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Why Vista Release Date Really Slipped
anzev writes "A team manager for Windows for 5 years has decided to write a blog-essay about what caused Windows Vista project to miss the due date. Philip tells us in the blog, that Windows developers are writing an average of 5000 lines of code (which is *only* 1200 lines less than the national average of 6200 lines of code per year). He addresses issues like the Vista code being too complicated, the processes the developers have to follow too complex and a lot more. All in all it gives a nice insight into why Vista will be late, from a different perspective. Oh, and Slashdot gets mentioned too ;-)."
5000 lines per year is mentioned as a joke...
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This is one of the worst Slashdot summaries in a while.
"A team manager for Windows for 5 years has decided to write a blogg-essay about what caused Windows Vista project to miss the due date. Philip tells us in the blog, that Windows developers are writing on average of 5000 lines of code (which is *only* 1200 lines less than the national average of 6200 lines of code per year). He addresses issues like the Vista code being to complicated, the processes the developers have to follow to complex and a lot more. All in all it gives a nice insight into why Vista will be late, from a different perspective. Oh, and Slashdot gets mentioned too ;-)."
Entire words missing, homonym confusion, mixed-up sentences... I don't blame anzev, but this is samzenpus' job. He gets paid to fix things like this. Christ on a bike, don't you have any pride in your work whatsoever? Are you the kind of person who coasts through life content to do the bare minimum necessary to ensure you don't get fired?
Microsoft doesn't guarantee updates every two years (or whatever your term length is). They just guarantee that you get any updates that occur during the term of your agreement.
Also, it'll be available to volume license customers in November, which you should already know.
Tard.
The author seems to like emphasizing the fact that Vista is the biggest "software" project in "history". Well, maybe in Microsoft's history. But having worked in industry for several years, I can assure you that there are other projects which exist that require significant amounts of highly complex and non-trivial code.
One very pertinent example, from an area in which I've worked, is the design of a semiconductor. (In this case, specifically, an FPGA.) Do you realize how many lines of software are necessary to make a complex semiconductor work? From the VHDL code, to the software support tools for the device (in the case of FPGAs, this includes compilers, synthesizers, tech mappers, placers, routers, timing analyzers, etc.), to the code to operate the test beds, etc.
Egads. This blog author has no idea. I'd wager that he suffers somewhat from Microsoft's "I'm bigger/better than you" syndrome -- he's like to think that Vista is breaking new ground in terms of size and project management, but he's a few years late.
Bill Gates is the hardest core nerd there ever was in the corporate world. He used to write the code...even lambast his own employees for not writing good code. He got started writing programs for traffic managment systems. He invented and wrote the BASIC operating system for the Altair. He got a near perfect score on his SAT's.
What ever one thinks about Bill gates now, there is no doubt that he is one of the biggest nerds of all time.
This brought back a memory of an event that I still find amusing after all of these years. Back in 1978, I was working for a defense contractor. I remember a department meeting in which one of the managers brought in a stack of graybar printout and proudly held a ruler next to it. He proclaimed that his group had produced 9 "side-inches" (the depth of the paper stack) of software, and outlined several items that were to be given to his group as a reward for such an outstanding accomplishment. Next meeting, all the managers brought stack of graybar and rulers. And surprise! surprise! surprise!, every one of those stacks was even more than 9 inches deep.
Within a year, over half of the projects represented by those stacks of graybar had been cancelled, unfinished. Today, that company is no longer in business.
As has been pointed out by many authors on the subject, you get what you measure.
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http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml
Eleven (11) layers of management is ridiculous for ANY company. When I worked at Unisys we had four (two layers of management at our facility and two more in Blue Bell), and when I worked at NWA we had five:
(1) Peons ("individual contributors") like me (i.e., not a manager).
(2) Managers
(3) Directors
(4) Managing Directors
(5) VP
(6) CEO
I think. There might've been a layer between 5 and 6. But that'd be six layers of management at most, and at the operational level where we worked there were really only two layers that mattered except when it came to strategic planning/funding.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
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Historical reasons laregly rooted in their reufsal to license the OS. Not issues with backward compatability. Their market share was low way before that came up.
Didn't they release a new version almost 4 years ago that took advantage of the features of Mac OS X?
We've used quite a few iMacs and Powermacs which have gone from OS 8 up to 10.4.6. Occasisonally the software does change, but the vast majority of it has run fine in Classic. There are very applications that have problems with it. The one you use may be one of them, but they brought out an OS X native version years ago.
So, Apple has a compatibility mode (called Classic, by the way), but doesn't believe in backward compatability? That sounds a little contradictory. And you've heard of Rosetta haven't you? It features superb compatability across a different processor architecture.
Back in the 80s, the space shuttle control software was 80+mln lines
I don't know where you are getting your information, but according to this article the flight control software for the Space Shuttle is 420,000 lines. Since this software has to be perfectly debugged, 80,000,000 lines would be insane.
Enigma
No, the summary is wrong. From TFA:
1000 lines per year is much, much more reasonable.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Note: the author has edited his entry and removed most of it. the mirror:
0 091564cac59/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/fb474e7cf3aa2bdcb159
The World As Best As I Remember It
Broken Windows Theory
Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And "just around the corner" is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind's history now threatens to also be the longest.
Admittedly, this essay would be easier written for Slashdot, where taut lines divide the world crisply into black and white. "Vista is a bloated piece of crap," my furry little penguine would opine, "written by the bumbling serfs of an evil capitalistic megalomaniac." But that'd be dead wrong. The truth is far more nuanced than that. Deeper than that. More subtle than that.
I managed developer teams in Windows for five years, and have only begun to reflect on the experience now that I have recently switched teams. Through a series of conversations with other leaders that have similarly left The Collective, several root causes have emerged as lasting characterizations of what's really wrong in The Empire.
Useless Trivia Sidebar: Broken Windows Theory
The original broken windows theory, first coined by Wilson and Kelling, describes the purported phenomenon whereby an abandoned warehouse with no broken windows is mostly left alone, but as soon as one window is broken, it acts as an open invitation to passers-by that it's open-season for rock-throwing.
This was generally accepted for many years as being true, but is recently coming under fire from different angles. We won't delve into those here, since we mostly commandeered the phrase because it sounded good, not because it actually has anything at all to do with our subject matter.
The Usual Suspects
Ask any developer in Windows why Vista is plagued by delays, and they'll say that the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process. These claims have already been covered in other popular literature. A quick recap for those of you just joining the broadcast:
* Windows code is too complicated. It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them. Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you'll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.
* Windows process has gone thermonuclear. Imagine each little email you send asking someone else to fill out a spreadsheet, comment on a report, sign off on a decision - is a little neutron shooting about in space. Your innocent-seeming little neutron now causes your heretofore mostly-harmless neighbors to release neutrons of their own. Now imagine there are 9000 of you, all jammed into a tight little space called Redmond. It's Windows Gone Thermonuclear, a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz of fervent destructive activity.
Let's see if, quantitatively, there's any truth to the perception that the code velocity (net lines shipped per developer-year) of Windows has slowed, or is slow relative to the industry. Vista is said to have over 50 million lines of code, whereas XP was said to have around 40 million. There are about two thousand software developers in Windows today. Assuming there are 5 years between when XP shipped and when Vista ships, those quick on the draw with calculators will discover that, on average, the typical Windows developer has produced one thousand new lines of shipped code per year during Vista. Only a thousand lines a year. (Yes, developers don't just write new code, they
The World As Best As I Remember It
Broken Windows Theory
[This was originally posted a week ago, and yanked of my own volition. What followed was a firestorm of speculation about how The Man beat me down, etc, which is completely untrue. Now I repost this back, only to quell the speculation. Blog on.]
Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And "just around the corner" is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind's history now threatens to also be the longest.
Admittedly, this essay would be easier written for Slashdot, where taut lines divide the world crisply into black and white. "Vista is a bloated piece of crap," my furry little penguin would opine, "written by the bumbling serfs of an evil capitalistic megalomaniac." But that'd be dead wrong. The truth is far more nuanced than that. Deeper than that. More subtle than that.
I managed developer teams in Windows for five years, and have only begun to reflect on the experience now that I have recently switched teams. Through a series of conversations with other leaders that have similarly left The Collective, several root causes have emerged as lasting characterizations of what's really wrong in The Empire.
Useless Trivia Sidebar: Broken Windows Theory
The original broken windows theory, first coined by Wilson and Kelling, describes the purported phenomenon whereby an abandoned warehouse with no broken windows is mostly left alone, but as soon as one window is broken, it acts as an open invitation to passers-by that it's open-season for rock-throwing.
This was generally accepted for many years as being true, but is recently coming under fire from different angles. We won't delve into those here, since we mostly commandeered the phrase because it sounded good, not because it actually has anything at all to do with our subject matter.
The Usual Suspects
Ask any developer in Windows why Vista is plagued by delays, and they'll say that the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process. These claims have already been covered in other popular literature. A quick recap for those of you just joining the broadcast:
* Windows code is too complicated. It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them. Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you'll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.
* Windows process has gone thermonuclear. Imagine each little email you send asking someone else to fill out a spreadsheet, comment on a report, sign off on a decision - is a little neutron shooting about in space. Your innocent-seeming little neutron now causes your heretofore mostly-harmless neighbors to release neutrons of their own. Now imagine there are 9000 of you, all jammed into a tight little space called Redmond. It's Windows Gone Thermonuclear, a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz of fervent destructive activity.
Let's see if, quantitatively, there's any truth to the perception that the code velocity (net lines shipped per developer-year) of Windows has slowed, or is slow relative to the industry. Vista is said to have over 50 million lines of code, whereas XP was said to have around 40 million. There are about two thousand software developers in Windows today. Assuming there are 5 years between when XP shipped and when Vista ships, those quick
Ok, first part was right- DOS, then Win1-3 on top. Win1-3 used dos's device drivers to operate the comp's hardware. I call that building the OS on top of DOS. DOS was single-threaded. Win1-3 used cooperative multitasking, which means that the OS itself was really just an elaborate extensible single-threaded program. You were running multiple "programs" (more like relocatable code blocks, really), and control would switch from one to the next when they called "GetMessage". If your program went into an infinite loop without calling this function, it was time for CTRL-ALT-DEL.
;-) They could access it just fine.
Win95 brought 2 main things with it- the Win32 API (for windowing, process/thread stuff, etc, all designed for 32-bit), and native device drivers. Win95 had some DOS compatibility in it, and needed to be able to use DOS drivers for backward compatibility. However, many DOS drivers no longer worked (like, network stuff- I seem to remember that the Novell drivers stopped working with Win95 and we had to get new ones) so you can't say that Win95 was built on top of DOS. It just had a lot of backward compatibility. Most notably, Win95 had real multithreading. It could actually divide processor time between jobs, and divide it between threads within a process without any programmer gymnastics.
The difference between Win95 and WinNT4 was that 95 didn't have separate memory spaces. Each program was just using space in the giant pool of memory, and could overwrite other programs' data at will. yada yada performance video games etc. WinNT4 was actually stable, and provided each prog with a separate memory space, and required complicated (for someone who's never dealt with it before) memory mapping in order to share data between apps. In Win95/98/ME, all you had to do to share data was pass a pointer using a window message to the other prog's main window
Win98 was Win95 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features.
WinME was Win98 with more device drivers and more APIs and more GUI features.
None of this line had protected memory regions. This is why WinME sucked so badly- it had a few bugs and they could take down the system since everything was so tightly integrated.
Win2K was WinNT with most of Win98's functionality. WinNT had been gaining functionality over time, with SP1/SP2/SP3/SP4, but when they finally got it so that it could run most Win98 progs, (and a bunch of API calls that were only on Win9X for some reason) they released it as Win2K. Win2K has a DOS emulator in it, and is itself completely incompatible with DOS. It is completely invalid to say that 2K is in any way based on DOS. I still use Win2K. Win2K is solid stable etc, and I've had uptimes as high as 83 days, while using it under very high load, such as running JBuilder 9 and WoW at the same time, along with Trillian, Winamp, Cygwin's X server, and a whole host of other nifty software. (the thing that ended my uptime was, of course, Windows Media Player, haha. I opened it by accident instead of VLC. I have since deleted its exe) Most of my uptimes are ended by power outages.
WinXP was just Win2K with some improved legacy emulation ("pretend to be Win95 for this program") some (improved?) networking like the firewall, and some additional GUI stuff, like styled window borders. Oh and remote desktop features. (which have been possible all along, since Win95 or so, but never implemented. Those curious should investigate the Windows Metafile ".WMF")
Vista seems that its main attraction will be the GUI, again. But we'll see.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.