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Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista
Stoobalou writes "In a chat with fellow CEOs at Microsoft's 14th annual CEO Summit, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer came close to admitting Vista was a dog. 'How do you get your product right? How do you help the customer? How do you be patient?' he asked, as if he knew the answer. What he did know was that Microsoft spent too many years building Windows Vista. 'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,' he said." You can also watch
video of the speech, but 31 minutes of Ballmer is a lot of Ballmer.
Supposedly they designed Windows 7 with tablets in mind and added multi-touch support. However the only company I know that was working on a Windows 7 tablet (HP) has since dropped Windows 7, and instead bought out Palm so they could get WebOS.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
how big was the footprint? even if they got it down to 5GB - 10GB it's still too much when iphone OS is 500MB or less and does most things people want in a tablet
Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004 that it was making significant changes. "Longhorn" development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release.
However it also did change peoples expectations towards security in Windows, which was an important step. People complained about it first, mainly because of the old poorly designed programs. Now all those programs had time to patch up or new ones came to market, so they finally work with the new security model and people aren't saying that Windows broke their programs.
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
As stated above, it certainly has some tweaks that could be used, but overall it's a great operating system.
Amongst many other reasons why, it even boots and runs faster and smoother on my Dell Mini 9 than a stripped down version of XP. Seriously.
Living With a Nerd
A lot of installers actually install their desktop icons to the All Users desktop, which is irritating as all fuck. Then you need admin privilege to delete it which invokes UAC. The problem is that the All Users desktop mechanism is opaque to end users, which is just shitty Microsoft standard practice.
Actually, Home Basic didn't have Aero. That was the major difference between Home Basic and Home Premium.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Longhorn never was a managed code approach
Perhaps I exaggerated a little, but there was a big push to try to focus user space as primarily managed code. Singularity et al are doing crazy stuff with managed code in the kernel amongst other things, which is interesting but not what I was alluding to in my original post.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
I'm aware, I followed the blog while it was still active. I particularly found the GDI concurrency post interesting. I wonder if having a similar blog for Vista would have allowed them to realise earlier on that it was going out of control.
Windows ME was really MS-DOS v 7.3 (or whatever that would be with the numbering system). It was the final operating system from the DOS legacy that started back in the days when Bill Gates was actually contributing code for the OS. That was ultimately the problem with it, where it had to deal with all of that legacy code base and they tried to make it sort of like Windows 2000, but deliberately crippled it so it wouldn't compete against their other products and introduced a few features that actually backfired as "improvements", notably the registry "preservation" tools that tended to wipe out the registry instead.
Windows 2000 and the Windows NT line that now includes Windows 7 actually started as a sort of fork from VMS, the operating systems used by Digital Equipment on the VAX and similar computers but ported to the x86 architecture. There still is a little bit of legacy VMS code in there, primarily in the thread handling code and some of the really low level kernel parts, which is part of what gave NT its stability. That IBM engineers were involved in some of the early NT development is now a mostly forgotten trivia fact too, but the two lines of operating systems have very different heritages and legacies.
I wouldn't doubt it that there were at least some within Microsoft who wanted to kill that old MS-DOS line for some time but couldn't quite figure out when that should happen.
This all misses the point though because there were a lot of features they spent years working on that never made it into Vista let alone Windows 7. Microsoft aimed too high with Vista and fell short and the process wasted far too much developer time.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k.
Not at all. Win2k was popular, stable, reliable, and remains so today, 10 years later. No activation or DRM crap to deal with. Win2k still has a large corporate market share.
Win2k is one reason IE6 remains popular. Microsoft refused to release IE7 for win2k, so all those users are stuck on IE6.
There is going to be a lot of corporate hand-wringing this summer, when Microsoft stops releasing security patches for win2k.
[...] or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1
No, as 10.5 is to 10.6.
Umm, yes it is. (lol slashbots, +5 mod to an obvious untruth just because it bashes MS ...)
UAC, bitlocker / EFS, IE protected mode, enhanced firewall management, ASLR enabled (plus I think they improved it in win7) and Windows Defender installed by default, kernel patch protection, network access protection. Furthermore MS has for some time been carrying out more thorough code review, reducing "attack surface" e.g. removing unnecessary default services and sending coders on secure programming training.
Is it "secure"? Not really, but that's mostly the fault of end users running botnet.exe and ignoring UAC these days. Even in that regard they're trying to do something, Microsoft Security Essentials is free and a pretty good AV by all accounts.
XP 64 was a bust and you had to buy it and where not able to use the same key as 32 bit.
Vista lets you use the same key for 32 and 64 so if had a oem system that came with 32 all you need is a 64 bit and you can use the same key.
You can thank Superfetch for that. If you have any decent amount of RAM Superfetch will take the unused RAM and load the programs you use the most, and if you use programs at a specific time it will make sure to load them before that time. Really gives it a kick in the pants. If you have a spare flash stick lying around I'd try Readyboost as well, as I've found that can also give a pretty decent speed boost.
The only thing that irritates the shit out of me about W7 is that damned devices and printers. In the old days you could "force" a device with the add new hardware wizard, and you can't really do that anymore. I currently have a netbook that is really pissing me off, an MSI Wind if anybody here has one? Anyway this came loaded with W7 HP, and the camera does NOT show up in device manager OR devices and printers, yet the software for the damned thing works!
The problem is the customer uses MSN Messenger (man I fucking HATE messenger programs!) and apparently messenger will NOT use a webcam that doesn't show up in devices and printers. I can't even figure out what to remove in device manager, as I said the damned thing don't show up there, but when I launch the MSI software...tada! The cam works. I go to their website to hope maybe a driver reinstall will fix and guess what? It uses native drivers! ARRRGH!
If anybody has one of those new MSI Wind netbooks (it is a U230 if it matters) and has run into this problem and knows WTF, please let me know. I've tried every trick I can think of, and short of wiping and reinstalling I'm out of ideas. I hate having to tell a customer his brand new 1.3MP built in webcam won't do the one fucking job he wants it for, but I'm stumped.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree that you shouldn't have been modded "Troll" just for voicing your opinion, even though I somewhat disagree with it. You were right that MS usually takes two tries to make a good OS though, but I believe you were wrong on the versions you called crap. Win98 was the second go of the 9x (SE was the true release of 98 IMHO). Win2k was the second attempt at using the NT kernel with the 9x GUI. Windows7 is the second attempt at the NT Kernel with the Vista GUI. All the second attempts were fine OS's in their time.
WNT = VMS (Take VMS and add one letter to each. V+1=W, M+1=N, S+1=T. Coincidence?) The NT kernel was written by the same guy that wrote the kernel for VAX/VMS, Dave Cutler. At the time, the code was being worked for OS/2, before the MS/IBM breakup. Both companies got the code. IBM turned into OS/2. MS made NT. The original project was called NT OS/2.
Oh, and VAX/VMS is one hell of an OS. Saying that NT runs much of the same code is a credit to NT, not a problem. The same kernel is the basis for all NT based OS's from NT 3.51 all the way to Windows7.
And yes, I meant W98SE. Just like when someone says XP, they usually mean XP, SP2. Win98 (pre SE) was a dog and basically offered nothing over 95.
Finally, yes, these OS's sucked by modern standards and usually didn't come into their own until a few service packs fixed them up. But for their day, they were excellent OS's. Win95 was a leap over DOS. Win2k was a leap over NT4. XP was just Win2k with a couple of tweaks, a few new features and a prettier GUI (pre SP2).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Have you listened to top brass of any large company with a large R&D?! They all use nice words.
You are equating R&D with productization. Microsoft Research is much more diverse than you think it is. That includes funding a shitload of basic sciences research which is not even intended to find a place within any product. Maybe taking a look at the research areas and the thousands of published papers would help you understand what Microsoft Research and its R&D resources are about.
It is much more secure than xp.
UAC, which allows old application, requiring admin rights under xp, to run under user's account. Firewall, which now can filter outbound connections and offers better configuration capabilities. Protected mode for ie, which mitigates most exploits. Holes in ie are really exploitable only on windows xp.
Address space randomization. SEH is now secure, under xp it was possible to change exception handler's address (if the application itself had an exploitable buffer overflow, of course) and use it to execute code.
Automatic detection of stack overflow, which works in most cases. Driver signing (mandatory on 64 bits), life is much harder for rootkits now. Also PatchGuard, which prevents modification of code in ring0 space.
DNSSEC support.
Session 0 isolation, which mitigates most of the shatter attacks.
Crucial system's binaries are checksumed at startup.
Many more drivers are user space now, this makes the attack vector size smaller. Things like ring0 access via unsecure printer's driver aren't possible now.
Password's hash method was changed from md5 to sha256.
Most of there are present in vista, if not all.
And thats just from my memory. You are obviously horribly ignorant and clueless.
Longhorn did however try to incorporate a bunch of other research projects right from the get-go, most of which were spun off into individual projects or into existing products. Avalon was supposed to replace winforms
I'm not sure what your sources are, but I dare say they are rather suspect, given that WinForms was never a part of Windows proper (it's a .NET library, which is a fairly straightforward OO wrapper on top of Win32 API, nothing more). It ships with Windows since Vista, in a sense that it comes as a part of .NET, and OS ships with .NET. But it's not something that affects the OS development as such.