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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.'"
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--
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?
I can run 10 year old binaries yet my system is no slower.
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.
Interestingly, I've found Apple to be very willing to integrate backwards and forwards support in their OS
I know everything must be wonderful in Apple Land, but the compatibility issue is nowhere as good as Windows.
The fact is that if you buy a new Intel Mac, it runs no pre-OS X software which is only 5 years old. Virtually all Windows software from 2000-1 still runs without any issues. The Mac situation is OS for most consumer users, but for larger shops, the "upgrade-cycle" can become an issue.
Your entire post seems to be "spin" to me.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
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
Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
PC 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
While we're comparing apples to oranges, I've got a few for you too.
BTW XP was releases Oct. 2001? and Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.0) was released just last year? That's like 4 years. You've GOT to be kidding me? Have you seen what's changed in 4 years? Or are you still living in a shack somewhere with your 233Mhz Windoze box?
Here are the requirements for slackware 3.4:
3.4 (Kernel 2.0.33)
* Intel 8086
* RAM - 8 MB
* Minumum Drive Space: 40 MB
Man, your windows is so complex cuz it requires at least a Pentium.
Here's the kicker, if you actually READ the article, it's not even focused on the running speed of windows compared to everything else. It's saying because of all the legacy support, that adding any features requires so much work and testing to make sure it doesn't break anything else for the last 20 years of windows programs. And because of this it's "slow" in terms of being able to add features or to innovate.
If you want a real comparison, why don't you take the requirements for Vista which isn't even out, but might have some of the features Mac OS X already! And guess what the requirements for Vista is going to be?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
"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.
...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.
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
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.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
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.
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.
What's funny is, based on Microsoft and Apples experiences with virtual environments, you'd think Microsoft would take the whole backwards compatibility miasma and throw it into a Connectix/Virtual PC environment.
Build the whole OS as a tight, single codebase that supports VMs, then let the VMs handle backwards compatibility. I never understood why 100% of the population has to suffer for the 3% that wants that parallel port handheld scanner to work.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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