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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 isn't slow.
For doing every day tasks, such as reading email, surfing intarweb and writing documents, Windows, even on a crappy PC still beats the shit out of latest "desktop Linux" offerings.
Windows 2000 is usable on low-end p2/celeron systems with as little as 128megs of memory, and XP, properly installed, will function just fine with 256megs.
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, 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), still lacks kernel audio mixing, still lacks in PnP department (removing a "mounted" USB flash stick anyone?), 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.
What about hibernation? Part of what makes your PC seem "slow" is having to turn it on and off, and waiting for the OS to boot. How long does Windows 2000 or XP take to resume from hibernation? At most few seconds. I have a laptop with 1.5gb of memory with Windows XP Professional SP2 and it takes about 15 seconds to hibernate or resume. Last I checked, Ubuntu developers were worrying about reducing their several-minutes-long boot sequence. I'm not even going to mention hibernation because I know that doesn't work properly in Linux.
So here you have it. Is Windows REALLY slow? Nope. Considering the alternatives, it's a lot faster! And when Vista comes out this or next year (who cares when, it will be awesome anyway) - it will be even faster. 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.
We saw this just a few hours ago.
+4 Obvious.
I am pro-lifechoice.
Last time when I've installed Windows, took only few seconds and I got a trojan.
Is that slow?!
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
Be.. because it's made of... wood?
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/
It's the brick wall.
They emulate a part of their os because it was developed for a different cpu
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.
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..
Zonk: Let's go beat it some 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.
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.
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
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.
Most of the parent comment seems wrong. I'm not an expert so I'll let others correct most of the errors. I have two points though:
1 - What is the problem with a mounted usb? With Mandrake 10 or Suse 10 I can plug in a usb dongle and unplug it and plug a different one in and the whole thing is just as automatic as it is in Windows.
2 - What's the big deal about being able to hibernate or suspend? I have put an ammeter on the power supply for a couple of my Linux boxes. If they're just sitting there, they don't draw much current. There's no point turning them off because not much energy will be saved. A Linux box can run for years without a reboot.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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!
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?
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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 . .
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?
...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.
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.
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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!
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
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Before you pay attention to NutscrapeSucks check his posting history.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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 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,