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
Because it had to move through the digestive tract and on through the large intestine.
Sleep basically saves the machine state and leaves the RAM powered up... which uses very little energy (but can be important like on a laptop where you don't want to keep your RAM powered if you aren't going to be using your computer for say 12-24 hours...
Hibernate writes the RAM contents to disk, then when it starts back up it writes back from the disk to the RAM, and brings up similar to sleep mode.
Sleep is faster, hibernate takes it down farther and shuts power off completely.
Maybe that's why ID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software still only has 31 employees?
MABASPLOOM!
Microsoft needs a Steve Jobs-ian spring cleaning. For those unaware, when he returned to Apple, he called project leaders into a conference room and had them justify their existence. If they couldn't do it, the project was scrapped. The company was streamlined to focus on a few core product lines.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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
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.
A bunch of reasons: :)
1. I like having my computers available instantly when I want to use them.
2. Turning a machine on and off many times can be harmful, so it is said. Others say it's a myth. I don't know who to believe, but it seems feasible that this could be so.
3. I run back-ups and virus checks during the night.
4. The computers work on protein-folding during their idle time.
5. My machines are in my bedroom, and they keep me nice and warm at night. Besides, there's nothing like the low purr of case fans so send you off to sleep
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
It's changed business models a few times. It started out as a playing card company. If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Well with a Desktop you can suspend to disk and then come back rather quickly, with a power off in between. This way you get the power savings, but you also get the fast "boot" time.
But let's look at me. I had a Dell laptop at school. I'd use it at home. Turn it off. Take it to school. Turn it on for class. Use it. Turn it off. Take it to next class/home and repeat. Suspend was very iffy (and didn't help much in the battery life department).
Then I got a Powerbook G4 (which I still use today). Run it at home. Close the lid. Take it to school. Open the lid. IT WAS READY. Within 3 seconds I could start working. When I'm done? No "Start->This->that" to be sure it worked. Just close the lid. I know some PCs worked that way, mine never did (reliably) that I remember. Next class/home? Open the lid. If it got low on power, I'd plug it in. My little laptop has had up to 3 months of uptime (mostly due to major security updates that require restarts). I NEVER need to turn it off. The last time I did was when I was going on an airplane (didn't know if they'd like it suspended during takeoff/landing). It boots relatively fast, but nothing compared to waking up and going to sleep.
If you're a desktop user, I understand your comment. But as a laptop user who has had the pleasure of a Mac, a fast reliable suspend is a HUGE time saver.
Now I'll note that some other people at my school had newer laptops that could suspend/resume just fine. But they took much longer. Some of them approached boot time length, some could do it in 20-30 seconds. No PC there matched my Mac (note: I never asked the few Linux users if they had it working on their laptops). I could suspend/resume my Mac 3 times with ease in the time it took the fastest XP users (and I'll ignore the "Click here to sign on" screen most of them didn't disable).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
``Maybe that's why ID http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software still only has 31 employees?''
No, that's because they used 5-bit ids in their database.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Are you one of those people who breaks out the AK-47 when someone spells Spider-Man without the hyphen?
MABASPLOOM!
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.
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
Of course, there's still vendor lock-in, which pushes in the opposite direction (decreasing the power of those competitors and increasing the price of Vista), but competition is far from absent.
Aren't they really the most darling creatures?
Not really. They're near-impossible to housetrain!
(A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. No it sodding didn't.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I used to work at Apple, in the OS and frameworks groups.
There is a master "train" for a release; projects that don't change are "forwarded" to that train, meaning no source changes are required. When a project needs to be submitted for a change for the new release, a new "view" is created for its specific changes. Every few days, a build is produced, sometimes using previously compiled bits from the old "train", sometimes its a full world build (which can take several days) but otherwise building all the latest submissions.
Then there's a fairly labor intensive "integration" phase where the built bits are all put on a box and booted. If a "quicklook" QA process shows that the build is hoarked, the integrator goes and pesters the submitters of the latest project that was submitted and gets them to fix it. (Some percentage of the time, the new code has exposed a bug elsewhere, regardless, the project that is the proximal cause of the failure is rolled back to the previous revision, it anticipation that all the projects that need to rev be submitted at once.)
The whole thing is set up through symlinks via NFS, so if you want to see the latest version of any piece of code in the system (modulus those projects that are "locked down" for security issues) you can just get your release name, append the build number, and you've got the source code, symbol'd binaries and build log *for any release* at your fingertips.
When a new build comes out, you just do a clean install. It takes about two hours on the internal network, so typically you pull the disk image and slam it to a firewire drive, (usually, you can bum a disk with the image already grabbed from a teammate) and do a full install in 15 minutes. I can't imagine having to spend a day (as some other posted mentioned) setting up a machine...
Most projects have 3 or 4 contributors. In many cases, and entire framework is the responsibility of a single person (and he or she may actually own several small frameworks.) Lots of small projects produce cleaner interfaces that lead to fewer dependencies. (Of course there are dependencies, and circular ones, but these are kept to a minimum.) Projects are encouraged to use public API from other projects, rather than SPI or other project internals. If there's something useful enough for some other project to use, its first made into SPI for internal consumption, with the goal that developers will eventually be able to use it through a public API.
Most groups don't have dedicated QA by the way - the engineers are responsible for their code, and everyone is generally just very smart about what they're doing.
As to this start menu problem: the entire UI team is about 5 individuals, plus Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall - and they're likely to say "Thats fucking stupid, just do this" and boom(tm), the decision has been made the product ships, and life goes on.
look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope
Pretty impressive when you consider that for all that time their ONLY product has been vapourware.