Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
First, remember that the "markedly better" comment references what HOME users were using before, Windows ME. For businesses, XP isn't much better (or is much worse).
But let's look at what OS X has done in the past 5 years (I only converted early last year). OS X has hardware accelerated it's GUI. It has gained Spotlight and Exposé, probably the two best inventions in improving computer use in the last 5 years. It has had little touches like spring-loaded folders. It manages to get basic window use right.
The fact that Apple did the first 3 things (OpenGL GUI, Spotlight, Expose) which MS sat around (really: spent all their time on patches) is just sad. MS has improved things (the wireless handling was abysmal compared to today's XP), but not others. I took a job last month that has me using a Windows box for the first time in a year and the result of having to use it for long periods is jarring.
Let's ignore the lack of Spotlight (which I love). Let's focus on something simple. Something that was in Windows 95. Something that was in Windows 3.1. Something that was there before that (don't know which version exactly, probably 1.0). Let's talk about the Z-ordering of windows.
At least once a day I seem to run into this. Let us consider 3 windows among about 10. We'll use FireFox, Outlook, and Calculator. Let's say those windows are all maximized (as are all others) except for Calculator. Calculator has been buried to the very bottom of the windows (or near). Firefox is on top, with Outlook below. Now click on the taskbar button for Calculator. What happens?
What SHOULD happen is you see Firefox with Calculator on top. That is what happens most of the time. But some times, for some random reason I can't find, doing this will bring Outlook to the front window behind Calculator, so you see those two on your desktop (Calculator on top). You can often repeat this 3 or 4 times before Windows "gets it" and things are put correct. By this I mean you can switch back to Firefox (which works), then click for Calculator and have it happen again.
I have NO IDEA how this happens or why, but how hard is it to keep a Z ranking of the windows I have?
I won't even touch on how hard it is to manage 10 windows with your only tools being the taskbar and Alt-Tab. Exposé is so intuitive and simple. From the screenshots I've seen (I haven't looked hard) Vista only seems to have a graphical version of the current Alt-Tab.
There are no spring-loaded folders (terribly handy for moving stuff around).
Windows DOES have a Cut command in Explorer, something that still boggles my mind about the Mac (how can Finder not have a Cut?)
Windows hasn't really improved at all (other than in security) since 1999 (when Windows 2k was released). Look at the changes OS X has made from 10.0 to 10.4. I'm not even including the cool stuff that's coming in Tiger. OS X even gets faster.
I'm glad to be off Windows for my personal use. And since my job is all Java and HTML, I'm going to ask for a Mac when my current Dell is no longer powerful enough. I think Exposé alone will vastly improve my productivity.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The other feature Redmond needs to work on: "not listening to a single damn thing Adobe Reader says".
Nothing like strolling into the office in the morning and finding your computer still at the shutdown screen... and what is it holding it open, pray tell? Not the IDE. Not the source control client. Not the database browser. Nope. Adobe Reader is sitting there smugly asking "are you sure you want me to shut down?" holding up the whole system from logging off. FFS, it's VIEWING TEXT - it can shutdown when I damn well ask it to.
Having used FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2K3 Standard, my opinion is this:
FreeBSD for servers, Windows XP Pro for the desktop.
It works very well for me - in fact, well enough that I'm considering trying out Vista when they release that. Part of the reason it works so well for me, is that instead of being locked in to IE, OE, and Office, I have opted instead to use Firefox, Thunderbird+Lightning, OpenOffice, and other OSS tools (like Eclipse). Theoretically, I could swap out Windows XP Pro and barely even notice the difference.
Why don't I? Because I don't feel like it just yet. It's comfortable.
Slashdot posted to a story the other day that has a lot to do with MS woes. That was the story about MS not forcing their own employees to run as non-admins.
The home version actually seems to do this a little better then the Professional edition. My parents and my siblings login to their computer with their own accounts and all as non-admins. Of course they don't lock down admin, so they all install all kinds of stuff.
Vista seems to go a long way in stopping unwanted stuff from installing, but with such a mainstream system does is it really going to help? If a user has to switch to admin to install that screensaver that also is spyware does that really help? Does Ms have to be held accountable for Spyware that is purposely installed on a machine. If it comes in through IE 6...sure it is MSs fault.
Linux installers are applauded by most, but I wonder what will happen to them in the mainstream. Commercial software will probably still install with stand-alone installers if Linux where to take off. Linux ( and others ) has standards that adhered to via open source packages, but would another company really put up with it. So a user in Linux goes to run an executable off a web page...they get an error from it saying please be in root mode. If they login as root would Linux do anything to stop them from overwriting system config files? Would we blame the problem on Linux or the author?
The author seems to be misplacing the blame. MS has to be the app cops? I guess in this day and age yes...5 years ago...not so much.
In the long run I think all OS's need to force application to install in virtual file systems. When I go to install a major app I wish that it would just copy a big file and "mount" it to the machine. You wouldn't even need to be in root to do it if done via an API call. The app would be registered with the OS and given a small amount of hardrive space to write it's config files to that only it would have access to. When it goes to save data files for the user the OS would ask the user if it was alright for it to. We can run entire OSs in a VMWare like system, why not applications themselves.
Of course lots of apps, especially in OS use pipes and heavily rely on other systems and libraries. Back in the day when sharing a DLL was needed to save HD space it was a good idea...is it now. Should we require all the apps to include their libraries? This would make code injects a lot harder as well....sorry botters.
The fundamental idea of an App installing needs to be re-engineered. Some OSs do a better job then others, but they all fundamentally invovled the installer coping files around, which will always lead to the types of problems we are seeing.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's found that drivers can crash Linux perfectly well, too.
They did. It's called WoW (Windows on Windows). That's how NT runs old Win16 apps.
Note, however, that there is much old software Windows NT will *never* support, because of the way it expects to access the hardware and OS internals.
I also think it's worth mentioning that they would never do this with Linux; if they did (and I'm not saying they will) they would use one of the BSDs.
Neither Linux, nor any of the BSDs, would provide any technological advantage. At best, they'd be a step sideways. That's the single biggest reason Microsoft would never use them as a base.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have had huge success with Windows XP Pro in installation, management, troubleshooting, and day-to-day operation. If you have installed Windows XP regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Create an unattended install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows 98, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Windows XP Pro.
This is certainly not to say that it is without faults, security and vulnerability being the biggest issue. Microsoft should forget about the whiz-bang Vista approach, and re-write Windows XP Pro from the ground up. THAT would sell.
My only real complaint with Microsoft and Windows XP Pro is that they have never provided cost-effective licensing for home users to legally maintain multiple computers. WIndows XP Pro is really the way to go, but at its original $300+ price, it was far out of the reach of most home users. I bit the bullet and purchased multiple copies, but if Microsoft had provided a more cost-friendly option, I would have promoted it and recommended it much much more.
It was basically a derivative of VMS 5 called MICA; for a while, NT and MICA were patch-compatible; Microsoft hired many of the key Digital people (there was even a lawsuit about this) & still couldn't make it anywhere near as tough or secure as VMS routinely was.
So... even with such a blatant head-start, Microsoft couldn't make it anything but rattley.
No change there in decades.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I believe it's actually a design decision on the part of Apple. The traditional way to move or copy files on a Mac has always been to use the mouse to drag them. This isn't hard at all when you have a decent sized screen and you can simply stagger the source and destination windows then drag from one to the other.
It is interesting though because dragging files is really something someone needs to be shown. My experience has been that people don't just pick it up without at least some minor prompting. Once you show someone on a Mac they seem to understand it quickly. However, I've had a hell of a time showing how to do it on Windows PCs. It just seems that people can't get their mind out of the one maximized window mindset and it's rather hard to drag from one maximized thing to another. Of course, you can drag through the task bar but that's another learned behavior, one that doesn't make that much sense compared with a normal drag.
This, I think, is one of the major shortcomings of Windows. Microsoft has basically crippled the UI to the point where it's nearly impossible to run more than a few apps with more than a few windows open. Unfortunately, it seems that Vista doesn't really fix this shortcoming. They have a cool looking alt-tab replacement but it's just that, cool looking.
It would be very hard for Microsoft to move to the Mac model here. Part of the Mac model is that the menubar switches with the app you're using and that all the toolbars and pallets disappear when the app is not active and switch when you switch which document you're working on within an app. Contrast this with the Microsoft style of putting giant sidebars on all four sides of the document area within the window. It makes the windows too big to be sized anything other than maximized on many screens.
Of course, some people have a preference for the Windows way. They say it "looks cleaner" because they only see what they're working on. Maybe some people really get distracted by having portions of other windows behind their active one still visible. Funny enough, that aspect of OS X never bothered me. I found it relatively easy to get used to the idea that windows generally exist on the screen and don't try to own the entire screen. To me it seems similar to the way one stack of paper sometimes obscures another on my real desk. I never stack everything neatly in piles and grid them out like tiles. I've got one pile of papers that's half covering another so I can see at least part of what's under it to know it's there. This way I can put a lot more crap on my desk and still know where it is. Now I know I'm not the only person whose desk looks this way
Still, can I really blame Microsoft for these things though? Not really. They made these decisions years ago trying to get people to move from DOS to Windows and then later from Windows to newer versions of Windows. The latest trend I'm seeing is for some people to get dual monitors on Windows. This way they can have two apps maximized, one maximized on each screen. I ran dual monitors on OS X for a while but lack of real maximization (and no desire to have it either) means you wind up with a good sized worksurface with a huge line in the middle of it. I've since decided that Apple is defiitely on the right track with the bigger displays. Particularly if you have the 23" you can begin to see how it completely changes how you want to interact with the computer. You're not going to maximize things; even at the smaller 20" size a window would be ridiculously big. What I find myself doing is just staggering more and more windows all over the place. It looks just as messy as my real desk. This, I think, is exactly the point. Apple has taken the desktop metaphor one step further with these huge displays.
And what has Microsoft offered us? More of the same. Compu
Here's an honest question: Ignoring the cost, just what is it that you think is so much better about Windows 2000 compared to XP?
Product activation. If I tried to sell you my car, but insisted on keeping the starter-kill remote, you'd tell me to go jump in the lake. For some reason, people don't subject Microsoft to the same scrutiny.
Product activation is bad enough at the application level, where individual programs have to phone home to receive permission to run. It should be absolutely unacceptable at the OS level... which is why it really, really sucks that everybody accepted it.
As far as I can tell, people who still use 2000 by choice are either ignorant or just dumb.
Yeah, OK, that must be it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I tend to reinstall my OS every 6-9 months. Swapping hardware, testing drivers, the occasional software that just won't uninstall all adds up and makes all versions of windows glitchy and crufty. The Solution? Reinstall the OS.
I refuse to pick up the phone and explain to MS why I should be allowed to reinstall XP. 2k no suck problems.
My reason for sticking with 2K until I am forced to move? General F'ing Principal.
Place a curse on Microsoft.