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Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista, and Windows 7 is mostly an optimized version 2 of Vista. So it's no surprise that with the codebase stabilized in Vista SP1 that Windows 7 will be able to build successfully upon that.
More performance is always a good thing, but since this is Microsoft it probably just means they will figure out how to suck up the extra performance with DRM....
It doesn't matter if I have a netbook or not, if this is true, then everyone benefits. Even the guy with a multimedia powerhouse machine will see an improvement if performance is the bottom line.
Microsoft's fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies has led to a consistent decrease in performance over the years, with Vista perhaps being the most obvious and poorly received example. The tide seems to be turning, though. Symantec pulled all the stops on making the newest releases dramatically lower in memory & faster, everyone's re-writing pages so they scale properly for mobile devices, now Microsoft is paying attention too?
This is a good trend. I hope it continues.
Yeah, because 3 years ago when Microsoft started the work that went into Windows 7 (remember MinWin?) they were smart enough to anticipate netbooks and so they did the performance work up front that would be necessary to make netbooks work well.
Or maybe, just maybe, they realized that Vista's performance sucked rocks and they decided to fix it and Netbooks were a happy beneficiary.
I dunno...Microsoft isn't the only faction that's suffered from some serious code bloat. Computers have gotten so much faster at such a rapid pace. Linux + Gnome and OSX have gotten rather porky as well....
I'd be happy to forego all the eye candy if it would speed up the work that I actually care about.
Best,
I give credit to the OLPC and the push it gave to the computing world to come up with something lightweight but functional. And that was long before Vista shipped. The Netbooks were a result of the global awareness the OLPC gave to a need for cheap, portable, functional computing.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Sadly, I have some bad news for Linux lovers (myself included) when it comes to the netbook. The fact is that hopes for Linux on the netbook is all but dead now that Windows owns more than 90% of this market.
I still have some hope though. KDE 4.2.1 is convincing many folks in my small world. If KDE programmers do what they have to do in terms of multimedia and the browser (read KHTML/WebKit), there is a future.
Up to this point, people just wanted something flashy that justified expensive, penis-length-contest-winning hardware. And so Microsoft gave people a more and more integrated experience.
As the public finally realized that they mostly just wanted glorified net appliances, demands changed. Microsoft, being relatively nimble as gigantic international companies go, is shipping what people are demanding.
Whether people would have realized this without alternative OSs pulling them along is debatable, of course. But Microsoft is simply tailoring their product to demand.
Duh?
Nothing is going to get me to stop using Linux, and if all of this competition means that Windows is getting better, well bully. I seriously would not mind if everyone stopped asking me to fix their computer for them.
While they claim (and reports indicate) Windows 7 will be faster than Vista, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot as soon as it's released.
And I don't think its the success of Netbooks that is making Microsoft focus on speed on netbooks. It's the fear of Linux/Android taking over where Windows Vista cannot work that is making them focus on speed for Windows 7. Amusingly enough, if Arm based netbooks take off, Not only is Microsoft screwed, but intel too.
Then again, Via Nano based netbooks are also starting to be rolled out, and they are comparable to the atom chipset. We'll see.
Nobody has made a netbook where when the lid is closed you have an e-ink screen for dual use as an ebook reader. This is totally pissing me off. I'm not the only person in the world who wants this or has thought of this.
slashdot's windows logo, they are all broken!
ha.
I ran Vista for a few hours before hitting fdisk, and didn't dig, but Windows 7 has ten million services I'm unfamiliar with, and everything I've read about 7's performance on a netbook has to do with the disabling tons of services for the netbook verison.
I'm pretty familiar with what all the XP services are, and which I don't need, but what NEW can I disable in 7? What is MS disabling in the netbook version?
Other than Samba sharing, I don't expect I need much more than the netbook version would offer on my desktop.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
rivalry, 4nd we'll
Ignoring the fact that it's a goatse link; this seems to be a snippet from a larger text.
Do I even want to know which one?
I never saw an OLPC here in Australia or anywhere else in my travels (including 2 trips to the US last year and 3 months in Europe).
I /did/ see a lot of eeePCs. Not all of them running Linux, but the day my parents came home with their shiny new eeePC running Linux, I thought to myself "Microsoft must be SHITTING BRICKS".
Short answer -- No.
First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.
Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.
Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!" ... Right? That's what happens!
And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...
Who says it performs better anyway? Arstechnica gives no information on what tests they ran. Windows 7 is really just Vista SP3, so I'm a bit sketical.
Microsoft will *always* improve their products. As the very last resort.
Now THAT is a mighty thin thread to attach to any sort of sucess for the OLPC project.
But I guess the poor OLPC folk can dream....
Thanks, Psion.
It's not as thin as it seems. Intel and Microsoft worked hard against the OLPC with much success. Do some Google searches to find out more.
The "netbook" is simply the tech media's latest obsession. Name anything, and the netbook is touted as the reason behind it. Cure to polio? Netbook. Waning Windows adoption? Netbook.
Name any problem, and the netbook is the answer to it. Financial crisis? Netbook. Inexplicable popularity of reality TV? Netbook. Global warming? Netbook.
Get the fuck off my lawn, assholes. Netbook.
... and then they built the supercollider.
cant say i really care. im going to dual boot xp and some distro or freebsd instead.
I run Windoze Vista, and I'm not at all dissatisfied. Yes, it does somethings in ways that I'm still adjusting to, some of the buttons aren't in the exact same spot they were in before - but I'll adjust.
However it doesn't take anywhere 15 minutes to load.
I'm running a Toshiba laptop, and Vista loads in under 2 minutes - that's from cold boot to me being on the internet. That includes the sidebar starting up, that funky eye candy thing called Aero, my AV software, and Ad-Aware.
No, Vista is not perfect, but I haven't had to reboot my laptop since I got it three weeks ago.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Honestly, if Microsoft came up with a Windows OS that was compatible with all the drivers written for XP and/or 2000 I'd be perfectly happy to buy it. If Windows 7 works well I'd be more than willing to pay the money IF everything works. I don't want to buy a new motherboard because it doesn't have Vista/Win 7 drivers... I don't want the hassle. Give me a OS that just WORKS with the hardware I buy.
I have a pretty standard Linux desktop, and just about everything happens instantaneously. It takes a second or two to start up Firefox, but everything else is just blinding quick. Really nothing to complain about.
Yeah - godferbid they just make a quick efficient OS because it's a good idea...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This whole thing seems to support earlier rumours that MS was deliberately bloating Windows code in order to make people keep buying new computers. Now that the market has spoken, all of that bloat can be easily removed. Everything in Windows seems to be necessary until MS is forced to remove it.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
The thing that breaks this paradigm is an Intel platform that moves backwards in net performance. When the goal shifts from ever increasing net performance to performance per power it's only expected that Microsoft should miss the turn.
The question is, how did they miss being informed that the turn was coming? Did they get told and disbelieve, or were they just not told? I believe the former, not the latter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This has a few (opposite) parallels over in the Mac world.
When the PPC platform stagnated, Mac OS releases started doing a strange thing.... they actually tended to be faster than the previous release on old hardware.
I've got a 450MHz G4 in its (mostly) original hardware configuration currently running 10.3.9. Unless I'm doing video encoding, or something else similarly processor-intensive, it certainly doesn't feel like a 10 year old machine. (The video encoding example is an interesting one, given that I used the machine 2 years ago for a large video-editing project with Final Cut Pro, and simply farmed out the rendering and encoding tasks to a more powerful machine -- FCP has remarkably modest hardware requirements)
This is all on a computer that shipped 2 years before the release of OS X. (As a random sidenote, I've also always been impressed that it could handle up to 2 GiB of RAM. That was unprecedented for its time)
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
IMO, the PowerPC's limitations actually drove a lot of innovation at Apple during those few years.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
WARNING: Intense rant built up over years of raging against boy wonder dickhead programmers who think they're top shit.
Here is a great hint for all those boy wonders who write shit applications that spray their shit applications everywhere - fix your damn applications up.
It pisses me off when I see vendors spray DLL's everywhere, from their own directory to the Windows directory to the user directory and everything in between.
1) Keep your fucking application exe and all the bundled DLL's in your application director - leave the fucking Windows directory alone. It is not for YOU to place YOUR shit into. It is for Windows and Windows only.
2) Don't write shit to your application directory; if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.
3) Don't use undocumented API's and hacks. You aren't cool, you aren't hip, it doesn't make you gods gift to the world because you're using private API calls never intended by Microsoft to be used outside their operating system development teams. Its private for a reason - private meaning it is not for you to fucking use. Hack away at Microsoft's private api's and I'll hack away at your privates.
Do the fucking job properly the first fucking time and stop turning a clean and pristine Windows installation ito a fucking dogs breakfast because you think you're top shit when clearly you're not.
By optimized you mean they have DRM turned off. Expect DRM to be in place for the final release candidate.
Seriously, what's with this "DRM" myth? Can anyone provide an authoritative source that DRM is on at all times (not just when you're playing DRM'd content), and that significantly impedes performance?
Or is Windows 7 really not that different in terms of performance than Vista SP2? I tried the Beta on a machine of mine, and really saw no differnce. Well, Windows 7 booted faster, but after that they seemed pretty much the same in terms of the overall feel. The memory after bootup was essentially the same too, hovering right around 700MB.
Go on then.
Please tell us how many apps (and the names thereof) document the zillions of registry keys they create/use/modify in normal operations?
AFAIK, I have yet to come upon a consumer grade windows app that does that.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Vista achieved a huge goal -- it pushed hardware manufacturers to make giant advanced for no other good reason. 64-bit, aeroglass, hybrid everything. If you want to face something, face the fact that aeroglass pushed graphics so hard that people sued over vista basic not being good enough -- because it lacks a few transparencies.
Vista was always pushed -- well, to developers and techs -- as a base for future versions. That was a big reason for manufacturers to go nuts and produce better hardware, better drivers, and weird requirements -- just like Intel is now pushing ram voltages lower for the core i7.
The reason netbooks can run windows 7 is because in the last five years, the hardware became available to do acceptable things with minimal horse-power.
It's still no where near enough for me. But I still don't understand why a smaller screen, lesser screen, smaller interface, lesser interface, slower processor, and lesser functionality will ever be worthwhile. Then again, I don't benefit from mobility, nor even from portability.
I really want to like Windows 7.
On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.
On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.
For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.
Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.
=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====
I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.
At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.
Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.
It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).
To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.
Wonder why 'we' are never happy here on slashdot? Why no matter what MicroSoft does, they are vilified by 'we'?
Here's a hint: take your user Id, and subtract 1. That's about how many DIFFERENT people registered here before yoi did. Each with their own ideas about priority and values, and what to lambaste MS for.
I lambaste them for lame things like email not working right with IMAP4 servers in WinMobile 5, 6, 6.1, and 6.5. That's 3 YEARS that some as simple as deleting an email hasn't worked right in a device primarily bought to (ahem) read email.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Why do you HAVE to run big-time desktop software on bitty little computers? You wouldn't expect Oracle to run well on machines like that either. Geez, we ran twm on 33 MHz 486s and managed to get our work done just fine. Pick software that's suited to the machine.
These are the netbook manufacturers I've collected brochures from:
These were advertised prices. Actual prices were about S$50-150 lower.
None of the vendors advertised the availability of GNU Linux. Asus is the only one that advertised the GNU Linux option. They also put up Eee PCs and Eee Boxes with GNU Linux on display, hooking up to big LCD screens for passer-bys to see.
This happened at the IT Show event, 12th-15th March 2009, Singapore.
So, no, I don't think your "nearly every netbook maker is developing a custom Linux distro that removes the cruft and makes it run faster" statement appears to be true, for the moment.
You *must* know from your XP experience that the desktop appears faster than on W2K, but is simply useless for the first 10 minutes until it's finished hammering the hard disk (and I keep startup services to a minimum, to the point of manually nuking GoogleUpdate every time it gets silently installed). Also, they were the ones to come up with a progress bar that RESTARTED (so, what's the "progress" there) which meant you no longer had an idea whether to just go for coffee or have a full 4 course meal..
I don't want them to come up with more cosmetic scams like that. Your observation about a system needing to be snappy is 100% right, I just wonder where the hell all my computing power goes. Sure, I don't have the fastest box in the world but it's still 3..5x faster than when I was using W2K, yet I have to wait. On a laptop with Vista the system "disappears" for seconds on end (cursor goes away), to then later come back and catch up with my typing, in a boring word processor. That is ridiculous, and that^s why I (a) stuck with XP and (b) use Linux and OSX more and more.
The whole netbooks concept is good: do more with less. After that housecleaning we may want to use what we have then on a box with more power and see it fly at last.
After I learn touch typing. :-)
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I can't understand why Vista needed so much computing power for the graphics AFTER forcing the use of a mega capable graphics card - it's almost like it doesn't use the graphics card. Especially when compared with Linux compiz/fusion where screen manipulations don't register at all on system load (making it nice and snappy) I have no idea what they did. But it wasn't good.
I would like them asusming they had NO new hardware resources. I'd like to see them work along the lines of LESS resource hungry. Because it would mean they'd have to focus on efficiency, which would be a first. It would also provide an instant update hit because it would mean that for the first time ever people wouldn't have to upgrade. It would make a killing in business sales, for sure.
But I guess that wouldn't be considered an "up"grade..
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In all due respects - how the fuck is it counter intuative? If I have a game, I expect the game settings, the saved games etc. to all sit in my user directory. It is called a user directory for a reason, it is specific to YOU and only YOU. The purpose of a multi-user environment is to seperate YOUR personal files away from the files that will be shared with anyone else using or having access to your system.
Good lord, its common sense. Your files belong to YOU there fore they sit in YOUR directory and not bob's, tom's or mary's directory.
Yeap, its all dumpted in Windows directory, over writing older and newer version - and you have a giant cluster fuck. You have newer DLL's that have new quirks that older applications haven't been tested against, then you have older DLL's over writing new ones with the obvious results, then there are the customised versions which over write the generic ones included with the operating system itself.
Then there is inter-generational operating system support because of the chain reaction effect of multiple components of Windows relying on multiple DLL's, which if upgraded can let off a chain reaction and fuck the system from top to bottom.
Oh, and if you say Linux doesn't suffer from it - I'll shove a red hot pocker up your ass; because obviously you don't track the compatibility issues that result in one library being updated resulting in 5 applications that rely on that one library to require updating as well.
Again, let the fucking operating system alone, load the libraries you bundle with your software in your own application directory; a few extra megs being used I'd sooner pay for in extra hard disk being used up than finding my system is a glorified clusterfuck because of your smart ass know it all approach to programming and deployment.
I honestly want to know why vendors don't use MSI. Why is it that Adobe feels the need that they must create a 'custom' installer when they should use the generic packaging method provided by Microsoft and can be integrated with their deployment infrastructure. I don't understand and quite frankly I'd love to see Microsoft make compulsory MSI usage as part of their Windows certification programme. The day when Microsoft stops allowing vendors putting the Windows logo to their software until it reaches certain standards - that will be the day when the quality of software will improve to a level I'd be satisified with.
"ask a kid who's been raped by his priest for 5 years if he thinks what the priest is doing is wrong; you'll be surpised to find that the kid EXPECTS that from priests and thinks that priests who dont rape him dont really love god."
Do you think what the priest is doing to you is wrong?.
The point of Vista taking a lot of CPU power is to make it necessary to buy another computer. Microsoft sells a copy of Windows with every new computer, even if the user plans to run Linux.
Now, with netbooks, Windows cannot be successful if it gorges on CPU cycles.
If Microsoft ever delivered a good version of Windows, the company would make less money. So Windows will always be dominated by sloppy programming.
In my opinion, Microsoft is not anyone's partner. Microsoft is the enemy of true partnership.
I still don't understand why a smaller screen, lesser screen, smaller interface, lesser interface, slower processor, and lesser functionality will ever be worthwhile
Simple: because battery technology hasn't kept pace with transistor technology. So we have multiple cores and ludicrous memory bandwidth and insane clock speeds (if you can handle the cooling). But it's a balance: a bigger battery means you can use a higher-powered chip, which means you can run a better OS which means more features & functionality, etc. Too small and you're restricted to Sudoku and MP3 players. Too large and you can't fit it in your pocket. The current batteries just aren't up to the resource requirements of our best chips, so there's a huge push in the industry to "Go Green" and low-power.
But until we see some quantum leap in energy storage technology, an easy fix is to just release faster software to begin with.
9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.
Unix permissions are one thing I'd never complain about being terribly complicated, IMHO they are a lot less complex than NTFS permissions. I have come across cases of NTFS permission chains so complex that the 'Effective Permissions' resolver in Windows failed to correctly resolve permissions on a directory (it used to be buried inside a set of menus: Right click Folder->Properties->Advanced button->Security tab->Effective Permissions tab, dunno where it is in Windows 7).The fact that you even need an 'Effective Permissions' resolver seems mildly scary to me.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
If your ideology goes against the dominant paradigm, beware: 5% of you will be true believers and the rest will be angry monkeys with revenge in their eyes.
Back when I was a liberal, I was a true believer. I was young, idealistic, naive, probably stupid, etc. and wanted to love the whole world and make everything better. At some point I woke up and realized very few of the people around me wanted that. They wanted death to the rich, to screw the middle class, to burn the bankers, to kill the politicians, to blow up The Power, etc.
My thinking was forward: let's invent a better world.
Their thinking was backward: let's use the excuse of inventing a better world to destroy all things that anger us.
I've now come to identify this in people and use it as my first line of defense. Backward thinking? I'm outta there.
This is not to say "don't be idealistic." It's awesome to try to make things better. FOSS can kick ass when it's not busy cloning commercial apps. We can improve everything here on earth and really should. But be realistic, both in what you intend to achieve, and in assessing the intent of those around you.
Futurist Traditionalism
Give me an application that is coded correctly and that does not try to be "more clever" than the operating system by using undocumented structures, functions, registry keys or whatever else
Even MS's own application developers agreed (in the most honestly-measurable way possible -- their actions) that those steps were necessary to write a major application, so quit blaming third-party developers for doing the same thing. MS rightly deserves all the blame for writing an OS that requires apps to do unclean stuff just to work decently.
This is an old standard. All pc producers put Windows on their machines pre-installed. That makes Microsoft the market leader. Microsoft wins. But the hardware industry also wants to make money. So each new version of Windows requires new hardware, because it is so slow on old hardware. Also the new peripherals only come with drivers for the new operating system and the old peripherals don't get drivers for the new operating system. Same with software.
Bottom line is that if you buy one new piece of software or hardware you have to upgrade your whole system and the whole industry makes a lot of money.
If Vista would have actually been faster than XP then nobody would have needed to upgrade. The hardware industry would have been pretty pissed at Microsoft. But since this is not some big old conspiracy written down with all the big company heads meeting in dark dungeons, but rather a loose agreement everyone understands it went wrong. Vista was too slow compared to XP and XP still worked.
Part of the mess was probabely some greedy kid at Intel who wanted to get Vista ready stickers for some cheap old mainboard chipsets. This is because Intel had build up such a huge share of the chipset and video chip market that they did not want to loose. If the Vista ready stickers would have only gone to high end machines Vista adoption would have started slower. Maybe in the end they would have sold more machines, because people wouldn't have been so frustrated with it from the beginning.
As for myself I tried Vista on some new and some older machines and in the end just went back up to Windows. Since I run Debian at home for myself I maybe should have just gone with Linux for all the machines at work. The only app they really need and run is MS Office 2007. And I checked it and they say it runs good on Crossover Office. But there are always hardware issues. They have GSM broadband adapters I have a heard time finding decent Windows drivers for, let alone Linux. And all the so called Linux desktop distros are still not there IMHO. I have had Ubuntu on my dad's machine since 2006 and I still don't like it (currently a fresh install of 0810).
In 1999 Debian was the os that sucked the least (it still sucks in many ways, but waaay less than the others) and this is still true in 2009. Damn you computers.
Windows 7 was expected to be a better performer than Vista right out of the gate, and if you paid attention to Microsoft's timeline you'd understand why. Here's the quick-and-dirty rundown: Windows XP was codenamed "Whistler", for the BC ski mountain, and essentially represented what was meant to be the ultimate development of the NT kernel. The next version was codenamed "Blackcomb" (for another ski mountain neighboring Whistler), and was intended to be a radical shift in the codebase to rely more on the .NET platform. The shift would be huge, and disruptive, since it would require a whole new driver model and would use new technologies for communications and presentation.
It would, in fact, be such a disruptive shift that Microsoft elected to create an "interim" version that would maintain compatibility for the most part. The inside joke here is that the code name for this interim version was taken from a bar located right in between Whistler and Blackcomb, namely the "Longhorn".
The trouble with "Longhorn" (which we all know and love now as Windows Vista) was that the attempt to maintain compatibility--AND improve security--led to some significant performance issues. Windows 7 resolves these issues, and it was always intended to.
As it happens, netbooks have come on the scene, and they'll clearly have an impact for years to come. In many ways, these really are truly "personal" computers, and the technology has finally matured to the point that such machines can be both cheap and genuinely useful. It's just a happy coincidence that MS has been finalizing a leaner, better-performing OS to run on them
could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
This is simply not possible to realistically do on a linux distribution because there are usually multiple options.
Windows allows one to install multiple web browsers and e-mail programs, but only one is registered as default. Ideally, as Repossessed pointed out, /usr/bin/filebrowser would look in some preference file, find the default file browser, and start Nautilus, Dolphin (the file browser, not the GameCube emulator), GNOME Commander, ROX-Filer, or whatever. That would at least make it as easy as Windows' start . command.
There are quite a few applications that allow you to [sudo in a GUI]. Use google.
I can't use Google because I need to become root to set up networking. Under Windows Vista, such an application comes with the operating system: UAC. But Nautilus doesn't have an easy way to open something with gksudo, or I missed something major in the help file. Ideally, someone in sudoers could right-click > "Open as administrator".
Learn how a linux file system works and learn how bash processes commands. The space character is a special character in the linux command line for good reason.
Sure, you can name all your files without spaces, but then you plug in a flash drive written on a system that doesn't treat space as a special character (e.g. the Windows or Mac OS X GUI), and you need to interoperate with the data on that drive.
Create a launcher
Google told me that creating a launcher involves typing out a text file. Does Nautilus provide a GUI shortcut for this procedure the way Windows does to make .lnk files?
8) Traditionally extensions have no meaning in the unix world... this is by design.
Imagine that the user gives the system a command to "open the file whose path is '/home/pino/Documents/class_schedule.odt', and which is not marked as executable, with the preferred installed program for opening this file". Windows provides start.exe, which calls a function ShellExecute() that uses the file name suffix to determine that such program is OpenOffice.org Writer. What does UNIX use?
Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems.
The problem is Nautilus makes chown a pain in the ass. Under GNOME, the "Administration > Services" panel has a button to put up a gksudo prompt, labeled "Unlock". But Nautilus's file info panel, on the other hand, has text to the effect "You are not the owner, so you can't change this" and no Unlock button.
Should I search Nautilus' bug list and post links to enhancement requests covering each issue that I have listed?
if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.
Say one of my PC's users has created a template for a word processor, and I want to install it for all users. Is it recommended to store the template in the HKLM hive of the Windows registry?
Or say I have a video game that lets the user install levels. A level consists of a 10 KiB script, a 100 KiB background image, a 2000 KiB music recording in Vorbis format, and optionally a 20 KiB banner for the level select screen. If a user installs a level for himself, it would go in a dot folder in the home directory (or a folder inside %APPDATA% under Windows). But if a user installs a level for all users, is it really recommended to stash the script, background image, and music file in the registry?
There's no problem with keeping incompatible DLLs in the same Windows folder as long as they have unique names. A lot of DLL authors have recognized this and changed the name of the DLL whenever the behavior changes. For example, the C library used by programs compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ has gone through at least CRTDLL.dll, MSVCRT.dll, and MSVCR71.dll. (MinGW programs still use MSVCRT.dll because it's so widely distributed.) The Allegro library has gone through alleg40.dll and alleg42.dll. The Zlib library is only at zlib1.dll, but that's because the interface hasn't changed yet. But you're right that some DLL authors don't follow this convention, and putting DLLs in the application's folder is a handy workaround.
I honestly want to know why vendors don't use MSI.
For one thing, they might have an installer that works, so don't touch it. Or they might have to support users who don't have the latest version of Windows Installer installed.
I'd love to see Microsoft make compulsory MSI usage as part of their Windows certification programme.
I could try to verify it, but apparently one has to have a Winqual account to get the logo requirements, and you need a paid certificate from VeriSign to get a Winqual account. VeriSign won't issue certificates directly to individuals; the sign-up form requires a "company", and various PDFs that VeriSign makes available through the certificate application process imply that this means a corporation or partnership, not a mere DBA form.
I thought /purchasers/ of Vista were going to be getting Win7 as a FREE upgrade? Or was I dreaming that? Anyways, a free or significantly discounted price on Win7 for Vista upgraders would not only validate the Win7 mantra of being a "polished Vista," but also please the customer's who weren't so happy with their Vista purchase.
I'm hoping that general Linux adoption will snowball. It seems likely: growth tends to be exponential and Linux market share (according to W3C) is at 2.13%, as apposed to 2.06% last month... If we maintained that growth, we'd be at 26.4285% in 12 months (2.13*2.13/2.06*12)... Just a thought.
Seriously, I don't know how that got modded insightful. My Vista machine boots to the desktop and is usable in under a minute. 15 minutes is complete bullshit unless he's trying to run it on a 486 or something.
Slashdot ran a story about employees suing over not being paid while a computer boots. No, Vista isn't to blame, but some companies require that so many programs be run at log-in that a 15 minute boot time isn't out of the ordinary.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I still hate that I can't just type CD DirName and end up in the proper directory. My old Amiga OS used to do this, and that was 15 years ago. Why is this so difficult to keep a simple index of folder paths? Thousands upon thousands of folder paths would take up a few hundred KB to index. If there were multiple choices, AmigaOS would simply warn you.
The proper case FS thing is a nag for me as well. I hear everyone talk about the benefits of using proper case, then everyone turns around and uses lower case to work around it. Of course this is my opinion only so I can't speek for others, but I never have two files with the same name in the same DIR but with different case. Although I'm sure there are people who could potential need this feature, does the common user really need this? What other reason is a case sensitive FS really for except to allow multiple files with the same name but different case in the same dir? Blegh
There are also some basic usability features that should be addressed. I have to agree with the above post. Why would someone need to Google to find an app to sudo to root via a GUI 'button' app? I don't think it's unreasonable to simply click a button to do that and be prompted for a password. Why isn't something so basic already included in the distro?
I love Linux. Don't get me wrong, but many of the Linux crowd have this huge chip on their shoulder that works along the line of "if it ain't broke, it doesn't need fixing, because it's FOSS and we can do no wrong". Unfortunately, if your not fixing/adding needed/wanted features, then you're stagnant.
These folks out here give so much of their free time and do great things, but some times they are too focused on the big things and they never address the little things.
I also think this is the mistake that Vista made IMO. MS was so focused on Searching and the new db based FS, and pre-caching apps to speed things up, that they forgot the small things that may not be the foundation of the os, but they are sorely missed when they aren't there or don't work well. When some of their big ticket items didn't even make it into Vista, what were we left with?
Amusingly enough, if Arm based netbooks take off, Not only is Microsoft screwed, but intel too.
Microsoft is not necessarily screwed if subnotebooks with an ARM CPU take off. The company develops a Windows operating system designed to run on battery-powered devices with a small screen and an ARM CPU, called Windows Mobile. And in fact, there used to be a line of subnotebooks based on Windows Mobile's predecessor. It would benefit TI over Intel, but only because it sold XScale to Marvell.
Note that the link you provided in your sig is not working: http://www.olav.dk/articles/tables.html
But if that had happened, we wouldn't have faster machines in general. There are very few forces that can push hardware manufacturers to produce higher performance. Microsoft happens to be one of the very few who can do it for the consumer world as well as for the business world.
A real backup tool would image the entire filesystem, wouldn't you think?
You have a point. But the roaming user profile feature of Windows, which automatically copies the %USERPROFILE% folder back and forth between a workstation on a domain and a server, works only on the %USERPROFILE% folder.
I just want a reasonable explanation why Microsoft made a requirement that Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade, when installed from XP Pro, has to format the hard drive in order to install. A PC can boot from the Vista Home Basic DVD, then tell you it has to be installed from the desktop. Once at the desktop, it tells you it has to wipe your hard drive. Absurd!
If Win7 has an upgrade, and I can't see why it wouldn't, I really hope it doesn't include such a rediculous requirement.
There is a balance between complexity, weight, and wide availability in tools, BASH is a shell, not a programming language, although you and write __simple__ programs in it In a Linux or modern Unix environment you also have Perl, which from the look of your sig will be right up your street, Python, PHP or Java as interpreted programming languages. But without extra cost you also have C C++ C# FORTRAN ADA LISP ML HASKAL ...
My take is that Bash is almost too powerful since it seduces people into writing long and complex scripts when they should be writing a program, and all that entails eg it is hard to debug bash, but easy in Perl.
This is history in that HP, IBM and SUN resisted installing Perl by default, so only with the comming of Linux coud you assume Perl, now of course Perl is standard in OpenSolaris and the NIH syndrome is over.
The whole sh - awk - sed - test - eval stuff is nonsense, Perl, or for the more traditional programmer, Python is much cleaner.
I think it's really both factors in play. Engineers wanted to make things better, because they knew how sucky what they had was. On the other hand, the advent of netbooks was enough to sell the idea of driving performance all the way to the edge (and not just "slightly better so it sells") to the marketing.
means your sound card is unused, the CPU must do all the work.
And guess what happens when the CPU has to do work that used to be done by a dedicated processor?
Less CPU to use on other things.
Idiot.
Ah, the shiny install disk that you will use... as a cup holder, I guess? It's not much use on netbooks
Ordinarily, the owner of a subnotebook will have access to another PC with a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive and can copy the driver installer to the subnotebook with a USB drive, an SD card, an Ethernet cable, or a Wi-Fi access point. Unlike games, drivers typically aren't copy protected to need the optical drive to be physically connected to the same machine that the program runs on. It works for Windows drivers and a Windows subnotebook, but not for Windows drivers and a Linux subnotebook.
"Netbook", "Windows 7"?
Rejected.