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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."
This is correct, but misleading. The main floor of Windows is built of balsa wood with a nice hardwood veneer. It looks solid to the casual observer, but isn't. As for the foundation, styrofoam sure can look like concrete blocks with a nice coat of gray paint.
And as someone else pointed out elsewhere, you're renting this house, and the landlord insists that all you need for a back door is strings of beads, which they add more of every time someone just walks into the house.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stonger.
We obey because it's the path of least resistance. I sure as hell ain't gonna start using Linux exclusively and abandon the stuff I like using just to stick it to Microsoft. Doesn't do a damn thing in the long run.
...why not just move straight to Linux and save the complete redesign and recoding? Oh, that's right, because Windows is THE standard in software. Remember that NT has been around for longer than 95 has, and it only overtook the 9x line with XP, despite NT being a much better OS than 95. Want to know why? It's very simple: because 95 ran all the existing programs and NT didn't; the only reason XP overtook 9x at all is because it brought compatibility with old programs up to 9x's level. Linux has fought tooth and nail for every 1% market share it's gained, and still that number is dominated by server computers that don't need to run all of the legacy apps. So I guess that's just a roundabout way of saying: your suggestion is absolutely crazy. It'd likely be a decade before the new OS became the new standard and Windows disappeared for all practical purposes. And who knows, maybe that'd be Linux' chance to crush MS (or at least MS' OSes) once and for all, and the new OS would never become the standard.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
IMHO the best "improvements" that XP has over 2K was the built in CD Burning, .zip support, and the ability to fool old programs into thinking they're running on an older OS. Most of this is a non-issue though because there is good software out there that can remedy these missing features of 2K. When I last dual booted XP and 2K on my system at home I found that with a clean install of each OS that XP would boot faster but once booted 2K actually was less of a hog on the system. Not that 3DMark is the best tool for comparison but I would always score higher in 2K vs XP (no extra services or processes running on either OS). XP basically boiled down to eye candy and the addition of features to remove the necessity for some 3rd party utilities.
Aye, that it was. Why? Because MS had deals with OEMs to keep their OS outlay to a minimum as long as said OEMs didn't use any other operating system. In other words, every fscking new computer sold had, and still has, a copy of this rot on it and people found they had to use it. After all, Joe Sixpack can hardly install any operating system from scratch without help.
Windows is the de-facto standard because MS's marketing department is the best there is. There's nothing technical about it, nor is it the vote of the end users. It's the fact that MS has the manufacturers right where it wants them: With their bollocks in its twenty tonne press and the salesmen, watching they don't break the agreements, ready to pump the handle by making them pay the "going rate" for the OS if they sell so much as one PC with another OS on it.
Dell was bloody lucky the n series with FreeDOS didn't bring the wrath of Redmond upon it. Of course, FreeDOS isn't much use to anyone these days unless you're flashing the odd firmware or two, so they probably weren't worried about Joe Sixpack discovering that Linux et al are just as simple as Windows XP when someone else installs it for him.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's found that drivers can crash Linux perfectly well, too.
Not everyone uses a computer as a glass typewriter. It depends on the software - some of the very expensive commericial software people use in my office has never run on a Microsoft platform and linux on basicly 1U gamer godboxes is the cheap way to use it. To look at the displays you can use Hummingbird Exceed on MS Windows or just use linux instead with a faster X windows as part of the standard install. To print on plotters you can spend many minutes and wasting metres of paper trying to get the page setup to the correct size in MS windows applications (if you can remember which application to use for a specific graphics format so you don't run out of memory) or on a dozen kinds of *nix you can just tell it to go away and print the thing or even just dump the file in the plotters memory by ftp if you want. As for network printer setup - someone went to sleep at MS that day.
As for compatibility - some new machines where I work had Windows98 installed on them so that old stuff developed expensively in house over many years would run (so yes - there is some redesign and recoding going on - and it will run on a lot of platforms), as well as things like expensive A/D conversion cards which just don't have drivers for newer versions of MS Windows. We even have to keep a DOS machine to get some stuff around - possibly buggy and incorrectly written to a poorly documented API but there are a lot of old programs that just will not run. A lot of scientific software was written in VB back when it was basic, then pascal and now it is java instead - so a lot of stuff really has to be rewritten from scratch even if you stay purely on the MS platform. If some guy has spent three solid years working out how to do some brilliant method of manipulating data in a certain way to solve a scientific problem you don't want to have to find their notes five years later, teach someone in their field how to program and get them to redo it in on a different platform - you want to just run the thing.
One last thing - having a single standard OS to rule them all is the stuff of meglomanic fantasy and ignores the idea that people want to do different things with their computers.
I've used WinXP for all of that 5 years and it's been a productive platform for me. I've edited and processed video, ran a digital audio workstation, built web pages, wrote documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Photoshopped, Skyped and played the hell out of Half-Life 2 and Eve-Online. Even made a few java apps. BitTorrent is my window to the world. I have actually had Windows Restore save my bacon a few times.
My computers talk to each other, and with liberal application of Kaspersky's finest, I haven't had a single bit of virus damage on my home wireless network. I can open a link to my network at the office and it also has not been taken down by virus or spyware, thanks to a moderately small application of care. I go more than a month without rebooting regularly and haven't had to reinstall the OS since 2003.
Although it costs about 150% of what I think it should, so does my car and iPod. I don't like the way Microsoft does business and I hope the Zune goes right down the crapper. I'm extremely apprehensive about Vista, and the WGA has been foul in the extreme.
But Microsoft made a pretty good OS in Windows XP.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Um, XP wasn't built from the ground up. It's derived from the NT line that began in the early 1990s. Additionally, XP's API layers (Win32, registry, etc.) are the same APIs dating back to the Win 9x line, which themselves date back to the original Windows 1.0.
There is much more that needs fixing than Internet Explorer, so much so that Windows developer Phillip Su called the codebase "overly complicated" and full of dependencies, many of them circular. There are hundreds of layers, and you may only ever understand two or three of them. It's so bad, that after a minor Vista refresh codenamed "Fuji," Microsoft wants to start with a rewrite codenamed "Vienna" and use virtualization technology to run pre-Vienna apps.
Of course, it remains to be seen if any of that actually comes to fruition or how long it will take. In the meantime, Vista is a mess both bug-wise and interface-wise. I count at least five different styles of menus and various conflicting dialog styles...some of them are the same dialogs from XP and even Windows 3.1, like the Install Font dialog. Don't even get me started on how many contradictory light source directions there are on the default Vista desktop's icons and interface. They quickly slapped Glass together to look like Aqua, and it's so obvious, even down to ripping off the OS X save dialog in IE7 all the way down to the disclosure triangle in the lower-left that reveals the filesystem browser. And UAC is absolutely horrible and intrusive, rather than the occasional password prompt you recieve in OS X.
I seriously fear for anyone planning to trust Vista on their machines with all its 1.0 APIs and untested technologies and further bloat on top of the aging Windows codebase. It's five years later, and we're still getting patches for XP and IE6, at an increasing rate, in fact. I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude in anticipating how many pieces Vista is blown up into by black hat hackers on release, like stopping to watch a roadside accident..
"Sufferin' succotash."
Or cheap, or just don't see a need to install a more demanding OS for no discernible benefit. I haven't found any software or hardware that refuses to install or run on Win2k, for instance. An OS is just a platform to run apps. If it does that without crashing, why change it?
It's worth comparing Windows XP licensing with Apple, which will cheerfully sell you a five-user license of their latest and greatest for $199. And they don't saddle you with a crippled "home" version, either.
However, I will contest your idea that Windows XP is intuitive while 98 is not. I remember very distinctly seeing my company moving from 98 to 2000 and XP, and in those years it was hard as heck to figure out where everything had been capriciously moved in the newer operating systems. You just think XP is more intuitive now because you haven't used 98 in a long time.
Recently, I've been looking at average people's average computers - ones not maintained by corporate wealth - and all of them suffer from confusing maladies. XP was advertised as something an average home user can maintain successfully, and despite a lot of money spent on anti-virus software, it doesn't seem like most home users can manage at all well.
Now, there are plenty of Slashdotters who have good Windows experiences, and I'm happy for them. But the real contest is what non-technical people face, and in that respect I have to call XP a shameful failure.
D
This is absolutely false. XP was absolutely more of a resource hog than Windows 2000. I used to support Win2K desktops in an office environment running standard productivity apps with 128 MB of RAM (2K required 64MB) and it ran fine. Try doing that on XP. I did, and it wasn't pretty.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
"InstallShield used to do that by default, until they realized developers were often sloppy and didn't put their files in the right places. That led to missing DLL files, missing OCX files, etc. Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so."
.app files -- they're not really files, but a bundle of everything the program needs to run it its own sandbox. We'll let the memory manager layer and the program loader figure out when to use a shared or private copy. In the meantime, the applications just need to be dragged in."
.dmg file and mount it (by double clicking it), then I drag the Camino icon to my Applications folder. With that taken care of, I can drag the .dmg to the trash (unmounting it and deleting it in one action). If I'm done with Camino, I can drag it to the trash, too. No registry settings, no OCX files, no DLL files, and no bullshit installers. If a stupid Wizard is the best answer Microsoft has to the task of installing and removing programs, they've already lost.
.app blobs), but it's a lot easier to manage and handle since it's through a reasonable interface. That's two solutions that solve the problem you mention, and both were easily achievable 10 years ago as much as today. So why is it that you have to even mention Installshield? Because Microsoft is unwilling to take a serious stance on anything that's not about supporting other Microsoft products -- that's why they're a monopoly!
It sure is Microsoft's fault. Apple was smart enough to say, "Look, let's adopt some of these sane ideas that have been coming out of the OS research people. Like these
And they do. If I want Camino in my Mac, I download the
Some people have been pushing for this kind of ease-of-use in Linux, but it's hard to get the momentum that Steve Jobs can get. Autopackage was kinda easy to use, but most people (who are like myself) seem to be using Synaptic for new applications. It's still hiding the same garbage that Windows has, in terms of the swarm-of-files approach to application distribution (instead of
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I sure hope you're insinuating that OSX is the better replacement and not Linux. If said home user wants to change some setting, he will probably poke through his XP control panel for a while and has a decent chance to find the checkbox or dropdown associated with the change he/she was looking for. In Linux, said user will never in a million years open up a terminal, type man somecrypticallynamedconf.conf, find the appropriate boolean, integer, or string value in the man page, su to root, fire up an editor and point it to /etc/rxcgsd.d/init/conf/somecrypticallynamedconf.c onf, make the appropriate edits, and restart the service.
/MLS
Before you pounce on the Windows Registry, just compare the number of times you have had to regedit a value, to the number of times you have edited a conf file. I think you will find the argument stands.
I'd like to see *nix succeed, but you do it a disservice by declaring it ready for Grandma when it is clearly not.
When every Linux app comes with a small plugin to a configuration management GUI, that adds the conf settings to a panel that allows you to view and edit them visually, maybe we'll have made some real progress. Upon launch, config manager asks for root password, then loads all plugins that come installed with all Linux apps.
Panel opens, there is a list of all the programs that it is managing configurations for on the left, and upon clicking, opens a nicely tabbed and organized layout of all the options with tooltips so I don't have to flip back and forth between the man page if I need further information.
Conf files are reparsed on every opening, so manual edits to confs will show up as well, and leaves that as an open option to 'advanced' users that are used to them.
It's such an obvious idea yet nobody has made a real attempt at it. I'll even give my 'revolutionary' idea away for free. Please God, someone use it.