WPF/WPF-E/Windows Forms/etc (quote), mostly just for compatibility. Why do they implement those technologies so good? Do it crappy (but just not crappy enough to make users too angry) and people will stop using them, switch to new technologies, and you can clean up your OS!
If OS X had provided native OS9-support, there would still be people devving like they did for OS Classic, and updates to OS X would be a lot harder to do for Apple.
All they do is make iPods, right? I mean, what other products do they make that even matter (statistically speaking)? Anyone have the numbers on total number of COMPUTERS and where Apple lands? I am talking Data Centers, homes, coffee shops, etc. If Apple had as many things to worry about as MS, they'd never get anywhere. And, the only innovative thing I have seen from EITHER company is the iPod. Screw patents, what has changed my life is the personal computer (uhm, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Timex Sinclair, Apple and many others) and the Internet (DARPA). MS wrote the BASIC code for some of the above..... and the GUI? Come on, everyone knows Xerox threw it to Apple. For those who think I have never owned a Mac.... sorry - I had a SE30 in the early days..... biggest waste of money I ever spent.... system bombs up the wazoo - more than my clean, non-user fudged Windows 3.0 machine. And IP entries required a REAL knowledge of IP..... LOL, innovation, yeah. LocalTalk.... yeah, funny - Slowest network I was ever on... even then, ARCnet & Starlan were faster. The ONLY things Apple has done right is marketing (gotta hand it to them) and the iPod. The rest, I am not impressed..... at all. - Colby
My parents got their first Mac in about 1985, and gradually updated the hardware with things like a hard disk and an external fan. They get the Performa 630 some time in the early 90s, but kept the old Mac around because some third-party apps they liked never ported to 7.x. Last fall my mom finally decided she ought to upgrade to a new iMac, largely because she needed a bigger brighter screen and didn't want to burn the desk space that a large CRT would require. (Also her Mac support guy had retired and lives across town, and she doesn't drive any more.) As far as I can tell, anything she used to use on 7.x has newer versions or adequate replacements under 10.x, and she's dealt with the 6.x mailing-label program's non-portability by getting someone else to run the civic association mailing lists.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...why can't they deliver a decent gaming experience?
Of course they can make tough decisions. They have to in order to survive! The PC market is sort of their appetizer, just to squeek by until the next opportunity (a la iPod) arises.
Their lack of software is rediculous. They don't, to the best of my limited knowledge, even have their own productivity\business suite! If they can't outdo MS to the extent that MS is bad for users business, they can't compete.
If they can't deliver gamers, then they aren't delivering anything but niche-market devices.
It's like comparing oranges and pianos. They both involve wood.
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
what kind of weird things dude-
you mean like you realise that you don't really know much about computers and you're a bit of a dunce who needs to hate MS coz thats the only way you can differentiate yourself
or weird like you realise that computers are just a tool and life is way too short for trying to express yourself with esoteric os crap.
If by "it still uses a 20 year old...method of talking with the video card", you mean openGL, then yes, its first incarnation is quite old, but by that standard DirectX is probably 10 years old by now.
Wow - Really!?! Weeks! Amazing
% uptime
12:17:42 up 212 days, 55 min, 23 users, load average: 0.94, 0.67, 0.38
The typical Mac, Linux or BSD user expects to never have to reboot for anything other then hardware failure or the very rare critical kernel update. I expect months of uptime.
That seems an ironic comment. Pretty much all throughout the System 7 days, System 6 was still supported. And when they made their switch over to the PowerPC hardware, overwhelmingly large sections of the operating system code ran emulated, making them far slower.
This strikes me as cherry-picking data.
A have several hardware pieces that do not work with Windows but work fine with Linux.
I believe there are more drivers in Linux than in Windows kernels.
Funny that if I combine my two (okay maybe a little exaggerated) rules of thumb their speed becomes roughly equivalent: p4 - 50% hit, celeron - another 50%.
Come on you fuckers, don't you dare drop legacy support! If I can't continue to run my SiS onboard, dual-screened with a Matrox card from 1988, on my Asrock mobo with a Cyrix processor, my funky-ass coax-only network card, and my sound card made by some freaky reman company out of taiwan that only made 4 cards in total before the entire factory burst into flame.... well, that would just prove how much Windoze suxxxxors!!11 /sarcasm
/am/ impressed that I can take most hardware, plug it into a random box, run a 2k or XP install, and at least get it to the point where it starts up and tells me what it's missing. In most cases, the most it complains about is that I'm using a 10-year old video card, and it's gonna give me "ugly mode" until I get that fixed up.
Seriously, legacy support is one of those things I remind everyone about when they complain how much windows sucks and how complex the code is. Yeah, it kinda sucks, it makes things a bit slower and less stable... but would YOU like to try and code something so that 100,000 different parts, made by random manufacturers who may be out of business, and probably didn't follow spec, have at least a chance of working properly together? I'm not a fanboi, but I
I applaud their efforts to try and rewrite, just as I applaud their efforts to try and keep legacy support going... but with the move to 64 bit, PCI-E becoming standard... perhaps it's time to put the hammer down, and say "No, we're sorry, Vista supports hardware made after 2003, and that's it. I'm sorry son, but your Rage 3D card and your Voodoo2 add-on are just gonna have to be upgraded."
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
You were talking out of your ass. Let me illustrate:
"And as the other poster pointed out, older versions of glibc are not compatible with the current version of the library. How many 10-year-old binaries do you have that are statically linked with glibc?"
glibc wasn't used 10 years ago in many distributions, libc4 and 5 were. Anything that did link with glibc was likely statically linked so that they could be run on libc4 and libc5 systems. The glibc movement didn't occur until a few years later when glibc2 became a viable library.
"Do you really want to install and maintain older versions of that and dozens of other libraries? Don't you realize that that's even more confusing and convoluted than Windows?"
No, it's less confusing and convoluted because under Windows, where your DLL files were not strongly versioned or protected.
mfc42.dll had a number of versions more than 10 and less than 40. Netscape 3, 4 both had different mfc42.dll files shipped with them. Any shareware application that shipped with it and didn't check before hand could overwrite it and turf your system. Only in Win2k and up do they have a DLL cache that resists such behaviour.
I can install libc4 and 5 alongside my modern glibc2 easily and without troubles. Provided they use the POSIX interface, they will run cleanly. On a BSD, I'm even better off, because the Linux personality can take care of any nasty differences to the non-POSIX APIs.
Linux can have a setup similar to Windows, except it has fewer gotchas lurking. Thanks to the way the Open source philosophy is, we don't have to worry about it.
Your original argument was a straw man. When I reply to your statement about binary compatibility ("You have a modern system running Linux that can run a binary that was compiled 10 years ago? That's honestly pretty hard to believe. Can you give an example?") such that I show it's a non-issue due to the different social behaviours around free software, you claim I am attacking you personally and make a further straw man about binary compatibility. You are a troll.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This is poor, even for the NYT - a shameless puff piece trotted out by someone presumably in Bill G's pocket. It helps to deflect attention hitherto focused on the Vista delay announcement. "Oh, poor Microsoft," we cry. "How they have suffered to make Windows so very backward compatible. This must be the reason for the delay." And so it continues ad nauseam.
Rubbish. Utter rubbish. As numerous people have attested in this disucssion, it is often necessary to retain Windows 9x boxen in order to ensure compatibility with a particular piece of software on which one has to depend. And that ignores the innumerable hiccups encountered in the switch from DOS/Windows 3.x to Windows 95. It was ten years ago, now, so I will grant that some may have forgotten (or, at a guess, given the profusion of Myspace-era teens on Slashdot these days, they were not around to even remember), but a lot broke in that switch. At that age, my particular peeve was games, although the experienced - among which I like to include myself - were generally able to continue wrestling with fancy memory configurations in order to get such software to run. Still, it certainly wasn't easy, by any means.
The switch to the NT kernel has brought even more difficulties, many of them insurmountable. If you still have a piece of DOS software that NT won't run, there is no MS-DOS mode to restart in; the command prompt is sufficient for some but not all requirements. Certainly anyone who still wants to crack out an old DOS game under Windows XP is totally fucked, although one might like to remind them that it is time to move on...
Still, all of this would be as naught if it were not for the perpetual insistence on attributing the resplendent brilliance of Apple's Mac OS X to its willingness to shirk a supposed responsibility for backwards compatibility, the idea being that Windows sucks because it has excellent backwards compatibility. I have never understood this argument.
Probably because it is bunk. Among a diverse array of boxen at home - running, I might add, DOS, Linux, OpenBSD and Windows - I run Mac OS X 10.4 on a PowerBook G4. I am not about to indulge in a lengthy diatribe about the myriad ways in which Mac OS X is superior to Windows (or Linux, or...), because that has been ably done already, but I feel a short note on backwards compatibility is in order, seeing as it is that which is under attack.
Mac OS X has excellent backwards compatibility. I would argue in fact that from a user's perspective it is in some ways better than, say, that of Windows XP. It is beyond doubt that from a technical perspective, Mac OS X's backwards compatibility is superior to that of Windows XP. Consider why:
A quick perusal of various of the abandonware sites will render unto you a very plethora of old software for your DOS PC or Mac box. The difference is that you'll need an emulator to run the for-DOS stuff. Most of the time, anyway. On Mac OS X, assuming the Classic environment is installed (and I grant that it no longer is by default, but it is supplied on the Install DVD), you just double click the icon and within, say, a minute, you are playing a way on a classic version of Monkey Island from the early 90s. Maybe earlier. Oh, and with sound. Or perhaps the first version of Microsoft Word floats your boat. I have an old Japanese version of Microsoft Office on here which has proved indispensible on more than one occasion.
What is impressive is that some of this software is 20 years old and still works. Not only was it written for a totally different operating system, but it was written for a totally different chip architecture too. It integrates well too. An icon for a Mac OS 9 (or earlier) application can simply be placed in the Dock like any other application, and it runs - with menu bar and everything - just as it would in Mac OS 9. Whatever you may make of Windows or the Mac, that kind of compatibility is amazing
How about the fact that when I log out from GNOME, my free memory increases by around 500 MiB? I would think that is about as accurate a measure as you can get. And indeed, I then count the free pages excluding blockdev caches. I don't really mind that it uses much memory, if only it weren't for the fact that I'll have to wait 10 seconds every now and then to get a process paged in from swap.
I mean, don't get me wrong and all -- I use GNOME and I like it, but it is terribly resource-inefficient, and the vast part of all dynamic memory allocated in GNOME programs is most likely not allocated by glib or gtk (since I have written programs myself using Gtk that don't use at all as much memory as even gcalctool). I just can't help thinking that it should be possible to optimize it a lot. (Of course, before you mention it, I have been thinking about taking the task upon myself, but I just have too many other things to do.) I read that one of the large pieces of news about GNOME 2.14 was that it's supposed to be heavily optimized, but I haven't tried it yet (it's not unmasked on portage yet).
It's not backwards compatability which causes Windows to be so slow, it's the crappy Virtual Memory Manager. It is flawed by design causing large amounts of physical memory to be paged-out to the page file(s) on hard disk (which is massively slow by comparison) while there is still plenty of physical RAM available. You can see this in Task Manager on systems with >1GB RAM installed, using maybe only 100-200MB after startup, but with that much and more also in the page file. The system I'm typing this on has 534MB of RAM available but there's 356MB sitting in the page file! Why?
Whilst backwards compatability in the API doesn't help to inspire speed, this could easily be solved by running Virtual Machine environments which wrap the older apps and their older API's. Vista would represent an ideal opportunity for MS to implement this, especially now it has been delayed even further (why not scrap and start again - OSX was developed from scratch in less time). Since an out-of-the-box machine is slow running only "new" applications, though, I don't personally accept backwards compatability as the reason for the slow-down.
Processes routinely hog the CPU or disk on my WinXP Pro gaming machine, making the GUI unresponsive for several seconds. By contrast, yesterday I had the CPU on my Ubuntu machine at work loaded to nearly 100% with a big PostgreSQL query, and Firefox remained fully responsive.
You must be new here.
While we are at, I suspect MS is successful because they paid a gognards weight in gold to the Elf King Rehudel.
Oh, and Windows is slow because the hamster inside gets tired. That is why restarting it works so well, because it gives the hamster a rest.
Before you pay attention to jimijon check his posting history.
...some people just may oblige you when you issue a challenge.
Of $5.709B total revenue, $3.397B were iPod and Other Related Music Products and Services.
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q106data_sum.pdf
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's easier to ignore your customers when you don't really have many to begin with.[/cruel but true]
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I surely haven't seen OS X perform any better than Windows XP Pro both on freshly installed systems. If anything the user experience on OS X seems to be consistently like swimming through pea soup. I've been told by MacHeads that this is for a consitent feel.
Strange article, yes there is legacy support it's why you can run the OS on so many different hardware configurations and still use you older peripherals.
I guess only Macheads are willing to throw everything out every 4 years and start over. Of course after spending a premium on a sole source solution Macintosh what do they care about another $500-$1000 in peripheral replacments.
It's not slow because of legacy software, it's slow because of legacy design. Windows is designed for localized single user monotasking. There's a lot of networking, multiuser and multitasking blobs and layers tacked on, but underneath it's still operating with a legacy CPM/86 mentality.
If you're only running one application, Windows is damned fast. But it starts to significantly slow down after a certain number of applications. Have an admin log in remotely for some maintenance and it starts to seriously drag. I don't have a problem with this, because I'm in the habit of keeping crap off my system tray and shutting down applications after I'm done using them. But a coworker never shuts down any application. She may have twenty or thirty different windows up on her screen, and her habit is to keep minimizing stuff until she finds what she wants. Her system is dog slow, and restoring a particular window can take two to five seconds (on a 2Ghz system).
But the exact same behavior on her Solaris workstation does not result in a slowdown. The disorganization is still there, but the cold molasses sluggishness is not.
Another example. When I compile software under Windows, that's pretty much all I can do. Every other application starts stuttering, and the whole system drags. But compiling software under my FreeBSD or OSX systems results in no noticable slowdowns. Even with three simultaneous builds going on, my FreeBSD KDE desktop is just as fast and responsive as ever.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
So far, no one has been able to answer this question for me: Why must individual processes be loaded every time a system boots? I'm curious as to why "hibernation" is not the default way of loading an operating system into memory. Why not have a ram image of the operating system that is loaded at boot? It takes seconds flat to go from completely off to ready to go, as opposed to the traditional way of manually starting each process one by one which can take upwards of 20-30 seconds (the terror!) on a new system.
I know that as one does updates to a system (or other kinds of changes) the said processes will change, but could the operating system not just create a new image to reflect that when necessary?
It seems so glaringly obvious to me that there must be a good reason that it does not work like that. I know one thing, I'm quite happy with the hibernation feature on my girlfriend's laptop. I wish my powerbook could do the same thing. Hibernation is vastly superior suspend / sleep. I seem to have some degree of expectation now that when I go to my laptop it should be absolutely ready to go with little to no boot up time, but unless I want to waste battery life by sleeping (And no, the "breathing" LED is not cute) I have to boot from scratch.
Please, save me from my ignorance!
Actually, the feature-laden complexity of Windows and Office has benefitted Microsoft over the years. This is something the Times article doesn't really mention, but which is an important point.
If Microsoft had engineered Windows and its other applications according to widely-accepted technical design principles like modularity, interchangeability, complete and open specification (would have ironed out device driver issues better) it would have made maintenance much easier now. But doing that would also have opened them up to more competition along the way and the possibility of people migrating and branching to competing products and losing market share. Bundling everything together and "leveraging Windows" (BG's mantra) was a successful business strategy for keeping competitors at bay and discouraging users considering a switch to something else.
My sympathies go out to the worker bees in Redmond who have lost out on the big stock appreciation and arrived just in time to re-tie an even larger Gordian Knot. All work and no pay.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
They can hire Google to index their entire existing code base. The new OS can be made by developers "googling" for existing code where needed and cutting and pasting it in!
This will be just like programming for OSS! Bound to improve efficiency and Vista or whatever the new OS is called will be done in no time!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I know the article doesn't have to do with the speed of the operating system. But that's much more fun to talk about.
I have been using the same computer with the same install of Windows 2000 for 3 years. I was as happy as could be about its performance when freshly installed. I have been able to go so long because I keep a lean machine. I have never gotten a virus nor any really bad spyware.
However, with each service pack install and especially with hotfix installs, the computer got slower and slower. Four service packs and 53! hot fixes later, my computer now runs like it has a 6502 (gosh I think I just dated myself).
Jaguar to Tiger is a 2 point minor upgrade (10.2 to 10.4). As for sources just google for it you'll get lots of info (quite a bit on Apple's site) and for example Tiger Review: Incompatibilities and Workarounds, or updates required.
Well there's the problem, you are msireading Apple version numbers!
Jaguar to Tiger was on the order of the shift from Windows 98 to Win2k. A lot of system API's were changed (some finalized for hte first time)and many core frameworks added.
When reading the Apple version numbers understand that you are talking about "OS Ten" version "4" (with tiger). The 4 is not a minor number, and the 10 will never increment (at least not for a few decades). For instance, the current version os OS X is "10.4.5". The ".5" is the minor number, and then of course for even finer grained releases before public updates there are build numbers as well.
As for the incomaptibilities, I note those are all Tiger - as I said there were a lot more of those than for other releases. Note how many of those are mostly cosmetic or have minor workarounds. Try to find a list like that for 10.4.4 to 10.4.5, or even for Panther to Jaguar and it's far shorter - much less than 10% of the apps (and the lists you found are not even 10% of the avilaible applications on OS X).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thought it was just me. Microsoft Visual Studio suffers from slacked-jawed waits and tardiness as I type. What's the point of having Dual-Core-3GHz+ monsters if Gate's minions can't write software that uses it efficiently. Honestly, my old Commodore 64 more responsive!
Notice to the article was by John Markoff, the reporter who framed Kevin Mitnick. Surprised he didn't blame Kevin... "who used a Captain Crunch Whistle to hack through the Microsoft Switchboard, then whistled viruses into Bill's Server." I just hope the movie is better than "Takedown." x-o
I'd heard from people who should know that VISTA is still going to be based on COM. Given the new loader in Dot-Net and the possibility of having that at a deeper level, with UNIX-like side by side versioning and shared loading, it's too much work for Microsoft to remove COM and replace it in VISTA.
COM is a real pain at the moment. When debugging in Visual Studio 2005 if we take more than 60 seconds thinking about it we get a COM timeout exception and the whole thing falls apart. Not sure if all application types suffer this, but ours does. 60 seconds to complete all debugging.
I can tell you why it's slow; everyone (especially Microsoft) insists on storing data in the registry. Proof: if you do a fresh install of WinXP, it's snappy, but as you add programs (especially Visual Studio or MS Office for example) it sloooows down. No, it's not because the harddrive is filling, it's because to do anything, the OS has to navigate the now bloated registry file.
Just say NO to registry bloat -- next time you write software, use an *.xml file to store configuration data!
Everyone has seen slow Windows and they want to know WHY it's slow. No one cares about Microsoft being slow to develop new Windows or IE or whatever. Yawwwn.
It is very easy to infer from the summary that the article is about Windows run-time performance.
"Geepers! The Slashdot editors have posted random jolly junk again!"
Read Pynchon.
Actually it's the statically compiled programs that have more compatibility problems, because they may refer to fixed memory structures or interfaces that nrmally would dwell in the .so. Dynamically compiled programs may run fine for years if the interface doesn't change. That isn't likely in Gnu/Linux, because people are coming up with new interfaces all the time and abandoning the old ones, but on stodgier OSes like Solaris you'll have better luck.
For example, we are able to run a couple of old horrible legacy apps on Solaris 9 and 10 as well as the Veritas Netbackup client software be bought in 2000, when Solaris 8 was brand new.
Not that it's a bad thing, the GNU/Linux efforts put a little less emphasis on backwards compatibility than the commercial OSes..
I upgrade my PCs about every 2 years, I upgrade my Macs every 3-6 years. Each OS X update has only increased the speed of my Macs. Every Windows update and service pack update has only bogged down my PCs, which is why I have to upgrade them more often. My PB 1Ghz is 3.5 years old and it's faster today, then it was when I bought it, and this is because of Apple's OS optimization. My XP3200 and MP2800 are both feeling slow these days.
h tml
Sole source solutions/peripherals? That's BULLSHIT!!! If you hadn't noticed, Macs like PCs have USB ports, so all the same USB devices I was using back in 99 still work on my Macs and my PCs today. Unless USB goes away, I won't have to replace any of my perhiperals until they die. Macs use the same perhiperals as PCs, lots of things have changed in the past decade. If you're refering to video cards, OS X has support for cards going back to the late ninties. Sure you can't run the latest and greatest CORE GPU effects on them, but they still work.
Here's a linke to Apple's official supported hardware. Some of these Macs were released 7 years ago; http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.
<]=)
My 486 is pretty responsive with the latest versions of the linux kernel, lynx, pine, and vim, for surfing the net, reading email, and writing documents. I could probably get software suspend working if I cared enough.
I'm in the Phoenix area if anyone wants to load XP on their 486 and have a showdown.
This space intentionally left blank.
The volume buttons on dell keyboard work with no problems on my mac, as well as all 5 buttons on my mouse, and my monitor is correctly identified (and sets up the resolutions and refresh rates) on both windows and mac with no user intervention. Only on linux do I have to run a console based program to tell my monitor what resolutions and refresh-rates it can use (and that often doens't work). Despite following the Ubuntu wiki exactly, I never did get it to display anything above an eye-hurting 60hz, even though it recognized my monitor model.
It's 2006, shit like this needs to be automatic.
Ooooh, look at you! What a stud you are with your four digit number. It's so sexy I can hardly control myself. Every word you type should be transcribed to paper scrolls and buried in clay jars for future generations to discover and worship. You are obviously the most intelligent person in the whole wide world, well, except for 5489 (and lower of course).
OK, now that's out of my system. I feel better.
Of course Apple can stay lean and mean by trimming the fat. Foremost they have but a couple dozen users. Who's going to care if they get pissed, no one would even hear them. Then there's the simple fact that making a machine obsolete forces that person to buy a new Mac, which in turn gives Apple more money.
That was the business model of the US auto manufacturers for many years. Build a car to last for a couple years tops so people will have to buy more cars. Worked great until the Japanese stuck their noses in.
So many people credit Apple with making all these great desicions that got them where they are today. Personally, I fault Apple for making all these ignorant decisions that got them where they are today.
If Apple is so friggin' wonderful as oh so many zealots would have us believe, then why are they not number one? The answer is simple to the rest of us. Just like their photoshop benchmarks for so many years, Macs looks great in very specific invdividual aspects. Yet when it comes to the overall product, when it comes to choosing either brand A or brand B, nearly everyone chooses brand A.
This is becuase almost no one buys a computer to accomplish only one very specific task. If Apple would stop clinging to the idea that they must lock down their product so that they can milk their current users for every last dime to make a profit, perhaps they would open their eyes to see that if they opened their product up to new customers they could profit more than they ever dreamed of before.
This is coming from a Mac and Windows user who uses both every day. I like both for different reasons, I hate both for different reasons, and I'll be the first to say that niether is even close to being great. Any current OS will look like wooden wagon wheels once someone comes out with an OS that isn't designed to control the user, but instead effortlessly allows the user to control the computer.
By the way, has anyone yet mentioned that the article isn't about Windows itself running slowly but rather the speed at which Microsoft produces new Windows technology?
Meh, It was ment to be a joke... you know... Funny...
Everybody knows you're not supposed to say slow, you're supposed to say special. Windows is very special.
Yes, Windows is slow because of WAY TOO MUCH legacy support. Yes, MacOS is faster because of WAY TOO LITTLE legacy support. But, no, MacOS is not a better OS because Apple makes those hard compatibility decisions to drop support for only 3 (maybe 5) year old hard and software. Everytime Apple releases a new version it drops support for so much of it's own older hardware that those people who still use that hardware are either forced to upgrade or forget about using ANYTHING designed for the new OS version, while for home users that's just fine for a good while, for businesses it means a LOT more money than just the cost of the software to be able to use a newer version of Final Cut or Adobe Creative Suite, etc. And Apple has no excuse for this except for greed. What's it take to support a 5 year old Apple? They make their own systems, they don't allow anyone else to make Apple-compatible systems, Apples are all shipped with all the hardware to run (mouse, keyboard, vidcard, soundcard, etc.) right out of the box. They don't need to package drivers for other companies' peripherals in the release, but still the support could be there. While Windows could use PLENTY of clening out, in the legacy area, it's still way more usable on older machines than MacOS will ever be. Legacy items in Windows that are so rarely used anymore should be removed, like support for ISA, EISA, VESA, 16bit programs, legacy ports (PS/2, paralel and serial) (all of which should be dropped from hardware also), legacy based modems (I know modems are still used, but there's USB for that), sound cards older than 5 years, old video cards (the standard VGA driver should be sufficient), MCI drivers, VfW and ACM (I know there'll be flames about that, but that's what DX is for), any SCSI standard older than 10 years ago, any imaging (printer, scanner, camera, plotter, digitizer, etc) older than 5 years ago, etc. And really it's not entirely MS's fault, look at the sheer number of different USB controller drivers built into Windows, why does every brand of controller need to make their's so radically different on the interface/software end that there needs to be more than one driver for just the system's USB controller? The real bloat comes from the bizzarre need for (example) VIA's USB hardware to be so incompatible with the standard driver that Windows doesn't even recognize that the USB controller supports HiSpeed (USB2) mode. Or that (again port-wise) 2 different firewire400 controllers can't use the same driver, even sometimes from the same company. It's understandable with advanced features on video and sound cards, but they should be made to at least FUNCTION in a stripped down mode with standard built in drivers, without the need for a full build of their own drivers shipped with the OS. The biggest problem with the speed of Windows is that hardware makers don't know how to resrain themselves when putting together their newest version of a device that outside of its componentry, functions the same way as a thousand other pieces of hardware. Just because they make a speedier, more stable SATA150 controller, doesn't mean there needs to be ANY FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE to the OS, it's still just another SATA150 controller. What can be done for those users that still need certain legacy devices, is, MS should at least release all of their legacy hard and software (16bit twunking, etc) drivers SEPERATELY from the OS. Or even better would be to drop internal maintenance of them entirely and release the source code into open source.
From the fine article:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Speed is just one metric of the inferior performance people can expect from Microsoft. The other measures are features and stability.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It certainly goes a long way to cut down on the total amount of disk space that Windows uses, but it doesn't have much of an impact on overall performance. Windows swaps to disk every chance it gets, making systems with "little" memory (64MB is "not enough" for even Windows 2000) nearly unusable. Windows 9x did better on systems that were short of memory but it still had some hideous problems in terms of swap file usage. If they could seriously stop with the heavy disk usage, I think the performance of the operating system overall would be noticably better. It's just insane how inefficiently Windows will use physical memory compared to something like Linux.
The blogger was softballing but the the NYT article is harsh. The slow development pace is tied directly to M$'s anti-competitive practices:
The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation. ... it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation - at Microsoft.
That's a quick way of stating that they made a monster they can't keep up. The article then goes on to say that the result is an OS that's not as good as others:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Yoffie must not be aware of how easy it is to replace Windoze.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I was wondering if you were going to reply to this?
Funny how I don't see anything like that outside your post.
The article does, however, mention the inferior performance of Windows:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Ouch!
Speed is one of many ways to measure that inferiority. It takes Windows longer to accomplish a given task on a given system than free software does. Other measures are stability, features and ease of use. With Windows, you have to be careful about the number of tasks you try to accomplish at once and the software suffers "bit rot" over time as the system is ruined by mal/spy ware. There are many things you can't do at all with Windows, such as the virtual desktop and pager manipulation found in Enlightenment and KDE.
Vista will do little to make up for any of these performance issues and will make most worse. The speed difference is a already huge. With Vista, it might reach a whole order of magnitude.
Only a Business School drone could think there's any hope for Microsoft to "pick up the pace" and compete. They've had five years to come up with something, anything, better than XP and failed. As people have proved by running alternate systems on Xbox have proved, DRM and Palladium are boodogles that won't work and no one wants.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
One reason its slow its because it enables so many services and ones you might not even use. It should know not to enable Bluetooth service or Wireless unless you are using it, thats what "Automatic" is for isn't it? When I tweak XP I like to disable services that I dont need.
Haha thanks....I really don't want them using Linux either. I just wanted them to stop downing Linux on the first post. The article was about Windows and Mac. WTF?? haha
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
I have zv6000/6100 (basically same as zv5000, just two more ports, 3 more 'special' buttons, and crappier speakers). SuSe 10 supports everything out of the box, including the ati X200 card with its 1280x800.
Two things you need to do to get COMPLETE support:
1) use ndiswrappers (I think that's what it was, google to be sure) to get WPA wireless on your card, and 2)edit keyboard file to enable 'special' buttons in X, such as volume, wireless, and quicklaunch (these are obviously enabled, but X just does not know what it should do when you press them). You can assign whatever you want to those, not restricted as in windows.
Note that I suck at linux and had to google for maybe 15 mins, and copied/pasted instructions into console... I think most normal linux users would know what to do even without google, so support for all hardware is essentially out-of-the-box.
On the other hand, I tried installing WinXP pro from a retail CD about a year ago (NOT the one that came with laptop), and I could get NOTHING to work. The damn touchpad just would not work at all, plus no drivers on the web at that time (synaptics touchpad, from memory). And my stupid screen was stuck at 12800x768 instead of x800, which gave horrible aliasing.
All in all, Suse provided MUCH better support out-of-the-box for my particular notebook than Windows XP(non-manufacturer bundled).
Oh, a big Thank You to all the nice linux/OSS programmers that share the great stuff they write and even take up their time answering newbie questions!!!
Another closer example then might be the movement from Win2K to Windows XP. Although there I would say that OS X underwent more sever changes again bteween 10.3 and 10.4.
And once more, even if you are arguing for 10% break between major versions that doesn't hold with shifts from Jaguar to Panther, where really not much broke. Tiger was a major shift in the underying OS X frameworks, just hidden better than most OS's manage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm a Microsoft action pack customer and partner (hell, its a good deal) so I've got all the happy new versions as they come out. I've had major problems installing office add-on components for example with existing versions of office that are different. I've had way more problems trying to have say, Visual C++ loaded with Visual Basic then adding Visual Studio.Net -- whatever one I'd add last would wipe out the other -- and always they are asking me to update the foundation library to the other version.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Why is it that almost every post that is in defense of Windows/Microsoft is modded to -1 flamebait or -1 troll whereas a proportionally similar amount of posts that are against Windows/Microsoft are modded as 3s,4s, or 5s. There seems to be a systemic bias here at Slashdot. At first I thought it was just kind of 'quirky' as in: eh, it's a tech site, people like Macs. Some people like Windows. There will be some debate. Some back and forth. Should be balanced.
... a giant circle jerk for OS X / Linux fans on this site. You make up 10% of the OS world, but, here, in the safe confines of slashdot, with each of you ensuring that everyone else's bias is preserved via your own prejudice, it's a paradise.
But it's not. It gets to a point where you become weary with the constant bias against MS / Windows without similar criticality toward Apple / OSx, from the comments to the mod points to the article selection themselves.
It's become like
WTF is going on here?
Yes, please check out all the unfair Apple Zealot moderation.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Save your time and braincells. Do not even bother reading the parent post.
You should try this thing called Windows. Every update slows down your hardware to a new crawl, while every OS X update has sped up all my machines.
I call bull. I have a G4/733, WELL over 3 years old, in fact I think it's over 5 years old or more, that is running the latest and greatest, and very USABLE. Can't say this about any Windows installation I've seen. You just need to scrape yourself together some more cash and get a used (but newer) Mac, man.
...that the issue pervades office products since they started requiring the framework as well as application development products. Always, they ask for the other framework version. Annoying. I've taken to using different VM's for each individual project. That's also annoying.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Ever notice how a Windows system gets slower and slower as the registry gets bigger and bigger?
on another note, with all this talk of starting new, last I heard MS is planning on the new server products to run only on 64 bit server platforms. Whether this is a nod to intel, or a real start over, who knows. All it's going to mean is that you'll have to buy upgrades to all your stuff, which will be costly, and probably not covered under maintenance, for all those companies already paying for the software "assurance".
And in windows, if you pull an usb stick without going through the systray, you get monkeys flying out the computer's airvents at best, or a thermonuclear explosion annihilating the entire town at worst.
Idiot! Please don't spout nonsense about subjects which you obviously know nothing about.
Microsoft still supports 16 bit dos programs and development. Apple runs software from the *last* generation i.e. ppc. Before that you have classic, before that you have 680x0 classic... but we don't even get that far. On the latest intel macs even ppc apps written for os9 or less don't work. Don't even think about 68k apps. Os9 is from 1999... dos came out in 1981.
Also, as an avid osx user, I can tell you that the classic environment sucked a lot. It took a long time to boot, it didn't support 3d applications, and whatever hooks it had into the OS seemed to cause fairly random problems with osx, like disks being in use so they couldn't be ejected, that would persist even after classic shut down.
Comparatively, I can still play alone in the dark and dune on windows XP, and presumably will still be able to on vista. Microsoft has many flaws, but they are the kings of backwards compatability.
There's nothing slow about Windows, except that 99.998% of its users don't know how to configure or run it properly. Say it's hard to use, but don't say it's slow.
What the _hell_ is this concept of drivers, where I have to log in as administrator to install new hardware on my system?
It's called security - low level drivers have high privileges.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
try W2003R2.. it runs fast on my PII 266mhz
You can probably just dchroot into the old root directory to get all your old applications from your previous install to run.
It would be nicer if this were more automated of-course.
Windows is so slow because it's a stinking pile of shit!
This is true; and if I have to tweak the drivers, I'll log in as root.
But otherwise, I should be able to just plug in hardware, and have it work. No configuration, no nothing. Just work.
Like on Linux, and OS X. Plug in supported hardware, and it just works. Unlike Windows, where every piece of hardware you might purchase involves installing a manufacturer's driver CD.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Don't buy machines. Buy parts. Assemble.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
There are many devices which work without having to install any drivers. "Surprisingly" it's the same as linux - if the driver is installed you don't need to install it.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
No, there's really quite a big difference.
Windows come with some driver archives. The notorious INF cabs/directory, for one, as well as previously install drivers that are maintained in the driver cache. As new hardware is put into the system, those drivers are added and removed from the system as needed. This can be a time consuming process, and if it involves "system critical" drivers, like ACPI stuff, or motherboard stuff, can easily cripple a system.
Linux comes with 99% of the modules you'll need precompiled and ready to load. Selection of which modules are needed (for the most part, some distributions rely upon overrides, as do some filesystems) is done dynamically on bootup. Swap motherboards, and your boot time is the same as before. No "installing drivers", no disk thrashing; that's because there is no such thing as an uninstalled "cached" driver on linux. Either the module is present, or it isn't. Loading a module is something the various hotplug systems do automatically, and instantaneously. There's no "list" of which are the relevant drivers, and which aren't. Notice that on Windows when you pull out a piece of hardware you can often see the "old" driver on the "hidden" tab of the device manager?
On Linux, you don't "install" drivers for the hardware you have in your system. You keep a modules collection for every piece of hardware that linux supports. As additional hardware supported is added, and becomes "stable", its integrated into the Linux kernel (ATI and Nvidia are notable exceptions). Once a driver is in the kernel, there is no "driver install" process; they are already there, all the time, on most every distribution's standard kernel build. Plug in the hardware, and it just works on next bootup. No install process, no nothing. Replace your ethernet card, the new card simply takes the same spot at eth0 in your network stack. No "installing" during bootup, no reconfiguration, no nothing.
You don't install drivers on linux. If a module you want is not included in your kernel's default build, you can compile the module; but this process has nothing to do with whether or not you actually have that piece of hardware on your system. It's really quite different....
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The problem is, many applications still only support the OSS sound interface, which hogs the audio interface. While OSS applications are using the sound card, ALSA is unable to provide its richer interface to native ALSA applications. This means, one sound at a time...or speak but can't hear....hear but can't speak.
It means, it does not work. I do not care if there are hydrogen fuel motors if the car manufacturers do not use them. It is like Windows support for non administrator users if applications contintue to require running as admin!
For me, a Linux Operating System is Mandriva, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. They are completely different and when I install any of them, the sound system does not work properly that is all I need to know. Whenever I install any of them and I try to use the mentioned applications, it just does not work. If I install Windows (even windows98) on my computer and use Windows Media Player and Sound Recorder they will both work at the same time (or if I download any open source game and play it while listenting to music).
How is that those half baked Open Source applications function properly on Windows but can not coexist on Windows (mmm that must be an O.S. problem don't you think so?)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
They are completely different and when I install any of them, the sound system does not work properly that is all I need to know.
Then clearly, as I pointed out, you know nothing at all. Period. The sound system and application is working AS DESIGNED. It is NOT broken. You only think so because of your obvious ignorance. Does it suck that some applications are slow to move away from the crappy OSS sound interface? Sure! Does that mean something is broken with the OS? Nope!
According to your odd logic, because my car doesn't allow for two drivers at the same time, it's broken. It is, of course, not broken in the least. Rather, it simply means it functions as designed. You need to learn that if you must point a finger at something in anger, you need to point it at the right party. Otherwise, you come off sounding like a moron...especially after the situation was just explained to you.
How is that those half baked Open Source applications function properly on Windows but can not coexist on Windows (mmm that must be an O.S. problem don't you think so?)
Now you're an obvious troll. If you're not, then you are a complete idiot. A moron. A dipshit. If you are an idiot, please have your slashdot account deleted immediately. Please refrain from breeding. Please leave your parents home address before you leave so we can all send them condolence flowers for birthing you.
Now you're an obvious troll. If you're not, then you are a complete idiot. A moron. A dipshit. If you are an idiot, please have your slashdot account deleted immediately. Please refrain from breeding. Please leave your parents home address before you leave so we can all send them condolence flowers for birthing you.
:-)
Wow, what a deep asshole, it really interesting to see the way you took it personally haha, did I hurt you?. Sorry to dissappoint you but, while you are fixing PeeCees at your internet coffee waiting for the hour to close to go home I am actually doing a PhD abroad of my country spnosored by my own government after winning the scolarship in a contest.
Dont know about you, but I have already participated in the development (design & programming) of two real world applications one used in the E-commerce and the other used in high risk situations (contingency management systems for Oil platforms using multi agent system technologies, you wont understand it anyway). And befre you name it I have also made the 5 or 6 stupid database systems for some restaurants and POS for stores. Yeah, using Linux (POS with ELOtouch and ) and windows.
Oh, and I do know about the OSS/Alsa architecture differences I was pointing at a real problem on Linux these days, but you can get your head into your ass again and forget what I have said.
Not that It actually matters but I just wanted to make you really feel bad, as it seems you take slashdot very seriously hahaha.
Que tengas un buen dia
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
RTR rocks.
Just patch, load the business apps and go.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
Sorry to dissappoint you but, while you are fixing PeeCees at your internet coffee waiting for the hour to close to go home I am actually doing a PhD abroad of my country spnosored by my own government after winning the scolarship in a contest.
/. by self promotion. Seriously...almost every time you'll find that you're trying to slap too high; as is the case here. :)
/., you need to seriously grow some thicker skin. This place is basically 1-"rch" less "western" than uunet. So keep that in mind. You also need to keep in mind the troll ratio way up these days and the moderators tend to only use half their brain. I take it from your posting that you were not the troll I presumed you to be. In that context, my comments were obviously over the top. I apologize.
/. everytime.
;)
;)
This is awesome stuff! Seriously. Your "bragging rights" sound like my first couple of years in computers...seriously...lol... I actually started out doing some POS coding my self. Later, I was the first in the history of Visa to have a DOS based POS transaction host certified for direct connection to a VAP. Of course, that was the days when Hypecom MegaNAKs were king. That was my first year in "paid for programming"... I must say, what's even more impressive is that I did it from my "PeeCee" in an internet coffee shop! Well, it really wansn't a coffee shop, but you get the idea. Teehee...two whole applications...nniiiiccceee....teeheee...
If you seriously want to try to flounder your way out, the last thing you want to do is to try to elevate your self above those you find on
Seriously, if you're going to run around on
Now then, having said that, if you insist on posting on slashdot, make sure you know what you're talking about. The quote I called you out on easily indicated you should have not spoken, let alone posted. If you instist on posting about any topic, especially in an authorative manner, for which you obviously have no idea what you're talking about, expect to get kicked in the teeth on
In all seriousness, it sounds like you're off to a fine start and have a bright future. I wish you luck. Just don't let a PhD go to your head. I can assure you, you've got plenty to learn. So, stop getting so full of your self...if you hadn't, you wouldn't of been roasted!
?Comprende?
P.S. When I was 15, I got to assist with a SCADA planning/deployment for an oil rig....but I'm sure I wouldn't understand....I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?" I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know - computer science.
Enjoy!
Que tengas un buen dia!
Most days are!
this is nothing true in there...
.NET, they all sucked one after the other.
You can install Tiger on a G3 just fine, ever tried installing XP on a 300MHZ ? yes Apple's code is probably much cleaner. but its not the world that has made the job easier for them. but them that has chosen to make their own life easier. in fact, the world are making their life harder with their smaller market share.
windows code base is not bigger because of backward compatibility... it is because programmers are lost in this huge code and they are scared to delete code. they should port Windows to Trolltech Qt. I would definitely help. They should just shut all their attempts at APIs.
all J#, J++, VB,