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Preventing Another Vista-like Release With Windows 7
CRE writes "An article at the OS News site details how Microsoft could best avoid Windows 7 becoming another Vista-esque release. The author advises Microsoft to basically split Windows in two. Windows 7 would be a new operating system based on the proven Windows NT kernel, but with a completely new user interface, with backwards compatibility provided by VMs. In addition, to please business customers and other people concerned with backwards compatibility, Microsoft should create 'Windows Legacy', basically the current Windows, which will receive only security and bug fixes. Relatedly, APCMag is reporting that Microsoft has moved Julie Larson-Green (the driving force behind Office 2007's Ribbon UI) over to work on Windows 7's interface."
But what makes you think Windows is less stable and less secure than *Nix or OSX? Other than people and their dogs running Windows as administrators (that's more an education problem vs Windows security), Windows is not less secure than *Nix or OSX. In fact, things like file system security is better than *nix, IMO. Windows ACLs just own, it's a breeze to use them versus the obscure *Nix FS security.
And for stability? The only time my Windows box crashed was because of piece of shit ATI drivers. People need to get away from the Windows 9x crashing every 3 minutes mentality. XP is rock solid (didn't drive Vista enough to tell on it's stability). I am currently running a VWare GSX server on Windows 2003, the only time I reboot is to install OS patches. Crashes so far: zero, nada, zilch. Been running it for 7+ months. Hardware: Do it your own el-cheapo components.
The vast majority of Windows crashes are due to defective hardware and/or drivers. Ever installed an unstable driver on Linux? Ever had a hardware failure on OSX?
The reason you're not seeing the business side jump all over this OS isn't because of just compatibility issues. It's the Genuine advantage.
For example. here where I work, we had Vista running everything most office workers need; Office, IE, SCT, Even wintegrate, which is an ancient terminal program from 96. There was three reasons we didn't go to vista. One was the System requirements we were not ready to meet, another was that F-secure did not have an official Vista version at the time, but the real reason we decided to stay with XP was simple. The Genuine Advantage is for lack of a better word a total pain in the ass.
In vista there are two ways of handling corporate keys. One with a Key Management server and the other with a Multiple Activation Key. Under KMS. You are required to have a KMS server on your network, tie it to DNS and give it your VLK (which can be changed if your old key is disabled and propagated to networked PC's). once you do that it will activate any Business version of vista automatically every 3-6 months without entering any keys, but if the computer is no longer on the network (say a Laptop) after 3 months, the system locks you out in a reduced functionality mode which can be described as useless.
The Second method; MAK isn't much better. basically MS handles the KMS for you. this means that you don't have to worry about traveling users not being disconnected from your network for too long since it works over the internet, but now MS is handling your activations, and you have to contact them every time you hit your quota in order to activate more windows. (which isn't as bad as it sounds. According to MS activation isn't counted against your licence count, and you can request indefinitely) However, if MS sees a huge activation spike. (say your activation rate average goes from 100 a day to 10000000 a day) they disable your key (which brings us to reduced functionality mode for all MAK'ed PC's) and then you must go to each and every MAK managed PC and change the key to a new one supplied by MS.
So basically, to use Vista you either have a server on your network and pray no one's laptop cripples while their on a business trip, or you contact MS until the break of dawn and pray that no one pirates your key so you don't have to touch 1000 Crippled PC's with the Dreaded "YOU ARE A PIRATE!" message
Office 2007, however, doesn't have the "YOU ARE A PIRATE!" system built in it and still has the old VLK licencing system like XP. I can guarantee that it's adoption in business is much higher than Vista. I know we're using it here, but Vista is sitting on the shelf.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
BTW - How come their new, more secure OS lists EVERY USER NAME at login? (and you can't turn it off...)
Lets play "Guess which user has a weak password"! The game is much easier if you start with all of the user names.
Nice rant there. You can turn it off (first), and second, the username is not supposed to be part of the secret, just the password is (I know for example your Slashdot username is Gription. Got weak password?). Ubuntu will also show (among other distros) list of users on startup.
You are comparing a light DOS/Win32 assembly optimized OS with a rather large portable C based OS that has a central client/server kernel, security, and on TOP of that full subsystems that are OSes in themselves like Win32 and BSD.
.NET frameworks, the installers, and the MS development DLLs that never shipped as part of the OS, tons of new applications, tools and utilities, codecs, et
If you take any fundamental feature of the NT product base that has become XP or Vista and try to compare it to a DOS/GUI hybrid OS you need to stop and compare what 'weight' the differences would have.
For example, when you start adding in Multi-languages, full Unicode support, or even the Font sizes to support the Unicode specifications, you are adding literally 100mb of space there ALONE.
Next add in security which DID not exist in Win9X, and this is NOT light security it is a full token based security system that EXTENDS beyond just the FS. And this is not even mentioning NTFS encryption abilities, journaling abilities, compression abilities, etc.
Also realize that a significant amount of the OS install is for a backup of the install media and drivers so you don't have to grab the DVD when adding new hardware or if a system file gets changed so the OS can self repair. Just in drivers alone Vista supports approximately 500 times the devices Win95 did, and just the INF files for this alone for these devices, not even including the binaries is over 40mb of data.
See how quick this starts to add up?
Now let's add in basic system disk usages, like shadow copies, system restore, larger pagefiles and hibernation file support ALL OF WHICH Win9X did not have to deal with with the exception of the pagefile and it was usually dynamic and around 200mb in Win9x. So once Vista is installed the OS is already shadowing files, managing at least one restore point, and has 2-6gb of data just for the pagefile and hibernation store.
Arguing the difference between any NT based OS and Win9X is easy for anyone that understands the massive changes in OS over the years and the difference between an assembly optimized single purpose OS to a portable scalable OS. As for features this gives users that you DIDN'T have in Win95, there is better threading, better caching, security, full networking services, multi-cpu support,(Vista even adds multi GPU support, preemptive GPU scheduling, and GPU RAM Virtualization ), and with NT there is also platform independence like running on anything from Itanium to x86 to x64 with barely more than a recompile because of the code portability that doesn't 'quite' compile as tight as was allowed with the Win9X OSes. You also have a lot of 'high' end services, servers, and features from things like *nix based printing support, SNMP management all the back to user seen features like RDP (remote desktop/terminal services), concurrent multi-user login support, etc etc.
Now to argue why Vista uses more HD than XP, start with the basic features of XP, then add in Media Center, Tablet PC Edition, and then start with support for a NEW API system for the graphics, audio, networking, printing, video, and even the animation API sets as well as the communication APIs, and this has to CO-EXIST with the older APIs as Vista still allows basic GDI based printer drivers, kernel XP video drivers, XP audio drivers in addition to the new driver models, and it also has internal compatibility layers so that the XPS printing system 'seamlessly' talks to older GDI printers or older applications printing using GDI technology or old Audio software or old Video software, and will ensure that they all convert BOTH ways so that old and new applications can use both old and new devices.
To further the XP Vista comparison, you then have to add in all the 'Vista' visible features like the search system(which even indexes ink, can do OCR on image documents, and even index voice notes so that recorded conversations can be text searched), the Text to Speech, the speech recognition, the