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Why Vista Took So Long
twofish writes, "Following on from Joel Spolsky's blog on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, Moishe Lettvin, a former member of the Windows Vista team (now at Google) who spent a year working on the menu, gives an insight into the process, and some indication as to what the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu actually did. Joel has responded in typically forthright fashion." From the last posting: "Every piece of evidence I've heard from developers inside Microsoft supports my theory that the company has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum, and overstaffing. The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly. In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991–2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product."
From the article:
"Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."
Monotone, BitKeeper, git, bzr, and so on would all handle this situation efficiently and gracefully; all the repositories can sync to each other and none need be more than a few minutes out of date. Amazing that Microsoft's solution is so poor by comparison
Xenu loves you!
Maybe that's why ID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software still only has 31 employees?
MABASPLOOM!
Microsoft needs a Steve Jobs-ian spring cleaning. For those unaware, when he returned to Apple, he called project leaders into a conference room and had them justify their existence. If they couldn't do it, the project was scrapped. The company was streamlined to focus on a few core product lines.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Sounds like Parkinson's law. Every large organisation eventually falls for it too.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
It's changed business models a few times. It started out as a playing card company. If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Well with a Desktop you can suspend to disk and then come back rather quickly, with a power off in between. This way you get the power savings, but you also get the fast "boot" time.
But let's look at me. I had a Dell laptop at school. I'd use it at home. Turn it off. Take it to school. Turn it on for class. Use it. Turn it off. Take it to next class/home and repeat. Suspend was very iffy (and didn't help much in the battery life department).
Then I got a Powerbook G4 (which I still use today). Run it at home. Close the lid. Take it to school. Open the lid. IT WAS READY. Within 3 seconds I could start working. When I'm done? No "Start->This->that" to be sure it worked. Just close the lid. I know some PCs worked that way, mine never did (reliably) that I remember. Next class/home? Open the lid. If it got low on power, I'd plug it in. My little laptop has had up to 3 months of uptime (mostly due to major security updates that require restarts). I NEVER need to turn it off. The last time I did was when I was going on an airplane (didn't know if they'd like it suspended during takeoff/landing). It boots relatively fast, but nothing compared to waking up and going to sleep.
If you're a desktop user, I understand your comment. But as a laptop user who has had the pleasure of a Mac, a fast reliable suspend is a HUGE time saver.
Now I'll note that some other people at my school had newer laptops that could suspend/resume just fine. But they took much longer. Some of them approached boot time length, some could do it in 20-30 seconds. No PC there matched my Mac (note: I never asked the few Linux users if they had it working on their laptops). I could suspend/resume my Mac 3 times with ease in the time it took the fastest XP users (and I'll ignore the "Click here to sign on" screen most of them didn't disable).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
IBM is terminating the final remnants of their OS/2 staff at the end of December, 2006 as OS/2 takes its last few agonized dying breaths. What's interesting, though, is that over the last 5 years, there has been a skeleton crew of OS/2 people at IBM to support the last few OS/2 customers and this tiny crew was able to accomplish a lot of stuff to keep OS/2 updated and running on current hardware that a much larger crew probably could not have. They were even able to add a lot of stuff that was never even included in the last 'official' Warp 4 release such as the logical volume manager, journaling file system, updated kernel for multicore AMD, USB 2.0 support, UDF DVD support, etc. In this case, a small crew could do a lot more than a large staff and the final dying remnants of the OS/2 business at IBM became more like the original tiny Windows group at Microsoft.
Conversely, when you are far enough past your competition, you have to decide where you want to go. Microsoft's business vision looks backwards (defensive) and sidewards (leveraging its unique position in desktop os and office software to gain entry into new markets and new revenue streams). They don't seem to be looking where they are going, because they're already where they want to be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The thing that is interesting to me is looking at not just the market share, but the market sales.
8 .html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061019-802
It goes DELL, HP, GATEWAY, then APPLE.
People tend to buy into the whole branding thing. People aren't as clear as Mac or PC users. People are either a DELL user or GATEWAY or HP or APPLE or IBM or Toshiba or ETC. Apple has always been the leader in the creative world. Technology of today is allowing even average people to become more creative. With more average people thinking they're creative, this will drive people to buy the 'creative platform of choice'. A mac.
It would seem a few years ago I was the only mac user in my group of friends. It now seems every single one of my friends has either a mac in ADDITION to their PC or have exchanged their PCs for Macs. These are interesting times. I only HATE microsoft because I used to lead a life of tech support for my job and friends and family. Friends and family always used to come to me to help them with their myrid of problems. Every incompetent windows user has a somewhat savey techie behind them formating their drive, installing windows, cleaing up viruses, installing programs, fixing things, etc. I got sick of being that person. I tell people now to buy macs. They buy a mac and generally just use their computer to get things done. No more fuss.
[rant]
If microsoft can ever prove to me that their applications can do what they promise then I will jump on the microsoft bandwagon. Prove to me that updates will no longer crash my machine, prove to me that re-installing my operating system (which seems to occur frequently with microsoft) isn't going to take 2 hours of loading and 4 more hours of installing fixes -- patches -- updates -- combined with 35 reboots. It's the reboots that are so dang painful. To click on a patch and watch all the other patches you just clicked all go 'grey' and have a dialog box pop up that says, "Sorry, this patch has to be installed individually." BUT EVERY PATCH has to be installed individually. What the hell? Prove to me that your operating system can run for 2 years without having to be reinstalled for some random reason to get the speed of the machine back to what it used to be.
[sigh] . . . [/sigh]
My beef with microsoft is real and valid. I have now been running a mac exclusively for just around 4 years now. My latest mac is about 1 or 2 years old. I got it from the apple store pre-loaded with OSX 10.4. I have yet to re-install it. Has run perfect just as expected this whole time. Sure, a mac has it's qwerks, but if you're sick of microsoft, the apple qwerks are much fewer and far between than dealing with microsoft's.
[/rant]
I used to work at Apple, in the OS and frameworks groups.
There is a master "train" for a release; projects that don't change are "forwarded" to that train, meaning no source changes are required. When a project needs to be submitted for a change for the new release, a new "view" is created for its specific changes. Every few days, a build is produced, sometimes using previously compiled bits from the old "train", sometimes its a full world build (which can take several days) but otherwise building all the latest submissions.
Then there's a fairly labor intensive "integration" phase where the built bits are all put on a box and booted. If a "quicklook" QA process shows that the build is hoarked, the integrator goes and pesters the submitters of the latest project that was submitted and gets them to fix it. (Some percentage of the time, the new code has exposed a bug elsewhere, regardless, the project that is the proximal cause of the failure is rolled back to the previous revision, it anticipation that all the projects that need to rev be submitted at once.)
The whole thing is set up through symlinks via NFS, so if you want to see the latest version of any piece of code in the system (modulus those projects that are "locked down" for security issues) you can just get your release name, append the build number, and you've got the source code, symbol'd binaries and build log *for any release* at your fingertips.
When a new build comes out, you just do a clean install. It takes about two hours on the internal network, so typically you pull the disk image and slam it to a firewire drive, (usually, you can bum a disk with the image already grabbed from a teammate) and do a full install in 15 minutes. I can't imagine having to spend a day (as some other posted mentioned) setting up a machine...
Most projects have 3 or 4 contributors. In many cases, and entire framework is the responsibility of a single person (and he or she may actually own several small frameworks.) Lots of small projects produce cleaner interfaces that lead to fewer dependencies. (Of course there are dependencies, and circular ones, but these are kept to a minimum.) Projects are encouraged to use public API from other projects, rather than SPI or other project internals. If there's something useful enough for some other project to use, its first made into SPI for internal consumption, with the goal that developers will eventually be able to use it through a public API.
Most groups don't have dedicated QA by the way - the engineers are responsible for their code, and everyone is generally just very smart about what they're doing.
As to this start menu problem: the entire UI team is about 5 individuals, plus Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall - and they're likely to say "Thats fucking stupid, just do this" and boom(tm), the decision has been made the product ships, and life goes on.
Don't let the icon fool you. The "power" button is a "deep sleep" button in disguise.
You have to click three more times to find the true shut down or restart, and if you forget you've got to wait around 90 seconds for the machine to hibernate and resume. Before you can actually shut down or restart properly.
Don't get me started about some of the other UI choices made in just the start menu. The limited programs scrolling area, for example, takes a nasty interface and makes it utterly unusable for someone who has more than MS Office loaded.
Hollow eye candy that makes the machine run like a slug, and to add insult to injury it's eye candy with horrid usability that takes upwards of 40% of my processing power and frame rate compared to XP SP2.
I agree that developers have a problem with this.
:)
But...
There is never an ROI on doing code cleanup and making it easier to maintain from a manager / new development programmer's perspective.
As a maintenance programmer tho... I see faster, more stable, easier to maintain code out of even the little things I manage to sneak in. A solid code cleaning can cut weeks or months off of other projects on the same code base. From everything we've heard- windows source is a mess.
What they probably need to do is spend 6 months and do an architectural code cleanup. There would be no immediately ROI however every project for the rest of time would benefit so theoretically their ROI is infinite.
As a maintenance programmer, I've frequently taken multiple pages of code out of programs without changing their functionality. In a large number of cases products are shipped by the development staff with dead code, goofy code, very inefficient code, redundant code, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.