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Vista RC2: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect
jcatcw writes, "Scot Finnie continues his love — hate relationship with Windows Vista. He installed the latest beta, RC2, on three machines. First problem: drivers — too many of them that should be available just aren't. User Access Control remains annoying and Vista's Software Protection Platform puts antipiracy above user security. Software compatibility is still in need even at this late date. However, previous problems with the Media Center were absent." And turnitover writes to point us to PC Mag's RC2 review. Their bottom line is that they expect an RC2+ or even an RC3 before it goes final. Here is PC Mag's slide show.
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
I have a bench machine that I've tested with Betas1&2 and RC1&2. All except for Beta2 have been pretty bug free, but RC2 fails at the "testing hardware" dialog during install, and after reboot will not give me the Aeroglass option, unlike all previous versions. I'll do some digging later this week to see how to force a re-test of hardware for compatibility, but this was dissapointing after 3 functional previous releases
No time for more refined. Unfortunately that's it.
It's obvious there's lots of patchwork in it. I browse the control panel and display properties and get the same feeling I have when looking at work I did in the last minute with a glue and duct tape.
IE7 still crashes like mad on Google Maps for some reason, and what's with the single tab display properties? What's the point of a tab bar, when you have always one single tab in it? We'll never know.
My Wacom tablet works terribly with Vista newfound tabletPC intelligence, it keep sassuming clicks I never have done, I had to go and basically disable all smart features and it still is funky (I can barely use a combo box with my Wacom in Vista).
It's apparent they'll be shipping it to the factory in few days either way, so I'm just hoping once they're done, they start working on a SP1 to be done for the January release that will fix all this mess.
Let's ignore people's feelings about Microsoft for a second. A hypothetical software developer has made a lot of changes to their operating system, rewriting a lot of internals, and making huge changes to their UI. Who here is expecting that this hypothetical software release will be "perfect" when it goes gold?
At best, even assuming Microsoft is a great software developer, there will be bugs and problems when it goes out the door. I don't believe that should be our question. My questions are, Is it usable? Will it increase my productivity over Windows XP? Does the new UI offer something beyond being "new"? Are there new features that I'll actually want to use?
Or to bang all of those questions into one super question, Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade? If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
But if you tell me that there aren't drivers for everything yet, well of course there aren't because it's not released yet, but there will be drivers for most things soon. If you tell me there's some little bug on your particular machine, that doesn't bother me. Release broadens the diversity of hardware that software is running on, and so even if everything was perfect in the beta stage, there will be some bugs.
I was just reading on Gripeline that Microsoft is suing a hacker who has already hacked the DRM components of WinVista.
...
Inquiring minds with sharpies want to know
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the same guy who first bitched about the UAC always asking for passwords to do anything administrative? (read: mimics SU, only more annoyingly) Didn't Microsoft respond by taking the passwords out?
/. post still on the main page that shows why an annoying UAC (with password typing required) would be a Good Thing(tm). Where is it.... where is it.... ah!
That was a bad move on both parties' account, IMO. There's a
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Besides bundled with new systems, who would actually buy Vista? I expect that we will see a slow adoption rate since most users are perfectly content with XP.
Browsing the slideshow, I found this beauty.
Please, somebody pinch me. IE is clogging up 1 GB of memory in the final build of Vista before launch?! Well, it explains the insane sys reqs though.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I used to run a "Software Quality Assurance Workshop" at Tektronix - I was an SQA engineer at the time, so I know a little bit about the topic. In researching this subject and also over time since then, I learned some interesting facts, which should be enough to scare the Vista SQA team.
1. There are strong mathematical reasons why it is near-to-impossible to find more than about 20% of the bugs in a system (of any significant size) using black box testing.
I don't recall the proof. As I recall the most important factor is algorithmic complexity - every additional two-way branch doubles the number of possible paths through the control flow. For perspective, a program with just ten branches requires 1024 different tests, for EACH grouping of input data.
Data issues provide more complexity. Heuristics may help discover as many of the pathological cases as possible. For example, every input data element (variable) must be checked at the 'fenceposts' (ends of the range), inside the range, and outside the range. Inside the range, there may be regions or single values that can affect the usage of other variables (e.g., angles might be defined in [0,2Pi] but tan (pi/2) is pathological), so those are another kind of fenceposts that must be discovered and tested for.
(There are many resources online. Wikipedia/Software Quality is a reasonable place to start.
2. Given a 'good quality' development system using techniques such as structured programming, code walkthroughs, manual and automated code analysis, and some other things, about 80% of the bugs will be in the original design document. (Another justification for Extreme Programming?)
Interestingly, something like 50% of these may be arguments regarding usage. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" is often a valid argument - a 'screwed up menu' for one user may be just perfect for another. Of course, providing options to the user as X11 does, is often itself considered a 'misfeature' for the general public, if not an outright bug.
3. Given the same system, only about 20% of the total resources (time, budget) will be spent in the development phase. As I recall, about 20% -> planning and design phases, 20% to development, 40% during SQA, and the last 20% after release.
4. Again with the same system, the designed, QA'd, tested, and released code will have approximately 1 bug every 200 lines of code (while there are arguments about using Source Lines of Code as a programmer performance metric, it can be more easily justified for this purpose, as we can assume that most languages will have about the same level of ambiguity regarding what is a line of code.) This ratio has been empirically shown to run true across all types of programming, from assembler to 4G database code. I recall reading a couple of years ago that Microsoft admitted a rate of one bug per 80 lines of code, but I don't have a citation, so I can't say for sure.
All modern OS have about the same number of lines (according to the above), using the same metrics - about 30 million. This is apparently true for XP and for various recent distributions of Linux - Redhat, Debian, and others, including the applications that came with the distributions. Therefore, every OS ships to the customer containing something on the order of 150,000 bugs. I once listened to a presentation by the then-head of IBM's OS software support group - I think for OS/360, but it might have been a later product. They released a new version every three months, and customers found another 2000 bugs every time.
A probable advantage of Unix-like systems is the relative independence of different applications and components. Each application presumes less about its environment, and so can be less susceptible to problems caused by interactions within the environment. This helps to break the algori
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
First off, you cannot just 'run Vista with administrative privleges.' That doesn't work around the problem. What you CAN do is turn off UAC, which is done in the most stupid way possible. You turn off the option and then you must (wait for it) REBOOT VISTA. Excuse me? REBOOT? Then why will anyone ever turn UAC back on if they keep having to reboot to use it.
The problem isn't that Microsoft has implemented UAC, it is the horrible way that they did it. You don't enter a password to install new software, you must click on a button that is on a different part of the screen every time it pops up, and it can pop up a lot if you are doing administrative tasks. So most people will simply choose to disable UAC, reboot, and never re-enable it again. That defeats the entire purpose of the feature.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
For good examples of how to do this properly see Mac OS X or most versions of Linux running a GUI.
Microsoft can't even copy good ideas correctly.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?