Slashdot Mirror
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."
So, Microsoft has finally adopted the Linux development model?
The owls are not what they seem
Every single organization seems to follow this exact same path. Lean and mean at first, to fast and nimble second, to large but feature, to slow and bloated. The next step after this tends to be, jump at any and all projects to see if anything will stick progressing slowly down a spiral with a large change either acquisition by another company or dramatic slashing of middle-management workers and projects to focus on their core. Unfortunately I have yet to see a large organization that doesn't seem to go down something similar to this path.
I've been in a sysadmin job now for about 4 years.
I work with computers daily, both Windows and Linux (and a dabble with OSX).
Can I tell you the difference between sleep and hibernate? No.
What are the differences, and why do they matter to the average Joe? Why not just have the 'best' one and forget the other one?
For that matter, why are they duplicating the Lock option, seems pretty dumb to me.
Because it had to move through the digestive tract and on through the large intestine.
Doesn't "the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu" already tell you everything you need to know?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Is anyone else surprised they didn't mention Europe bitching about every little thing in Vista as part of the delays? Kinda hard to forget to mention that one, huh? I do agree that the overstaffing problem is a huge one. I'm working on a 9 week programming project for a class in a group of three and we're still like "you did what?!" every single week and then try and stomp out all the little fires that pop up from two people doing things that aren't compatible.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...uninstalled Vista instead? Now that would be a simple way to solve the matter.
It was those 18 month long sound effects.
Sometimes waiting for the release of a perfect app is suicide. They should take a page from Google's book and allow beta versions to be constantly tweaked and hammered on. A flowing model might have a better chance than a rigid once-every-five-years plan.
People would want Vista if it were revolutionary. But you can't just sit down and say 'let's make something revolutionary' and then set up a timeline and claim to be able to create a revolution within that timeframe. Revolutions happen by accident if at all, not on purpose.
So why hurry? For money? In my experience hurrying to make money never works out.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Sure. In five years after SP1 and SP2 and maybe SP3 are out to fix what's wrong with Windows Vista now and the hardware is able to run it fast. From what I seen, it's just a bloatware update to Windows XP. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Mac OS X Leopard. ;)
I don't get the new cult of never turning your PC off. If I'm away from my computer, it's usually for an extended period (IE - a night I'm not downloading crap, or a full day of work). Doesn't it make vastly more sense to not have the power supply fan running for those 8 hours? Or the HD randomly going idle and then spinning up again? When I'm done, I shut the machine down and turn off the power strip. Interested in why others don't, however.
Looking at the article... Is it just me or getting that menu to pop up for the shutdown options by that arrow seem really unintuitive? I've gotten that feeling all around while using vista. Nice looking in places, but much of what the windows/system is telling you is hard to make sense of.
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!
Basically OS2 took on more than they could handle and were out of their depth. They didn't have the kernel development experience that the other kernel development groups had. My impression is they didn't want to hire in people who knew more than they did since it would jepordize their big frog in small puddle status. This delayed things so when they were finally forced to add more people it was too late. The adding more people to a late project makes it later mythical man month thing. And the '93 layoff happened in that time frame and there were a lot of skilled people available. So no excuse that there was a shortage there.
I'm offended. I was hired by Microsoft recently, and basically only attend meetings (I'm a PM). My job is to keep the devs from having to go to ad-naseum meetings.
/. at 10am.
I feel shamed that I'm viewed as part of a growing problem, and that I "got in easy".
Then again, I'm writing a reply to
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
I've read other blogs in regards to Windows Vista, and from what I am gathering the primary reason why Windows Vista took so long to complete was because of management. Philip Su argued how the gargantuan amount of code included in Vista slowed it development dramatically, however I think that this strengthens my point and the point made in this article.
However, I'm not terribly surprised that this occurred for Vista. The higher execs at the company wanted Vista to be a revolution and had a clear and concise goal that they wanted this operating system to achieve. In order to do this, from what I've read, they needed to form many more separate divisions inside of the Windows division to concentrate on small parts of the operating system. This probably sounded like a good idea, but the problem was that none of their work was in sync with each other. Some had more work completed than others. Furthermore, rifts within divisions such as the one present here spurred disagreement after disagreement, that including the decision to switch the codebase of the OS to the one present in Server 2003 (something that from what I understand should have been decided from the beginning). With all of this, it was only inevitable that confusion and miscommunication would occur.
All in all, while I think Windows Vista is definitely more capable than Windows XP and warrants itself a much needed upgrade, I feel that the actual improvements of the operating system do not warrant a five-year delay. Okay, so the compositing manager, networking stack, and audio stack may have needed some time to complete, but five-years? I am not a programmer, so my impression may not carry a lot of weight, but being that Linux and UNIX based systems have already included some of these "future technologies," it becomes naive to deem this delay as acceptable.
This problem of bureaucracy and overbearing process is uniform across Microsoft. If you don't believe me, visit MiniMSFT and browse the archives.
"Sufferin' succotash."
cumputer
I bet I know what you use your PC for.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
1. As a monopoly, they define how much they charge.
/. waiting for next week's meeting?
2. Sales/Marketing's job is to force this product down OEM's throats. Good, bad, whatever, just buy it.
3. There is no accept or reject market mechanism. You WILL be buying Vista if you choose to buy a new PC later. It will be the very rare individual who switches to a mac or just slaps linux on their current box.
4. There is no incentive to establish a more productive developer environment.
Therefore, chaos and mismanagement won't ever harm the beast.
Joel's comments are fun to read, but the scale at which MS develops their OS makes it too easy to criticize from Joel's relatively tiny company.
Finally, How many hours did the developer spend/waste reading
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Pure and simple, Microsoft needs a clearer direction on its UI and feature set if it's to continue developing new releases of Windows. Vista development continually failed because Microsoft could never agree on what they were trying to bring the consumer, and left too much in the hands of its development teams. It never had a clear roadmap from the beginning, and was always chasing features that were introduced by competitors along the way.
... a tall order for a company with thousands of developers. As we're seeing from Apple's small but significant resurgence in popularity, customers are demanding more than ubiquitous driver support and backwards compatibility, they are demanding an experience ... and it's increasingly one that Microsoft refuses to deliver.
In the future, competitors will continue getting more creative, and keeping up with them will someday become prohibitively expensive for Microsoft. To survive, Microsoft must innovate instead of duplicating their competition
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
Isn't telling a company how to write it's programs, particularly it's flagship, like telling another parent how to raise their kids? If they want to PAY over twenty people for designing that, hey, it's their money. Whether it's mismanaged or not is an internal affair over at Microsoft. Maybe the articles will have some people answer for that.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Is he sure that it wasn't because they had to remove all those features? You know, the ones the promised when it was still called "Longhorn", like with all the other aspects of the OS?
Quite frankly, Vista is well on route to becoming a term for "taking the long road around to arrive back at the same place" - as in "hey, did you Vista or what took you so long?".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While the development sounds aweful, I think the result that came out of it is quite nice.
I hear two camps: minimalists and those who want do make every possible decision. One camp says just have one or two buttons. The other wants 10 buttons. I think the third option is the best. Make it easy do the two buttons but still have a way of doing the other options. This is what Microsoft has done. They have a power button and a lock button. The power button goes into a sleep/hibernation mode. The lock button goes into a lock/switch user mode. If you want the other choices, you need click on the menu arrow.
This seems like basic design. Make it simple to do common stuff. Make it possible but not as easy to do things that you do less often (more advanced).
the powerbill i could care less about, but anything extending the harddrive MBTF i will do gladly ;)
on another note, i tend to use remote desktop a lot since it lets me access my agenda and outlook installation and whatnot from pretty much any location with internet access. (and using your own setup all of the time is just convenient)
Maybe they don't want to sync repositories that quickly. This prevents newly introduced bugs from quickly interfering with everyone else's work.
This coincides well with other insightful articles that show Vista is probably Microsofts last dominant OS. IF things continue the way they have been. The average computer user would have enough know-how to be able to figure out how to install linux. Also, with linux's expanding hardware support. Linux is evolving into a possibly successful mainstream OS. Linux will most likely take over the higher-end portion of the Vista versions such as Vista Premium and Business, etc.
With the amount of bearacracy that is going on in MS. It looks like they are putting money in anything that looks like it can fly and a lot of it is not flying. This is not good in the longterm. MS needs to proiritize and get back to its roots if they want to continue having a high marketshare even if that market share slowly shrinks due to Linux. The best they can do is slow it down.
IF things continue like this, there will finally be a true competitor to MS.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Vista works fine and I see nothing but biased bitter views of Vista from this community. It runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old and actually runs smoother than XP; navigating networks and browsing is seamlessly more easier to access than in XP.
Bloatware right? Thanks Linux for reminding us what a terrible desktop Windows has been the last 10+ years for the millions and millions of people/businesses around the world. But I could understand the last few years how Linux people have given up their bitter argument of Linux vs Windows on the desktop and have shifted their argument with MAC OS X vs Windows desktop.
I also find my self using the hibernate feature and also the suspend feature in Windows quite often as well, depending on how far I have to lug my laptop. I would really be missing the functionality of all these features. The features I never use are lock and switch user. Only one person ever uses my computer, and that's me so I don't have much use for these options but they don't bother me. I just wish it looked cooler and was easier to get to the options I use most often instead of turning out to be the "lowest common denominator".
On a tangent, I wish that Vista would allow you options when you create a user to customize the complexity of the options it gives you. Maybe a computer guru setting where it gives you all of the options for the shutdown menu and shows hidden folders and file extensions by default (I don't know if Vista does this or not) and then a beginners setting that just shows you the basics. I know that the first thing I do whenever I install XP is customize everything so that I can work faster: show full path in address bar, get rid of the common tasks pane, etc.
Why can't there be a way to specify which of the 9 are listed???? Is that so hard?
I know the difference between sleep and hybernate, and I use sleep all the time, both for shutdown and startup speed. (writing 2GB of ram + POST and reading 2GB of ram takes a LOT longer than the 2/5 seconds it takes for sleep to do its thing.
For a home PC, the only option I would have showing would be sleep.
At work, the only option I would have showing is lock.
Let the user choose what to show.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
"The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly."
Leave it to Joel to turn every issue into a hiring standards one. The problem was that too many people were involved in the project, not their quality. Joel likes to stroke his ego and promote his company by claiming he always hires the best people. This issue afforded him another excuse for self-promotion.
I just get the idea of a really long flatulent fart..
These layers of complexity are added to many Vista functions, copying files, burning CDs, running applications that have not received Microsofts blessing, video/desktop settings...ugh! I give up. Give my my nice functional XP anyday. XP was the best thing they have done so far. I don't think I'll say that about Vista. I'll miss XP when I am forced to upgrade. I am an IT implentor and I am going to pesonally kill any move to Vista for as long as I can. My users will hate it, they just want to do their jobs, not relearn how to use a computer. I ran Vista 3 weeks and last weekend I hung it up and "upgraded" back to XP.
Am I the only one less than shocked by the implication that Vista's UI is going to be a mess, just like every other version of Windows? I mean I thought it was pretty obvious that somewhere early on in the formation of MS, they hired people that don't know how to do good usability testing and have never corrected the problem. Or maybe it is just that people in marketing or somewhere else have more say in the matter and end up overriding the right decisions.
Now I don't agree with all the quick and dirty second guessing. I think a lot of people want to have their Windows box shut down, closing all their apps and restart with a "fresh slate" while they go to the bathroom or something. But I also doubt that the existing UI described was the result of good user testing. The UI could be greatly simplified. Anyone, however, who was expecting this to happen has never paid attention to a Windows upgrade before or was privy to something I was not. The Windows UI will suck right up until it starts costing MS real money. Until then, users will just have to deal with it.
It runs perfectly fine on my 5 year old...
:P
You run Windows Vista on your kid?! Not even Linux users would do that!
Ok. I've been running vista on one machine or another for a while.. since early beta.. and am now running the release version on my main machine. There are quite a few headscratchers in here. I often tell my colleagues I'm like the little kid from the 6th sense.. except instead of dead people I see bugs. Things that annoy the crap out of me that have been there at least one maybe two versions of windows ago.
In the past days of clicking through endless options and dialogs to configure things such as encryption certificates, etc I often wondered if this was really better than editing a single line in an easy-to-find text file.
Start menu? Hardly ever used the damn thing. Shortcut keys with and I put the quicklaunch bar off to one side with the 40 or so frequently used programs I use.
Vista doesn't support dragging the quicklaunch bar off of the stat menu and off to one side because it was "confusing to end users." No one seems to have found a registry override as yet.
Vista doesn't handle symlinks properly. It used to be "c:\documents and settings" but now in vista it is c:\users. I see a clever little "C:\documents and settings" shortcut on my C drive. OOOOoo is this a symlink? No? I get Access Denied when trying to double-click. Opening the path via an API however works fine. Go figure.
BUGS. Features? Half-Features? Call them what you want. I think most technical folks that have to work on this know these problems exist but architecturally or bureaucratically they are hard or impossible to fix.
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run. I would say this is just an odd quirk about me and how I think menus take too long and too much work to do something, but now the run area has been replaced with a little place you type in stuff and through the magic of windows desktop search it finds whatever you type in the area above that normally occupied by program icons. The bug? You have to let it search. No matter what. Yeah, WTF? This works great on a home PC where you maybe have maybe 10,000 files. Network drives? Oh no. You can't just type n:\ then hit enter. You have to physically wait a sec for it to pull up n:\ in the list of programs above the start menu THEN hit enter. WOW, WHAT A GREAT FEATURE. No more control-esc n:\ enter for me. It is nowctrl+esc n:\ wait..wait..wait.. enter. Otherwise I get some random program like Notepad. Or Flash. Or Firefox.
On the one hand I can see how the start menu splaying itself all over your screen as you "drill down" to whatever the hell obscure program you need might be unappealing. On the other hand confining the entirety of all programs available to you to a 400x600 pixel window doesn't seem like a good fix.
This is just the start menu. Don't even get me started on the new file explorer, which is the least half-baked area of Vista in my opinion. Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments? I'm sure I could go on all day.
I take all this as evidence that a lot of new features in vista are based on good ideas.. new paradigms in UI design.. it just seems that the vast majority are implemented poorly at best and implemented recklessly at worst. I would not expect this in 2006 when others are able to produce such polished and solid OSs. I would have to agree this seems like code-rot from the inside out probably due to the megalithic internal structure at MS
When you hibernate, the HDD spins down. How is this any better than turning it off?
Does nayone have any info on how the OS X team works? I mean in a few years Apple did a complete paradigm shift from OS 9 to OS X on the OS level. I would be interesting to see what, if anything, they are doing better. Links or experiences would be nice.
And while I am at it, the start menu requires input from the kernal team. WTF? This is violating some very basic software design principles. The OS should just be basic services, then the applications, including the UI, should ride on top of the kernal without really caring much about how the kernal works.
I can see integration with the shell, but the kernal? It looks like MS policy of tight OS integration with the applications is biting them *hard*.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. You do not need 255 different ways to tell a laptop to "close up for later use". A true geek would want to be questioned for each process about whether it needed to be persisted or killed. This is a problematic mindset.
That is all.
he complains about 15 options, but really there are only 7 options, but with multiple ways to get to most of them.
I find (in my own experience, I'd like to hear other views), people don't mind having a lot of options to do the same thing if they are "not near eachother". For example, there are two buttons on the start menu to turn of the computer (the power icon, and the "shut down" list item) - mouse/screen elements, a function key combo (keyboard elements), power button (physical button on the computer element), and closing the lid (physical manipulation of the computer).
The only two parts of these I can see people having a problem with are the two next to eachother on the start menu, which may cause some minor annoyances, the rest are really dissociated from eachother in terms of "method of approach".
However, 7 types of "shut down" could be annoying... switch, logout, lock, shut down, sleep, hibernate, and I forgot one. Anyway, the shut down, sleep, and hibernate, which are very similar, will porbably annoy most users.
As far as the project managment... 24 people + 1 year... That looks like an afternoon of coding for one person to me... Yeah, that's ridiculous.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Newsflash: Large software project takes a long time.
Did it occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, a software project of this magnitude just takes this long to complete?
What's to say it should take less time? Management schedule? Isn't that wrong by definition?
paintball
A lot of meetings is not automatically a bad thing. Especially when the worth of a product is overly subjective. What works/looks good for one developer may not for another. Normally, you would pick your best options rather than all to ease confusion, but I could understand shipping them all and and letting the user pick what they like. I guess they don't figure on shutdown nazis getting mad that other users can shutdown the machine differently than them. Seeing the shutdown options, I would suspect two problems. One would be poor management structure. No one willing to stick their neck out and narrow down or standardize features. The second I would guess is uncertainty. Not knowing what users will want. Giving them as many options as possible and hoping they have most people covered. It seems they didn't give much consideration to those that think less options is best. The problems explained by Lettvin point to poor communication and too much secrecy. When you wish to hide all other sections of code or keep them in the dark about changes from developers of a particular section, you are going to add serious overhead. I don't think the problem is too many developers, its the communication between them. Ideally, having large teams would give you the best ideas from more people, but if you never let them know what the other is thinking/doing, the large number of people can't build off each other and is wasted.
Why they spent so long on that sound, the world will never know.
After I install windows I usually change all the default "features" including the often annoying startup sounds.
About the development of the 'Off switch' for the guide! I can not be the only person who immediately thought of that!
Wait until you read about the development of the "About" menu item!
--- What?
On second thought, maybe Microsoft should take away restart. I mostly use it so that I can reboot into Linux.
I don't think I've ever had a HD failure because of that (I think the one that was smoked was probably a design flaw), but I replace power supplies on a fairly regular basis (at least once per computer, sometimes twice). For me, saving the wear and tear on that takes priority.
Google is almost entirely web-based for all intents and purposes. Google can bring all of their users up to the latest version and state easily and almost instantaneously. Microsoft, by contrast, has to support these platforms in a very distributed environment. Thousands of seperate desktops that may or may not get updated for months or years and updates that may not be properly installed (these, after all, are controlled largely by users -- not their employees) As they release additional updates, these difficulties compound on themselves.
Additionally, Microsft is developing an OPERATING SYSTEM which is far more complex and upon which thousands of seperate critical applications depend on. It would not be acceptible to most of Microsoft's customers if MS were to suddenly break their favorite application with an update. The level of interaction is much greater than anything Google has to contend with.
I respect Google. They are good and what they do, better perhaps that Microsoft is at what they do (their core business: Windows, Office, SQL, etc). These companies are, however, largely engaged in seperate businesses and are at very different stages of maturity.
You might argue that Linux uses this rapid-release model. However, the distributions are a total mess as far as the average user is concerned, i.e., overall usability, installing applications, etc.
Yes, clearly you should be running NetBSD on that kid instead.
I read the internet for the articles.
When you Hibernate, the machine *is* off. It writes the memory out to disk and physically turns off all power to the machine. The only difference is the startup time and the fact you can resume everything where you left off. The fact that resuming from Hibernation shows a BIOS boot screen should have clued you in on this.
When you Sleep, theoretically only the memory has power. This isn't quite true (some power is pushed around so you can detect wake events), but is close enough.
The reason people use sleep and hibernate is to save electricity. As machines draw more and more power, you realize more and more cost savings as you let the machines power down when not in use. Whether the cost saving matches the wear and tear inflicted by spin up/spin down cycles is another question.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
High proportion of bright people who know what's really going on at first. The more people you have, the more average the knowledge and intelligence in the company. It's good though, these big dumb companies are perfect targets for the smaller smarter ones.
Deleted
I use restart all of the time, not only when installing software. It's easier to do than shut down and power back up because I don' have to press any buttons.
It's also easier on the circuits and mechanics of the computer.
Uh, Microsoft told us it would take less time. Therefore it's their fault when they miss their self-imposed deadline. They underestimated the difficulty of the project and therefore we should have nobody to blame but MS.
rm -rf
It seems that at MS Vista, NIH has become NIH Either.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
The UI isn't all that terrible. Joel Spolsky is making a mountain out of a molehill. Look at the screenshot he gives in his article. Here's what I notice:
1) There's a power button. That shuts things down fully. ("I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off.")
2) There's a lock button. That leave it running, but keeps others out of your stuff. ("I am going away from my computer now.")
3) There's a menu of choices if you care to look at it, and the button is much smaller than the other two and has a nondescript arrow icon on it which makes it much less attractive to non-techie users.
Yes, his suggestions for combining lock with switch user and sleep with hibernate are good, but I don't think what they actually implemented is all that difficult to understand. His problem is that he's "one of us" and went looking for all the extra options. Most people will never click that arrow to make that menu appear. Ever. It's kind of unfair, even to Microsoft, to rag on something for being unfriendly to non-techies when non-techies are never going to even see it. Usually Joel Spolsky's observations are spot-on, but this time I'm going to have to give him an F for eFfort.
What would DOS do?
Give you an incomprehensible message and the options A)bort R)etry or F)ail.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well, you can have it both ways. Present the interface as Splosky would have it (one option: "Bye" which locks the screen, allows user switching, then goes to sleep, then hibernates) but allow the optimizer to customize it through some setting somewhere. I would like to have more explicit choices, because I know what I want, but since I know what I want I don't have a problem finding the configuration for the things I care about.
Where "limited choice" systems get it wrong (I'm looking at you, recent versions of GNOME) is where the configurability is removed, not just hidden.
demi
All true except the .NET part. That really seems to be knocking out Java installations all over the place. Java was a great dream when it started, but it lost focus after a while. I've seen quite a few companies either abandon Java or relegate it to 'legacy' code bases, and do all new development in .NET. Microsoft actually did a very good job with .NET.
Good God you have no sense of humor. Oooh oooh! Somebody insulted Linux!!!! Alert the authorities! Won't somebody PLEASE mod the GP???? Think of the children!
I need to leave my desktop computer on all night for backups and virus scans. Otherwise, my computer is inevitably downloading something, processing or rendering something, or otherwise doing a job for me.
:-)
My laptop, on the other hand, sleeps constantly.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Incidentally, the Catholic Church also provided the model for Microsoft's DRM marketing:
It's not buggery, it's a feature!
I know /.ers are instictively repulsed by the idea of anyone saying something non-negative about MS, but an article in the WSJ today pointed out that the usability tide has turned - computers now are pretty easy to configure and interconnect, compared to consumer devices.
As bloated and late as it seems, Vista's most important design objectives were to be somewhat idiot-proof and to support every half-assedly-engineered peripheral device sold in all the four corners of the Earth. I think that is what bogged them down, not something of interest only to anal-retentive UI consoisseurs. Meeting these objectives required getting rid of generation of cruft (and laying the foundations for generation more to come, I am sure); if you've ever done any programming you know that is the hardest part of any project.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Twenty-four people spent a year on the Vista shutdown menu?
If that sucker doesn't have dancing girls that pop out, give me a lap dance, and serve me beer every time I shut it down, I'm gonna be disappointed.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
I can't believe how acurate this is!
This is almost exactly my latest experience at Microsoft too.
The difference is that most of my code was independant of others so I didn't need to worry about other people's garbage as much. But, when I did have to deal with it, then this is exactly how it was.
Please, though slashdot Microsoft haters, remember that it was not always this way. Microsoft used to be more efficient. Size, scope, and culture there has changed. It used to be a fun, great place to work. Now it is filled with the same corporate stupidity that other big companies have.
A lot of hard working smart people are leaving for other companies. Not necessarily the brightest of the bunch, but the people that got most of the work done are leaving. The brightest of the bunch get paid so well, that it would take more than complete corporate idiocy to drive them away.
That's why I won't go back -- unless I am offered a freaking ton of money. I think that more people are starting to feel this way about Microsoft too... Anyone else on slashdot (not afraid of the huge flames you will attract for saying you worked at MS) willing to post one way or the other about that idea?
Hopefully, I can assume that they won't waste cycles as much for the highest paid range. Maybe this is an incorrect assumption? Does anyone that works there at a high echelon, have some good input here?
It allows me ssh access from outside the house so that I can transfer files back and forth as needed. It allows me to run a simple web server from home, so that I can give relatives access to family pictures.
The cake is a pie
Oooh oooh! Somebody insulted Linux!!!!
By insulting Linux, he has insulted a whole community of grossly unattractive buttseckshaving faggots, and this cannot be accepted.
They can't afford that Steve.
They're stuck with the other one
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
I leave my machines (other than laptops) on 24/7 and have never smoked a power supply in 20 years. I did have to replace a power supply once - HP's engineers decided a 200 watt power supply would be enough for a machine that used close to 300 watts at peak load - the original power supply would trip its circuit breaker when usage would peak (e.g. doing anything CPU intensive, reading/writing HD and CDROM at the same time). Even then, the power supply would come back online after waiting for the circuit breaker to cool down - so it wasn't smoked.
Additionally, of the thousands of servers and routers used by my company running 24/7, I think we might have lost 2 power supplies over the past 5 years - and I would scratch those up to manufacturer's defect.
If you are smoking power supplies 'on a fairly regular basis' - maybe you should look at ways to regulate the power coming into your systems (power spikes etc?), and rethink your policy of powering everything up and down on a daily basis. Another issue might be that the power supply you are using is not rated for the equipment it is powering (as in my HP example) - you could be overloading your powersupply, and just because it came from an OEM doesn't mean it is designed correctly (as in my example - I added up the power requirements of all the components on my system and it was a number quite a bit north of 200 watts - and mind you, the machine was equipped from the factory, I didn't add any new components).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I will be watching how Blizzard continues to expand and produce now that everything goes through the "channels." With the expansion getting pushed back, I have to believe that they still care about the product the are giving to their customers. That is the reputation they have and why their fan base is as loyal as it is - They care. Lets see if it holds up with StarCraft 2 :)
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
a) Stop buying such shitty power supplies, you get what you pay for.
b) Get some sort of line cleaning, even a UPS, since apaprently you have amazingly shitty electricity.
First off all, he's retarded because in the screenshot he gives obviously there is one button for "off" and one for "lock" and one for "other". That's not a lot of choices. There are a lot of subtly different choices after you choose "other", but the answer isn't to have one option that somehow magically does everything right.
His "answer" is one choice that:
1) saves all memory to persistent storage (usb drive, hd, etc).
2) locks screen,
3) where you can: log in as a different user
4) or wait 30+ seconds for some kind of magic 'power off'
Except saving memory may take a long time (on say a 10mb/s flash drive) and if you have any tasks running like say a fileshare or bittorrent or whatever then you have to freeze them at the locked screen. And what does it mean to "power off"? Do you really want your bittorrent to stop because your computer just assumed after 30 seconds of idle it could shut down completely? If you actually want the power off you have to wait until it says "ok to turn power off" before unplugging the cord at full system power because your system doesn't even have an "off" button?
Solve the actual problem. People don't want to tell the computer what to do, they want to inform the computer of what they are doing. So instead of shutdown you have "Sign off". Instead of sleep you have "I'm Away". Instead of lock you have "I'm Idle". Like instant messengers. If people can say "Away->Extended Away" vs "Away->Eating" then this isn't a burden of choice at all. The computer can then magically do the right thing because it knows what you are going to do. Plus it can inform other computers of what you are doing, so you don't have to select "Eating" in gaim/trillian AND in the system menu.
Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments?
You're already using it. Go right ahead...
you had me at #!
The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros actually have an option (on by default) that does both sleep and hybernate. Basically when you shut the lid the laptop immediately goes into sleep mode but also at the same time writes the hibernate state information to disk. Then if you pop the lid open, it just awakes from sleep in a matter of a second or two (much much faster than Windows XP's sleep). If, while sleeping, you happen to remove the battery or otherwise lose power, then the next time the machine is booted, it boots from the hibernate information and restores right where you left off, in just about 20 seconds or so.
This is a great combination of the two mechanisms, and done in a way that the user will never really have to worry or care about it.
That you say you can't explain the difference does prove that you're a moron, but that everyone else missed it isn't helping.
As I understand it, "sleep" on Vista puts the computer into standby, and after a preconfigured amount of time, it wakes from the standby and immediately hibernates. The idea is you just push the "sleep" button, and if you're away for only a few minutes, it's ready for you, but if it (rightly) guesses you're not coming back, it hibernates completely to save power.
However, there is an important difference to the average Joe -- suppose you need to pick up your computer and move it, or replace the battery in your laptop? In other words, suppose you need to deprive your computer of any and all power for a very short amount of time? Your best option then is hibernate -- if you do it after pushing "sleep", you either have to wait an hour for it to hibernate, or you end up losing data.
By the way, I disagree strongly with TFA here:
Actually, it's seven. And I can and do explain things like this to my mother. So don't bother bringing out the old "people are stupid" argument.
Look: Even with an automatic shifter, you usually have a choice of: Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Gear 1, and Gear 2. There's also a parking break (often misleadingly called the "E-brake"). Yet people drive these things all the time, even more complex things (manual shifters). Uncle Joe can handle it. We just need to stop pretending he's a moron -- if he really is incapable of understanding the distinctions on his shut down menu, he should not be operating a computer.
Actually, 7 choices is about the right number to show a user, from what I've read of UI design.
So, all that said, there are important distinctions. Let's say I was sharing a gaming rig with my brother. Here, I definitely do care about the difference between "switch user" and "log off" -- if he's logged off, all his programs are stopped. That means there's nothing he's running to lag my games.
It would also be nice to be able to lock without necessarily logging off -- and certainly without telling your computer to shut down. What if I want to leave a download running? What should be the golden standard of idle-ness that tells the computer it's really not doing anything useful and it can shut down?
It also seems nice to be able to switch users without locking -- in theory, that would allow me to toggle quickly between logged in users. Perhaps not as fast as I can on Linux (ctrl+alt+fn), but it's better than having to enter a password every time.
What about actually shutting down or rebooting? Well, rebooting makes sense because it kills all apps and gives you a fresh start, and also seems to magically fix many problems on Windows. Shutting down makes sense because all apps get to know what you're doing, so they save state (and prompt you to save documents), so you don't lose any data if you're planning to pull the plug -- and also, if you're going to dig around inside the case, you really have to shut down, Hibernate doesn't like it when you change the hardware before you boot it again. You also need these options for dual boot, if you have any partitions you want to be readable from the other OS.
Actually, the lock and shutdown/sleep buttons make sense. To a user who's not going to learn the distinctions between sleep and hibernate, there's no need for a reboot button or really anything but sleep, and it's not that difficult to tell the difference between an icon that looks like a padlock and an icon that looks like a power button. I don't think the lock button needs to be there, but two choices isn't bad, and it's obvious why th
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Would you have a 30 page argument on the merits of sleep vs. hibernate...
The problem with the credibility of this blog is FogCreek itself. If you want to set yourself up as an authority on software development, make sure the software you write is above average -- and Fogbugz is anything but.
Joel obviously has no clue on what he is writing about... Any laptop user will tell you important basic difference between Sleep and Hibernate - Sleep is quick and still uses significant amount of power (yet takes less than 1 sec to power up), while hibernate takes 10-15 seconds to restore but uses very small amount of power. With my laptop I always use sleep, unless I on trip where Hibernate is very useful to squeze last ounce of battery power.
What he is also not understanding is that those are actually options, signified by them being located on option button-arrow which is supposed to provide you more options. It is actually one of the 3 main icons/choices, and is the smallest one - big icon is Power icon which shuts down your computer (60% of screen), lock is next to it and slightly smaller (25% of the screen, while option arrow is smallest (15% of the screen).
So why in the world would you actually want to lower the choices in Additional Options menu? He obviously ignores large power and lock buttons next to it and comes to the same conclusion as MS Devs did in his summarization on what should be there (Lock and Power, which are already there - funny stuff). Article makes no sense, and whoever posted it here also didnt take 10 seconds to actually read it.
Or is he debating on why do we even have options? Maybe when I become an moron, and start writing blog with my real name and picture, I will understand why would anyone be annoyed with developer giving you an option in form of 15 pixels wide button.
What competion do you speak of?
Mac market share that still stands at less than 10% of total market share despite being the superior mass-market OS?
Linux/BSD? Desktops.... Nope. Not even close.
Either you are astroturfing for MS to prop up the appearance of competition or you haven't examined the history of MS's share of the desktop computing market.
I urge you to consider the issue with a bit more objectivity.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Large software products take less time with fewer programmers and more time with more programmers. 24 people involved in a single feature and 4 levels of source code control with months to update is just the modern version of IBM with OS 360 and their 2000 Architects, 3000 Engineers, and 5000 clerks running around replacing paper pages in a 5 foot high stack of notebooks that was source code control in the 1960s.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Only if he's dead
I think there is hope. It's about Dunbar's number. Wikipedia say this about it:
This number is dictated by the "volume of the neocortex region of their brain" and it indicates the number of "relantionships" that a person can manage without problems. The number is 150 BTW. This is a very simplistic summary and you should read the Wikipedia article.
Now, some people are applying this when creating and managing companies in order to not have the problems that the big corp. have. See http://www.scottweisbrod.com/index.php/?p=92 for a nice summary.
I learned about it after reading Malcom Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point". It's a good book BTW.
When a person makes a comment like:
"Why do you want the power off? If you're concerned about power usage, let the power management software worry about that."
Everyone should really step back from the article and realize either he is trying really hard to pretend to be stupid, or is stupid.
(In the wisdom of Mencia)
Dee Dee Dee, I can think of one reason I would want to worry about power usage, like a laptop.
I am also concerned that he is instructing his uncle to use the 'advanced' menu to turn off the computer. MS Made it scary easy, there are TWO BUTTONS on the screen that either lock the computer or lock it and power it off. (The menu he details should not be something average users ever touch.)
Additionally, am I not like most people, because I actually use the provided sleep and Power buttons on the keyboard/physical computer anymore?
Working as intended, sorry Joel isn't able to keep up with the two button interface and is playing with the advanced menu, since it seems out of his understanding.
My power supplies don't smoke (stop working), the ball bearings just get bad and they start making a grinding sound when I first boot that takes longer to go away the more I put off replacing. My latest system is a dell (instead of from the chinese guys up the corner), so hopefully I won't have this problem again :)
... developers are sometimes handcuffed by previous expectations. I'm not suggesting that Vista should have everything that every previous version of Windows has had, but users are very, very literal-minded when it comes to this kind of thing. You give users two options where they used to have nine (even if they're the best and most valid two options), and they'll get angry and confused. "I don't want it to sleep -- I want to hibernate!"
Again, I don't condone ridiculous backward-compatibility, but I also don't envy the UI designers for Vista. MS has created a monster, in that they have made themselves the ubiquitous consumer OS. This means that they now have to cater to power users and business apps on down to grandma and her e-mail, and need to do it all within one (somewhat) cohesive UI. And while the Vista UI isn't perfect, I am frankly impressed with how much they've done to improve the UI without changing things so much that XP users would be lost. It's too bloaty for a from-the-ground-up design, but it's not from-the-ground-up -- it has to build elegantly on several previous, less-conscientious UI's. And I think it does that. And Office 2007's new UI is a great improvement, in my opinion, but that's another topic for another day.
Moreover, Vista's faster on my machine than XP was -- I thought Apple was the only company that came out with faster OS's with each release. I'm sure SP1 will bog it down, but for now it's pretty zippy for everything it adds.
So mod me down for being an MS apologist, but I think they're doing all right for once. And as for flaws, there are other, more urgent things to gripe about than maintaining backward-compatibility as it pertains to turning off the computer. You only see your plethora of options when you click a button specifically to see them -- if you had to wade through these options to get to other things, it would be a bigger deal. But really, you don't.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have a bad feeling about Vista now. If this blog is indeed representative, it sounds as if the key groups of developers had large levels of complexity to deal with just to implement the most basic features. Also, the word "head-strong" UI and development leads makes me think that there's a lot of conflict in the development team - I don't see how any of this could lead to good code.
I'll wager $10 that Vista will have as many security issues out of the box as WinXP did when it was released.
Now I'm not a Microsoft employee, but even as an outsider I've seen some hints that it might be the "promiscuous dependency taking" that has delayed Vista.
1) Integration of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft claims that IE and Windows are inextricably linked together, and at least for Windows 2000 and newer this seems to be true. For instance, if you type a URL into the address bar of the Windows Explorer, it will show you web pages. IMHO a stupid design, the web browser should be an application, not a fixed part of the GUI.
2) The RPC service being responsible for things a "remote procedure call service" has no business handling.
In August 2003, a worm called MSBlast spread by exploiting a buffer overflow in the DCOM RPC service (see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBlast). At that time me, trying to be clever, thought:
"I don't want anyone remotely executing stuff on my PC anyway. I'll just switch the service off and be fine".
Lo and behold:
After turning off the RPC service, various local functions were dead as well. Including the Services menu in the control panel. I was lucky that I could reactivate the RPC service by manually editing the registry, else I would have spent a day reinstalling.
So it seems quite believable that Microsoft is choking itself by lack of discipline in designing Windows
C - the footgun of programming languages
While I like having choices, I prefer that the out-of-box settings be reasonable and that the choices that are most likely to be used are obvious. This way, I can get useful stuff done right away, but I'm still able to hack as I need to.
Tony Jeffries
yep - as a comedian once said "I got a new PC the other day, it came with a free screensaver - just a piece of polythene but it seems to work ok!"
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
In order for competition to have its benefic effects (on prices and innovation), all is necessary is that MS be afraid that, should it do some wrong move, it would loose market share to competitors.
You can tell something is very wrong when the lamentable Zune software doesn't work properly (or at all) in Vista beta. I mean what the hell is going on? How could they be this far wrong?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
"In an almost spooky series of events, Microsoft has shadowed Apple's brush with death, making the exact same set of moves exactly ten years after Apple:
- In the mid 90s, Microsoft rapidly built upon its past success with MS-DOS to establish Windows as a vast empire
...just as Apple used the success of the Apple II as a stepping stone to launch the Mac in the mid 80s.
- From 1995 to 2001, Microsoft rapidly delivered advancements to its desktop Windows product
...just as Apple rapidly advanced the Mac System Software from 1985-1991.
- In 2001, Microsoft began announcing technologies that would be released as part of Longhorn and later Blackcomb
...just as Apple described new technologies intended for Copland and Gershwin a decade prior.
- From 2002-2006, Microsoft dropped features, changed plans, and started over several times in protracted efforts to ship Longhorn
...just as Apple had fumbled around with Copland ten years earlier.
- By 2006, it was obvious that Microsoft's Longhorn was not going to live up to the hype, and would really be just a refresh of the existing Windows XP
...just as Copland had been gutted in 1996 and its salvaged remains delivered as the optimistically named Mac OS 8.
- Microsoft outed Blackcomb as vaporware
...just as Apple admitted that Gershwin had never been anything but a list of deferred goals ten years earlier.
What's Next? The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that today, in the final days of 2006, there is no equivalent to a 1996 NeXT waiting in the wings to swoop down and fix Microsoft's mess. Leopard vs Vista 5: Development ChallengesA true geek probably wouldn't bother with something that took 2-3 mouse-clicks to do if there was a keystroke-combo that did the job. The problem is the semi-geek who wants to have every option available but can't remember something slightly esoteric like "hold shift when you click the power button icon" to access those "advanced" features.
To appease this type of geek wannabe, MS makes all 7 options available via the shut down menu. However, if the "power" and "lock" icon do what they seem they would do, then what's the beef. Does the fact that you *can* click the little arrow to access 5 more options cause convulsions in the techno-illiterate crowd? I have more of an issue with the "on/off" icon if the point is to make things easy for non-geeks since many have no clue what that means.
In fact it should be noted that the MacBook Pro supports sleep and hibernate at the same time. Basically if you close your lid or set it to stand-by the system will go into sleep AND save a hibernate image. This means that if you wake it up it will use the in memory image, but if you find your battery completly dead on the return, or have to change out the battery there is still the hibernate image to wake up to. This all means you don't have to think: stand-by or hibernate, since both are done.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And yet people still prefer the choice-laden "big box" stores over the three-items-only downtown boutiques. Take a look at your local grocery store. Tons of choices, but no one's passing out from brain strain from having to make all those decisions. Take a look at your restaurant menus. Tons of choices. Some exceedingly expensive restaurants frequented by the overly chic might have only one entree, but these restaurants pale in comparison to the popularity of those that have multiple items.
People WANT choices. Unfortunately, there are some like you that don't want OTHER people to have choices. The latter are commonly known as "control freaks".
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This happens because we are all human. The larger the group the more difficult things are to manage. Not a heck of a lot that can be done about it. Some times teams can get things running really quickly, sometimes - not so much. Let's face it, computer programs are machines in some fashion - the bigger/newer the machine -- it's gonna take a while. I don't think this is a Microsoft-specific case here.
Vista - as almost every stewie loving brian beating kid would know - IS Windows ME 2.
I guess you were never a Commodore fan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
I know! grayscale piecharts and virus checkers! That's what the mac guy told me on TV
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
In Windows there are 15 ways to shut down the PC. In Linux, there may be only a couple of ways to shut it down but over a hundred different versions to choose from before you can begin to use it! I think this is more of a victory for the mac
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Power options - Advanced - When I close the lid of my portable computer: Do nothing (screen turns off, actually), Stand by, Hibernate.
You can set it to hibernate if you wish...it takes 10 seconds.
You are also wrong regarding hibernate...on my Toshiba if I close the lid while hibernating, the hibernate completes and the laptop powers off - the lights go out. When I lift the lid it loads properly from hibernate.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml
A mature and amazingly extendable system that puts simple 'source code control' systems to shame.
;)
I love the plugin for Eclipse...I can do everything from within one IDE!
I wonder how IBMs development system compares to MS
Blar.
Steve Ballmer, is that you?
Vista's UI is nice, and I like that it finally uses non-boneheaded names for system directories (e.g. c:\users\blincoln\documents instead of c:\documents and settings\blincoln\reparse point that sometimes shows as 'my documents' and others as 'blincoln's documents).
However, no way is that worth the upgrade price.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Maybe I'm used to incremental-style development, but it seems like "literally the best Windows release to date" should have gone without saying.
... I actually preferred Fedora Core 3 to 4. But there weren't five years between those two. If FC5 were not better than Red Hat 7.1 then I would suggest something had gone Really Damn Wrong.
Like, okay
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
What is a buttseck, and why would you want to shave it?
Is that the boss is not gonna figure out how to sleep/hibernate/turnitoff anyways since he may not recognize what the on/off symbol means in the 1st place. And a little arrow nearby isn't gonna clue him in either .......
:O
That on/off icon duplicates the button on the laptop, they do the same thing i hope!
Having to hit start to shutdown was bad enough to explain
Looks like they got rid of the word START, i guess that's a start.
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. I don't think it's "more choices" that add confusion. It's the poor presentation and the non-intuitive implementation of the choices that are presented. Joel's suggested alternative actually preserves almost all of the choices (and flexibility) of the actual bloated menu. What makes it so much better is that most of the choices are made by direct user action (walk away for 15 minutes = hibernate, log on as someone else = switch user) rather than a list of vague yet explicit options. You're not telling the computer what you plan to do. You're just doing it, and the computer functions appropriately. But you're right about presenting a few, salient choices at a time. The lesson here isn't that we have to take away people's options to make them happy. It's that we need to present the spectrum of choices with sensible defaults and within some kind of context that makes sense. I think even Joel is unclear when talking about this point sometimes.
Oh give me a break. In GNOME/GTK, they removed the location bar in the open file dialog several years ago, thus giving the user less choice and making the dialog simpler. It looks like this. Notice that it looks very similar (almost identical) to the MacOS X file dialog, and we all know that people only praise OS X.
And guess what happens? People complain about the GTK file dialog! Specifically, about that they can't use the (nonexistant) location bar. What was that again about less choice being good?
You have to choose "Start" in order to initiate any of the "Stop" thingies.
Then you choose "Turn Off Computer" to choose one of the "I Probably Don't Really Want To Turn It Off" thingies.
And it took 24 people to come up with this.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Joel, don't be a slacker. If you really put some thought into it, you should be able to get it down to zero buttons.
#DeleteChrome
Maybe not Linux, but I just started my Hurd fork to the KiD architecture last night.
Thank God for evolution.
You should be looking at this more objectively, not the GP.
First of all, has Mac's market share gone down any time recently? There's a trend to look at, not snapshot figures.
Another example - is the Linux/BSD desktop getting worse, is it losing more users than it's gaining? Where was it five years ago? Or ten years ago? How could you really tell for that matter - what counts as FOSS "market share"? Ubuntu CD download counts? Come on, market share is a fallacious argument when discussing MS' competition, not so much with regards to Mac admittedly. Newegg alone sells $millions in computer hardware daily; is all of that system hardware being counted against MS' totals? Or the people who buy a legit OEM XP to run games (like me) and use Linux for 97% of my other tasks?
I know that neither of my folks were using Linux even two years ago, but they are now... given no support, I can't possibly imagine how the three of us together would count in any market share statistics - but together we make up five computers which run Linux as a desktop OS.
I also see a very surprising number of laptops with Linux on them at school - apparently a lot of students have discovered the giant multiple-DVD-sized heap of free software that you get with most FOSS OS'; things like circuit simulators, databases, publishing packages, music composition software, development tools, a gazillion little addictive games for the not-so-hardcore gamers (parents love those too btw), etc.
Now all that said, do you think MS will deliver an even better Windows any time sooner than 5 years? How long will it take them to get all these "features" working together that were supposed to be in Vista 3 years ago? They've hyped Vista through the stars, they can't exactly come out in a year with a new Windows... they could make a very drastic service pack and charge people for it, which is actually the most likely case from what I've heard.
Windows really does have a lot of competitive pressure on it.
...and after spending all that time on them, the sound effects still suck.
Reading the comments posted before me, it seems that many have a guru-like insight into how a business runs and operates. To me, that seems like the pointy-haired boss telling you how to code. There are very few people out there that can adequately bridge the tech-business gap. It's been my humble observation that well-run business are independent of the technology they have. That's doesn't mean that technology is important; however, if you start a business with only a revolutionary technology as your asset, most times it won't work (think: dot-com). As cliche as it is, company's assets are the people. If you have the right people in the right place when the technology becomes available, then your company can accelerate much faster regardless of what beaurecratic measures lay in front of you. Bring this idea back to the case study: Microsoft, although still in a strong growth phase, is most likely approaching a saturation point. If the talent available in the company is strong enough, it will find ways to work around this plateau; however, if the pool has become diluted and all the talent is being taken from the company (Google?) then the profit centers will stagnate.
bah.
Not to marginalize Joel or anything, but you can configure all behaivors. Like if you want your computer to sleep on shut lid it will. The default is it sleeps. Forcing it to one would be dumb. Take my case: I have dual monitors at home not using my laptops LCD. I want my lid closed my cat sleeps on it:) It was a really simple change to make. While someone else would want it to just turn off. MOST people just want it to sleep as they walk to class or between clients. You can have it do whatever you want. Why should microsoft decide what is best for me? That's what Joel is suggesting. Saying Vista sucks cause you don't like how they did the UI design of the power off buttons is kinda like complaining you don't the ash tray design in a BMW. And his comment about how he rather restart than log off a user and on as another is ignorant of the majority of the PC market. Most people it takes a minute or more to boot up. The log off and shut down are far more graceful in Vista. The user is finally in total control. The user could bring it down at break neck speed or save open documents without this enforced deadline XP caused. Maybe we should educate the user about a smart product instead dumbing down the product for ignorance we percieve in a user.
Gates decided Vista should only require 640k of memory.
...was "random mode". At least, that is how my Dell came configured.
Random mode is very entertaining in that your notebook MOSTLY does the same thing in resonse to a certain action, but just to spice up your user experience XP will throw a bit of randomisation into the logic. It's always fun to make friendly wagers with your colleagues as to whether you computer will sleep, hibernate or power off when you close the lid. Mostly it sleeps (I *think*) but it is always neat when the planets align or the wind blows from a certain direction and it powers off.
Random Mode Release 2 is an improved version in that it seems to change the state of the machine when it is left unattended. That's totallly wild man! My life was dull before then but it's an adventure now to come home from work, open my valise and hear the little fan whirring away on the toasty little notebook machine. It's cold here in Canada sometimes and I guess it was just staying warm, except that the battery is flatter than southwestern Saskatchewan by the time I notice. Having to connect the power WIRE kinda wrecks the wireless experience.
Even better is when I sleep or hibernate my notebook when I'm coming back from a trip. My selfless little XP notebook figures it is too cool up in the overhead compartment of the airplane and decides to expend what energy is left in its flammable cells to warm up itself and all his new carry-on friends. Of course, you learn the first time that happens to make special note to save everything before suspending your machine...and to be patient when (for some reason I cannot fathom, to restart and log back in takes nearly twice as ong as from a proper shutdown.
Nine powerdown options is certainly annoying. However, I'd have to say that it is a minor annoyance in comparison to XP "random mode" power management (assuming this has been addressed in Vista of course)
What I wonder when I hear all this is why their project is so complex in the first place. They're putting everything in the same repository? Why? Why not a more modular solution, where every module publishes its API, and projects that use it code to that API? You should be able to develop the kernel separately from the core libraries, the applications separately from everything else, etc. Need the latest version of Internet Explorer? Download it from its repository. Need the lastest version that works? Specify a different revision/branch/whatever. I don't see why it needs to be so difficult.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
These are people who think they are geeky enough to need a location bar but not geeky enough to discover Ctrl-L, apparently.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
Yes, clearly you should be running NetBSD on that kid instead.
I dunno, shouldn't kids have a few more open ports, by default?
Seems to give new meaning to the term "LiveCD" ...
A true geek probably wouldn't bother with something that took 2-3 mouse-clicks to do if there was a keystroke-combo that did the job.
Exactly. I have two ways of leaving my computer:
Work computer on weeknights, home computer all the time: Ctrl-Alt-Del 'Enter' (and then I turn off the monitor).
Work computer on Friday night: Ctrl-Alt-Del 's' 'Enter' (and then I turn off the monitor).
Unpleasantries.
And I thought that thing was complicated enough just with just the Log Out/Switch/Sleep/Shutdown options! No wonder it's taking so long!
Would you want your daughter to be open source?
You missed the GP's remark about pirated windows, which probably make up at least 10% of the market; the higher MS raises their prices, the higher the incentive to pirate windows becomes. Another poster pointed out that if MS started charging 3000$ everyone would switch to their competitors, but I disagree with that view; in such a scenario windows would still have a huge part of the market, but 99% of those systems would be running pirated windows.
But at McD's they have pictures and descriptive names that tell you the difference between an Number 3 and a Number 10. At Big Box Mart, you can read the box, compare prices, use brand name recognition, etc. What MS does is about like if Big Box Mart just stacked all the stereos together in identical, plain white boxes, and named labeled some 'Stereo', some 'Radio', and some 'CD Player'. So say you buy a 'Radio' and a friend buys a 'Stereo'. Except...they both can produce stereo audio, both receive AM/FM radio, and both can even play CD's, it's just that one of them seems to turn on a little bit faster, but once in a while the tuner will be reset to the default station.
It's not so much about the choices, as it is about the ambiguity about which does what and why you might use one instead of the other.
Unpleasantries.
Of course, the decision to not re-write and keep ugly legacy code itself (rather than just the API) isn't always the correct one either. The judgement of what is "best" is tough for managers and coders. Though I've only started to listen to the "pragmatic" arguments for about a year and a half or so, the best thing I've found to answer this question is unit testing. And I don't particularly like writing unit tests.
If there are unit tests that have already been written, I can see just what sort of implementation problems happened in the past. When I want to re-write code, I'm usually thinking in the stratosphere about how the new approach will make everything better, but looking over unit tests written by other developers often brings me back down to earth and I see that my perfect solution may wind up retreading similar problems in an unfamiliar way. That's even more important when the customer sees an old problem re-surface in new code: they've already been down this road and they'll be out for blood that we're backpedaling and charging them for regression rather than development.
Since unit tests are a new practice at my work, they aren't always written for legacy code to make this judgement. In that case, I find that forcing myself to sit down and write some unit tests is a good thing. Though writing them is on par with my desire to floss, I have to admit that it is a good practice. It scratches my itch to actually dig into the details and write code. After I've really looked at the failure possibilities, it really helps me make a better decision to rewrite or not. And whether we choose to rewrite now or not, it's useful in the future whether the decision is made to dump or rewrite.
I am curious about the testing practices for major products like Vista and OS X are standardized and used. I know Microsoft has a huge testing infrastructure, but I wonder if the delays in Vista have been due to too much influence of the testers, or too little, or no net effect at all. I was under the impression that Apple's testing was much better, but some major, obvious regressions lately make me think that perhaps Apple simply has a smaller "legacy" of custom code to support. Do big companies even have sound testing practices and require their use?
As a final note though, I prefer to write unit tests on other people's code since mine, of course, never needs them :-)
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Ok, this guy is a software developer right? Does he KNOW the difference between a power cycle and a soft reboot? Yeah, let's just turn the power on and off again, nobody cares about the wear and tear on the drives and components, not the mention the huge power spike you get when you initially turn on your computer, nor mention the fact that turning your computer off and on again straight away is a BAD thing, but most naive users would do that anyway.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
I like how one of the team members is "a Mac." You can take it to all the meetings for less than $30 an hour and it's full of good ideas that won't come out in a year of weekly meetings.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
You're right that it's almost like Linux. The crucial difference is how projects get selected and evaluated.
In Windows, if some yahoo inside the company decides that database-backed file systems with ACL and some hokey metadata schemes are the best thing since sliced bread and sweet-talks his managers into putting it on the feature list, then they are committed to shipping it. Furthermore, the company will rally the resources behind the developer to make it happen. That means that people with great PowerPoint slides but dumb ideas will get to ship their stuff. Unfortunately, computer science is full of dumb ideas that look good on paper and in mockups, and that's in part why Windows is so full of crap, under which some nuggets of good engineering are buried.
In Linux, if some yahoo has a dumb idea, they first have to put in their own time and money to develop it (or convince some people to part with hard-earned cash). Then, they have to build a user community around it, which means the software has to work and be useful. For Linux, this mechanism operates at the level of every single package or project and it tends to weed out most of the bad ideas; "weed out" not in the sense that the software is completely unavailable, but in the sense that the bad ideas don't interfere with the good, useful software.
Heh, I used a Mac the other day. Girl who owns it has owned it for a year. She works for a publishing company and is around Mac users all day (thus the reason she bought it). She accidently removed Safari from the dock 6 months ago and hasn't been on the Internet since (cause she can't find the icon) and she struggled with iTunes for an hour before giving up and asking me if I could figure out how to get it to import a CD. I only managed to do it because I figured it needed to get track names from the internet before it would import, so I fixed her internet problem first, then importing the CD "just works". And that's a Mac in a nutshell. Everything "just works", until it doesn't, and then you have to go through a lot of pain to get it to work again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Uh, there's a location bar in the Apple screenshot...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Grandparent: In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository.
Parent: Then how does Debian GNU/Linux do it?
One should not be pointing at Debian for examples of a fast release process.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I doubt its because the SCC cannot handle the physical number of users (5000 users, for MS and its unlimited hardware budget, I mean, come on, no way) but the way these users interact with each other.
If you have 5000 devs checking stuff in, if 1 of them does something that breaks the nightly build just once each, then you'll actually never produce anything the ever compiles. Instead you have to come up with some solution to this issue. Options are: make developers work on totally separate products (eg, Media Player has no dependencies on anything in the kernel, shell etc so they can do what they like knowing they won't break anything other that Media Player), or make devs work on subtrees.
Whilst the first is arguably the better option, its not always feasible, and I think MS way of working means that you end up with dependencies between projects - eg, the Shutdown UI was dependent on features in the Shell and Kernel even if these dependencies were made by contract (eg, Shutdown team said 'we need the following functionality, once you've implemented it we'll finish our job') the bureaucracy of MS meant that wasn't possible (ie, you can't be paid to sit around for a month waiting for the kernel team to fulfill their contract with you).
So, the 2nd option was utilised - you check your stuff into a branch that gets merged once you've completed your work. The trouble is that the project is so large that you're working on a branch that is branched off a branch, which in turn is branched.
Linux works the same way - no-one works off the main trunk, you'd check work into (eg) a test branch that gets merged into a unstable one, that then gets merged into the root.
... and, of course, with a license that allows the user to redistribute freely the modified version so anyone can benefit from the improvements made.
The trademark on duke nukem forever has expired
it has changed to duke nukem never® according to british law
You aren't part of this target market. The guy is specifically in charge of improving shutdown, etc. for MOBILE computing users (tablets, notebooks, etc.). But you'd have to RTFA to get that. For desktops and workstations, choice is less important as the machine is rarely intentionally without power.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Because it's completely obvious that the location bar in an active dialog should be shown by pressing Ctrl-L. Even though there's no displayed shortcut key, or space for the control in the dialog. And because the only _possible_ label for it would be Location: (rather than, say, Path:, Address:, Open:, etc). I mean it's obvious that I want the dialog Left aligned (Office/OpenOffice "Ctrl-L").
Yes, Ctrl-L has functionality in IE (from the main window at least) but it opens the "Open" dialog which we're discussing. It doesn't display the location field in an existing "Open" dialog. Ctrl-L doesn't have any functionality in FF2 on Windows that I can see.
Note that even Office 2007 retains the ability for a user to type in the full location of a file (with auto-prompting too) without requiring invisible fields to be shown. Doesn't seem to have hampered users' ability to use Office applications, yet for some reason it's been removed from Gnome.
It might also be worth considering that the Mac has always been mouse-centric; thus the default OSX File-Open dialog is also mouse-centric.
Hmmmm. I wonder.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I heard that exact same argument for Win XP (vs Win 98/2000) and Win 2000 (vs Win 95/98). I'd prolly have heard it for 3.1 vs 95, too, but Slashdot wasn't around then. (There was Usenet, though. Someone go Google it.)
The problem is that computers (in the IBM-PC world) basically live for 5 to 10 years. When a computer dies, you buy a new one. And the new one will come with Windows Vista, whether you like it or not.
That's why Visa is not going to fail. People would have to stop buying new computers for Vista to fail, and that's not going to happen. (Well, the other way would be for everyone to buy Mac's or naked boxes for Linux, but that's not going to happen, either.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
as a reference when yuo say "quite a bit north" are you talking deep Canada or "Hi Santa!"?
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Around the time Windows was achieving dominance over OS/2, there were vicious debates over which was superior, as we now do with the likes of Linux vs. Windows. However, one of the biggest debates was not over the more useful technical aspects, but over how long it took to boot each operating system!
Seriously, geeks would expend so much hot air on the issue that it got ridiculous - as if they spent their whole day rebooting their computers, as opposed to actual useful work.
Truly bizarre...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
My machine is located in my bed room. The fans, the hard drive, make noise. When I sleep, my machine sleeps.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So I installed Vista on my laptop yesterday. It's the first time I've seen it since 2004. I have to say I like it. The clicking OK for anything accessing system settings can get annoying, but no more than Kubuntu's sudo method of doing everything. At least I didn't have to type in a password everytime, that's a plus.
So after installing everything (the new installer is much nicer than the original installation process) my survey of Vista went pretty much like this. Control Panels, yep that's different. Cool new task manager, but it's not Process Explorer. Nice screen savers, finally something that's close to what KDE offers. Same shitty command window, yawn. Lovely looking interface, chewed up 550MB of ram but I'm into candy and the interface was still very responsive. New games (ie not 10 windows 3.1 minesweeper). Alright... I'm bored.
I guess what I'm getting at is, what is the rush for Vista NOW! WinXP did everything I needed it to do. What it did poorly I got a utility for. Vista may make some of those utilities obsolete, but what did I really need a new OS for (besides candy)? I don't take for granted all the under the hood changes, but why did I need a new OS? It's an OS that runs software. It's not supposed to be the only program you need to do work and play.
With that I respond to the question "What took Vista so long" with "What were you really waiting on?". Furthermore, how can one be so disappointed at something that only improves what was currently working just fine. Before I get the M$ Shill crap in my face I'll say I absolutely hate the marketing angle of Vista and how it will be shoved down the throat of consumers. Power users who don't like DELL or HP on the side of their PC can tack on $399 if they want Ultimate. That's poor, especially since I really only needed DirectX10, which could have been on XP.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
Apple is a large corp that started at pretty much the same time as Microsoft. They seem to be going down a different path less choked by bureaucracy.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Because when I want to do something on my computer it is only about 3 seconds to get going and uses almost a little power- and my power supply fan (do I even have one?) turns itself off too.
It always annoying when you wanna show something to some one and you have to say (rhetorically) oh...wait a minute it's loading. Or buffering....buffering...buffering.
I'm gonna go read that list, but I won't keep my hopes too high. I went from Win2k to XP this year only as there were only two new features that I found moderately useful: user switch without having to log off (which I rarely use since there are more computers than people in my house) and the ability to display thumbnails while in a search window. Period.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
That's Control-Eject then 's' for you Mac users. 'r' Restarts, 'Enter' Shutdowns. Though I've gotten in the habit of tapping my powerbutton (which invokes Sleep without waking the dimmed monitor). Oh and if you haven't heard of Quicksilver you'll need it too.
Zune: zOOOO-oohn (Who even knows how to read pronunciation keys). A repackaged toshiba MP3 player released by Microsoft 4 years too late, with crippled functionality. The Zune is only noted for it's brown color. Some parts of the Zune copy Apple's iPod design, the rest of it (the brown part) was not significant.
She accidently removed Safari from the dock 6 months ago and hasn't been on the Internet since (cause she can't find the icon)
Most people would say she's just a fucking idiot. Finder | Applications | Safari. Don't know about Finder? Then just hit the "Help" button on the keyboard, type in "World Wide Web" and low and behold... There's even a "Open Safari for me" link.
and she struggled with iTunes for an hour before giving up and asking me if I could figure out how to get it to import a CD. I only managed to do it because I figured it needed to get track names from the internet before it would import, so I fixed her internet problem first, then importing the CD "just works".
Here I suspect you're simply lying. This past weekend my internet connection was down for most of Saturday afternoon, and we had a friend over who had a CD I had asked him for. I ripped it with absolutely no problems. I know from recent personal experience that what you said is simply not true.... and just for grins I just tried it on my machine at work, and it worked similarly.
Any tips how to do it? Where does it put the tracks? What she was doing was putting in the CD, selecting Import, after the import iTunes doesn't go to where they were imported to. So next she tried making a folder and dragging the tracks into it. iTunes just does nothing.
As for Finder -> Applications -> Safari, yep, that's what I did. She had no idea though.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Go look at the Wikipedia entry. Money-hungry Microsoft did not spend 5 very, very expensive years throwing out entirely complete, perfectly polished features one-by-one until all they had was shiny. In fact, my memory says they stole all the features from "Orcas" and now have no ideas for their next OS.
As for those non-RIP features, try BitLocker, a driver model that makes everything run in non-bluescreen-able userland, User Account Control, restartable video drivers (even your beta nVidia drivers won't blue-screen Windows now!), or how unique DirectX 10 actually is compared to any of the previous versions...
Oh, yeah, the GUI is shiny, too. That must've been all they did.
DATABASE WOW WOW
The "few, salient" options relevant to any particular user may not be the few, salient option relevant to any other user, though, which raises the problem of having the right set of options for the specific user.
... from my PowerBook Duo days, sleep put the machine into a 1Hz clock (yes, that's one cycle per second) for as long as the battery had left. On a full charge, that was two weeks. In ten years of PowerBook Duo, 1400, iBook G3 and iBook G4, I can count on one hand the humber of times sleep didn't wake. Maybe it's changed, but I'd expect you still have days of sleep, and if you're typically not using a laptop for days on end, you may not need a laptop...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This was all predicted by Douglas Adams.
The time has definitely come for "Mode Execute Ready"
In a large corporation that is mismandaged, is it the employees repsonsiblity to justify their existence or to say, give me some good guidance and see what i can do ?
jobs is such an a**hole
I suspect the few things that have been done right at apple are not his (I bet the mac gui was some underpaid female artist type) the ipod wheel was probably someone else...
In my experience the number of reboots and downloads for the same vintage re-install of a Mac or PC is about the same. Re-installing the OS on a Mac from a 1 or 2 year disk takes about 3 to 4 re-boots and around 150 MB of downloads (includes misc. apps like Adobe, Flash, etc.)
Re-installing Windows XP from a disk of the same vintage takes 2 to 3 reboots and about the same amount downloads (again, including apps).
Add an additional 1 or 2 reboots if the machine needs firmware upgrades (about the same frequency for a Mac of PC).
Equally irritating, even on a brand new machine for Apple or Dell (and I presume others) the need for massive downloads before the machine is up to date. Why can't the manufacturers ship machines with the most current software?
Yesh yesh, what's better than checking on your torrents in starbucks with VNC on your NDS? Weeee!
ms is a business techno nerd
it doesnt matter if the product is good or bad - it matters what the profit is
which is why mit geeks work for harvard mbas
In any event, don't expect all services on the box to be truly stable until uptime approaches 30 years; 40 years in some instances.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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 ...
This may explain Gate's heavy lobbying for more H-1B's. Microsoft likes to have small teams of the very best rather than throw bodies at big, but temporary projects. However, that is expensive and they don't want to pay it. By allowing them to grab staff from the whole world, they are more likely to find the elite (at least what MS considers elite). This is why they push for H-1B visas: they want to be picky at a low price. It has nothing to do with an "american skills shortage", it has to do with being picky without paying a picky price. They want to shop like a NY fashionaholic woman but pay Walmart prices.
Table-ized A.I.
Its a trick. Get an axe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista#Digital_Rights_Management
I wasn't replying to Microsoft's braindead management decisions, but rather the idea that choice is bad.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
From GGP post:
I like that it finally uses non-boneheaded names for system directories (e.g. c:\users\blincoln\documents instead of c:\documents and settings\blincoln\reparse point that sometimes shows as 'my documents'Wow, someone learned from /home and similar concepts in half a dozen or so other operating systems. That came down to Windows design being around "one user/one computer" which isn't exactly the best in the networked world and really sucks on servers.
See my journal, I write things there
Any tips how to do it? Where does it put the tracks? What she was doing was putting in the CD, selecting Import, after the import iTunes doesn't go to where they were imported to. So next she tried making a folder and dragging the tracks into it. iTunes just does nothing.
Have her right-click on the column titles in her library and make sure the "Date Added" column is checked. Then click on that column to sort by it, and go to the date/time when she did the import.
A: 24
1 to comb OS X for clues ("R&D")
19 to screw up what the first guy learned ("management")
1 to code it ("advanced software engineering")
1 to introduce new problems ("debugging")
1 to ignore those problems ("QA/QC")
1 to reassign everybody to fix XP (SNAFU)
As much as I prefer OS X over Windows, it seems the guys in Redmond did do a lot of work. I recognize quite a few items Apple introduced in 10.4 and is supposed to introduce in 10.5, and some Apple might like to copy. Some of these are quite useful and deep, so just quoting adaptation of a few games is unfair.
The 255 char limit isn't the filesystem, its explorer (and the api it uses.)
You can use subst, reparse points or just map a share to get to the files too deep to get straight too.
I've seen quite a few network drives organised into a very clever heirachy that is 10+ levels deep hit this problem. You have to make a new share, deeper down.
All right, now you're really reaching.
You are aware that you can enter all of the metadata yourself in iTunes without an internet connection, right?
You must be aware that iTunes will otherwise just call the songs "Song 1" "Song 2" or something similar (it's been a while since I did it without Grace Note saving me time), right?
You should be smart enough to realise that iTunes makes audio CDs from playlists, right?
You realise we're talking about iTunes here, which works the same on Windows as on Mac OS X?
What do you mean, you're didn't know this?
Win95 was a PITA, I fought with it for a weekend before I found out how to keep Plug&Pray from running amok. The solution was to let the hardware detection only handle essential stuff like keyboard, mouse and harddisk controller, then manually install drivers for the rest of the hardware.
;-)
Win98 was somewhat better (after I used 98lite, http://www.litepc.com/ on it), but still easily crashed by bad applications.
Windows 2000 was a massive improvement, finally a reliable system. I used it first in 2003, with a new PC that had no trouble with the increased hardware requirements.
I agree about Win XP and activation, it was the first Microsoft OS I did not even want to pirate (yes I could have a copy from a friend if I wanted). Vista seems even worse. Still running on Windows 2000 and occasionally trying a new Linux distribution.
Linux is getting better at a nice pace, and soon it might reach a point where I use it by default and run Windows only for games
C - the footgun of programming languages
Of course Microsoft has gay employees (Joel Spolsky used to work for them!). But MS is personified by Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, not "Lou in accounting". Joel Sposlky, meanwhile, is openly homosexual.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Or maybe when my grandma asks how to turn her computer off, I really don't feel like explaining the 7-some-odd ways to do it, and I can assure you that she doesn't want to hear it.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Good point, I completely forgot corporate users. I wonder why you're modded as a troll, don't really see any reason why. The magic of slashdot moderation I guess. :P
And we return to my suggestion to have a benevolent dictator looking after the brand-name edition of the tree, and including and excluding particular changes. I don't know Microsoft's internal structure at all, but wonder who that lucky person is, if there is someone in that role. I'd additionally suggest a Wiki-like browser for the tree which supplies information from the code-base about the interfaces so that amendments don't create incompatibility; it would require a small step from this to have an IDE read these files and insist you follow the now-in-the-tree edition of the API.
Many if not most organizations reach a crisis at some point in their growth because of the loss of a simple feedback loop. Companies grow because they are profitable, often unusually so, but that profitability reduces the vital negative feedback that strangles bad decisions in their cradles. Myriad bad decisions, which would have died off in the company's more lean times, survive and accumulate. Eventually, the company becomes like a once fast ship now encrusted with barnacles.
People don't like conflict and high profits lets them avoid internal ones. Instead of managers fighting over which competing ideas to implement, high profits let managers avoid conflict by implementing them all. (This is one situation wherein a hyper-competive, dominating jerk of a manager can be better for a company than more consensus guided one.) Instead of fighting one's way up the food chain to earn more money and perks, managers can simply hire more people to work under them. Individuals begin to build internal fiefdoms. No one like firing people so low performing employees are kept on or internally transferred instead of being laid-off.
The longer this process goes on, the worse the eventual correction will be. Efficient companies that survive over long periods usually do so because they survive numerous sharp downturns in their profitability that maintains their internal discipline. In the end, slim margins and slow growth build the strongest and most sustainable companies. Unfortunately, that is something we almost never see in the computer industry.
And one day, you will find your hard drive will never wake back up. Better to move the PC to another room and leave it turned on (or buy a new case that is designed to be silent, such as an HTPC case) than to lose your hard drive.
That's not the point. The point is, the GTK file dialog removed it, therefore giving less choice to the user, and therefore it should be better. Yet people still complain about it.
Apple is a large corp that started at pretty much the same time as Microsoft. They seem to be going down a different path less choked by bureaucracy.
They also haven't been nearly as successful or grown nearly as quickly as Microsoft.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!