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Microsoft Developer Explains Why Windows Kernel Development Falls Behind
New submitter mha writes "In a response that truly seems to be from a core Microsoft developer, we are told about why Windows kernel development continues to fall further and further behind that of the Linux kernel. He says, 'The cause of the problem is social. There's almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world. ... There's no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business. See, component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: if you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no," and you have very little incentive to say "yes."'"
"Oh god, the NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel [...]" -- lol!
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
People at M$ only innit for the money. Microsoft's got good people no doubt, but I am reminded of line from Chef in Apocalypse Now: "They lined us all up in front of a hundred yards of prime rib. Magnificent meat, beautifully marbled. Then they started throwing it in these big cauldrons. All of it. Boiling." That's Microsoft: boiled prime rib.
its because of her genes though
The quality of Slashdot trolling has gone way down recently.
These NIH type problems are hardly unique to Microsoft, or even proprietary software. It's human nature. Big success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Open source has the forking mechanism which provides an outlet against some of the worst abuses (only).
they have to keep introducing new ways to nerf HOST file support to prevent APK from taking over the Internet.
Sounds like the guy was just frustrated and venting. Lots of us do that sometimes, and this one seems ready made to please the slashdot crowd. But do read the retraction the guy posted.
First, I want to clarify that much of what I wrote is tongue-in-cheek and over the top --- NTFS does use SEH internally, but the filesystem is very solid and well tested. The people who maintain it are some of the most talented and experienced I know. (Granted, I think they maintain ugly code, but ugly code can back good, reliable components, and ugliness is inherently subjective.) The same goes for our other core components. Yes, there are some components that I feel could benefit from more experienced maintenance, but we're not talking about letting monkeys run the place. (Besides: you guys have systemd, which if I'm going to treat it the same way I treated NTFS, is an all-devouring octopus monster about crawl out of the sea and eat Tokyo and spit it out as a giant binary logfile.) ...
All of the problems listed there are the direct result of poor management.
Accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry because . . . .
makes test angry because . . . .
and PM is angry because . . . .
There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team.
When this happens, the manager who is in charge of all those people steps in and says "You will co-operate and get things done, or else you will no longer work here". Sadly, too many managers are too lazy and/or gutless to do this.
I submitted this story. I am only human - what was I thinking? I guess I thought of the many strange comments I could elicit...
I am so sorry, guys. I must say that shortly after reading the story reason set in (but I was too quick on /.) - there is nothing unexpected in it. It is no big deal. It is a non-story. Everything described is not "Microsoft", it is human, including the complaints. I don't think the points are invalid, it's just that one can make a long list like this for ANY large (or even medium) project. Life is messy - but I got my first story submitted (which means nothing).
My apologies.
I just hope that the guys managers, should they find out, react maturely - by doing exactly nothing (at least no punishment). Stuff like this happens, and if it does so only once it should be overlooked.
PS: On the other hand, enough people voted this to the front page...
Sigh. She's married now. The hot grits will just never taste the same.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Another reason for the quality gap is that that we've been having trouble keeping talented people. Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, ...
Well, what do you expect? Microsofties come to Slashdot, get picked on, insulted, called evil, etc ... then they have to go home and cry themselves to sleep. The days of the Microsofty crying his way to the bank to see his millions are gone. Now, he cries in his bed, over the insults on Slashdot and the insults spewed at him during his performance review.
Now, some of those poor poor basterds are at Google and Google is now Evil and they'll have to put up with the abuse AGAIN!
On another note:
We just can't be fucked to implement C11 support, and variadic templates were just too hard to implement in a year. (But ohmygosh we turned "^" into a reference-counted pointer operator. Oh, and what's a reference cycle?)
Dude, I feel for the compiler team. MS' programmer tools team is the BEST on the planet bar none. YOU guys should walk around with your heads held high and your pants down do I can kiss your asses! And as far as anything regarding C++ is concerned, well the creator of that language - He who shall not be named - should have stopped in 1998 with adding features to that language - maybe even in '90. He made 'C' OOP - awesome!! Then he went crazy with the "features".
As it is now, I won't touch C++ for new development. ASNI C for system/metal work or anything that needs high performance and Python for most of everything else. GUI work depends on the platform - Visual C# rocks for Windows dev!!
Don't get me going on a rant about Java's current state of stinky.
Must be those host files finally kicking in and blocking these lusers.
Microsoft tried to kill the Start button, but it failed as the open-source Classic Shell struck it to the ground.
Microsoft could try to kill the .../drivers/etc/hosts file, but it'll fail as the developer of an open-source DNS resolver incorporating efficient hosts file lookup throws it to the ground.
(Apologies to Tenacious D)
Hey, I didn't get a "Harumph" outta that guy...
"Harrumph!"
Gentlemen! We've got to protect our phoney baloney jobs here!!
-----------
Bottom line, none of the lazy bastards actually want to do anything like work.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
It is possible that you can make some kind of pretty good hybrid tablet/desktop OS if you thoroughly plan and execute it really well. We cannot fully know. The problem is only that Windows 8 is way too far from such vision. They just released a hacked Windows desktop with this Metro screen thingy taped on it. Everything is all over the place with no good integration and smooth workflow. There is no posh: the graphics are only sharp squares with plain colors. It feels like a tech concept demo thrown together over a weekend.
While this might be pervasive at Microsoft, this problem does occur at other companies as well.
If a project has enough churn, you can actually justify cleaning up design, interfaces and even entire subsystems in some cases. If all you do is make each piece of code you touch suck just a little bit less, you'll hate having to work on that code less and less over time. All you have to do is look at the code and think "it doesn't HAVE to be this way!" If that old application everyone hates has gotten to the point where it requires a full time position just to maintain it, there's usually no reason why the design couldn't be improved along the way. My goal in maintenance positions is to eliminate the need for that job. There'll always be SOMETHING that needs maintenance, so I don't feel bad about doing so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
exactly.
Take the ribbon, love it or hate it, if you really look at it the ribbon all it does is change the shape of the menu system of earlier versions of office. The exact same dialog boxes are there behind the scenes, showing up when you least expect them.
Even in windows 8 if you look around you can find the old windows 9X series dialog boxes and components in the seldom accessed areas. They are slowly being phased out but they are still there.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
From Pournelle's web site:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
*** Finding a way to effectively deal with bureaucratic capture of institutions is probably the number one human problem.
I set up a $10,000 challenge for you to prove that.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slashdot
...may very well be the HUGE increase in competition of websites clamoring for attention. I *do* believe that it would have behooved them (/.) well to continue to work on the moderation system - it hasn't changed much in all that time, and I see LOTS of room for improvement (not that it would be easy, but I don't even see attempts).
Definitely!
> the ribbon all it does is change the shape of the menu system of earlier versions of office.
Unfortunately, no. Someone decided which menu items I should want, and put those on the ribbon. But in fact, 90% of the items on the ribbon are things I never want to run from a menu (Copy? That's what God made c for. Paste? . Mailings? Can you say 1980s?) And many of the things I do want, and which were in the menus, are no longer in the ribbon. The menu was completely customizable.
Yes, after the first three year fiasco they made it possible to add new commands to the ribbon. But many things on the ribbon are not deletable, so I still have to sort through all those danged hieroglyphics (or squint at the tiny English labels that some, but not all, of those hieroglyphics have).
I am a fairly active linux contributor. I have patches all over the kernel tree. I also review drivers/staging code.
Most of the patches that I send are things that I cannot test because I don't have the hardware. Even though I'm careful, there are still a few times where I have introduced bugs. The most recent example was code like this "if (!attributes & 0x4000)". That has a precedence bug so the condition is always false. Unfortunately changing it to "if (!(attributes & 0x4000))" disabled certain graphics card. The correct thing was to delete the condition.
Breaking stuff is just a part of development, you try your best but don't let fear of breaking things stop you from applying patches.
Probably over 5% of the 10,000 patches in every new kernel are cleanups. We're always merging API changes and unlike Microsoft we don't care if it affects out of tree drivers. There isn't any subsystem where the owner says, "This code is stable now and I'm only accepting actual bug fixes."
The other thing that helps is the short release cycle. If something does break, it's easy to fix.
Some people find linux development frustrating. One developer told me, "Ever since XXX took over the YYY subsystem he has been constantly changing the API and re-writing my code. Does he ever sleep? I don't know how anything works any more."
It's hard on reviewers as well. I have reviewed literally over 3000 cleanup patches to the comedi subsystem. I have mornings when I feel lazy and it doesn't fill me with joy to see 40 new cleanup patches in my inbox. The process is expensive.
But I do feel a great deal of pride in the work.
Instead of everyone getting upset because they have work to do while making adjustments to new changes, how about you just do your damn job and maybe things will get done faster, with better quality. It's not a war, it's software development. If you want to stay relevant, you will do everything in your power to understand this and become better at what you do. In the case you don't want a job, keep getting "pissed" every time changes come down the pike. Consumers don't care about your personal struggle with adapting to change. This isn't a daycare, it's business.
I'll bet she'd still look good petrified.
The first rule of the internet is that everything is true, and that if somone says they are something then it must be so, like me, im a astronaut on a super secret mission to be the first to land on mars, go me...we launch in 2017, but you wont know it, it will be disguised as a satellite launch.
I must say though, anonymous person posting over tor does leave a little credibility to be desired. Of course i remember the first rule of the internet, how can i not, its the only truth out there, but if i was truly a critical thinking person id be forced to spend a little bit of time wondering if this was just some jackass trying to get attention, or someone truly from Microsoft. I mean, clearly he is from Microsoft cause he speaks with so much unproven knowledge, he sounds good right? that must mean he is telling the truth, no way he would lie, right? nobody lies on the internet, why should they, being anonymous means you always tell the truth right? anyways, i got to go train now, going to be the Neil Armstrong of mars, to bad nobody will ever know about it but ill probaly get on tor and write a article about it since its annon people will believe me and make a big article and ill be supper popular.
It sounds like MS has become like most IT departments in the world; the department of NO.
Generally IT people are operating under a a system where they are brutally punished if things go wrong, are vaguely rewarded if they do what someone wants, and not rewarded for doing things that people don't understand (like simplifying the usage of VPNs). So these IT departments see any change requests as increasing the possibility of disaster and thus bad. This results in a combination of refusing to adapt to the company's needs as both dictated through employe requests and through changing technology. This is evidenced through many larger older organizations still running a bunch of SUN servers or a Novell network.
But it is often far more vicious where you have IT people actively reaching out into the company and telling them what technology they may use and how they might use it. One advantage of the iPhone over the Blackberry was that generally iPhones were impossible to ruin through "Corporate Policy" and BlackBerries could be completely neutered through an easy to use interface. But out of control IT people need not fear for long as horrible companies came along to give them the tools to mangle even the iPhones.
IT people might blah blah about corporate security and various data management laws but the simple fact is that if companies don't exist for the sake of their IT departments. IT is a tool that most companies use to achieve their core goal. Yet you have IT departments treating say the head of marketing of a $20 billion dollar company like an infant "for his own good". Where I find it interesting is when IT meets the President or the CEO. Often the president will say something like "I don't want to change my password every 30 days" The IT people don't dare pull the "corporate policy" card but resort to whining about the rational with the CEO concluding, "I'm going to change my password at the exact same frequency that I change the head of IT. So set things up accordingly."
Again this is not all because IT is filled with evil trolls but because their rewards are structured incorrectly. The best run companies that I have ever seen structured IT really well so that when some guy comes in with his Vic-20 and wanted to use it for presentations they either showed him how bad an idea it was or made it happen but then billed his department for the effort. Saying NO just wasn't something they were insented to do. The result was the more stupid the requests from various departments the more budget that went to IT. This way you don't cut ITs budget you told the various department heads to be less stupid with their money.
Back to Microsoft. It sound like MS has created a similar case of fiefdoms that have perverse incentives that are not aligned with the basic goals of the company. I know in the old days of MS they would hand out stock options like candy. This resulted in many people becoming insanely rich. Maybe they need to go back to that same structure. If a small department does something extraordinary they get some big bucks. This would have to be carefully managed as I can see a few superstar programmers doing the heroic only to watch their manager pull up in a new Porsche on Monday and for them to quit on Tuesday.
Code turns to crap with indenting screwed up and code which nobody knows the purpose of. Nobody wants to fool with it because of the risk.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In contrast, employees of a company are doing whatever it takes to make a paycheck
That is totally wrong. Many programming employees at companies ALSO enjoy what they do. They are ALSO good programmers.
But as this article attests to, what they cannot do is influence code outside the group they are in, even if they have access to it. So the effect they can have, even if they are very good, is often reigned in a great deal beyond what it could be.
The reason Linux does so much better is because restraints are based on ability, not on arbitrary non-technical boundaries.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course you disagree. You don't even know what he was talking about.
I work at a place with that attitude. "You changed the copyright string from 2012 to 2013 and re-compiled. MUST RUN FULL WEEK-LONG TEST PLAN AGAIN BECAUSE ANYTHING COULD HAVE BROKE!"
My understanding is this can be turned off. It is less Windows and more Windows Defender:
"Windows 8, set for release on 26 October, automatically deletes entries in the HOSTS file for specific domains. Try, for example, to prevent attempts to access Facebook.com, Twitter.com or ad servers such as ad.doubleclick.net by rerouting them to 127.0.0.1 by adding entries to the HOSTS file and the relevant entries will soon disappear from the HOSTS file as if by magic, leaving nothing but an empty line."
This behavior is due to Windows Defender in Windows 8 thinking it has discovered malicious modification of the Hosts file. Windows Defender is enabled by default in Windows 8. Users who would like to continue using the Hosts file as a simple, albeit effective method of blocking certain sites, can do so by adding the Hosts file to Defender's exceptions list. Of course, that means that Defender will never be able to notice any actual malicious changes to the Hosts file.
Windows 8 seems to be rather prejudicial about which entries in the Hosts file Defender will automatically delete. It automatically deletes Twitter, Facebook, doubleclick and other ad sites but other domains such as "heise.de" it leaves intact.
www.h-online.com/security/news/i927.html
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
you can see the changes.
Open up the page layout tool, win office 2003, and office 2007/2010.
While the location of it on the menu has changed because of the ribbon the tool it's self is the same.
I really noticed it in outlook 2003/ outlook 2007. I use the edit message button often to add notes to emails. while the location of where that seldom used menu item has changed the dialog boxes that go with it are the same.
think of the menu items like a stack of playing cards. No matter how many times you shuffle them, no matter what game your playing, no matter how many times you mark them, bend them or use them, it is still the same 52 cards.
Windows is like that. They shuffle things around, even update the graphics, every once in a while they even grab a whole new deck. But if you open that deck and look it is still the same. now it just has a new smell.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Each and every point you make is bullshit, Stop reading hardware news websites.
First off: Why does it need to? Its a desktop OS the buisness aspect is minimal as a domain. The amount they charge vs usefullness is a bit over bearing any sufficent admin should look into samba and make do. It is easyier dealing with users with a Microsoft Server but I don't see it as a necessity. The new versions are getting better with command line tools you can use in scripting. But they lack so much in making scripting easy that it is a pain to get things all the way you want. How hard it was getting printer settings via having to create registry entries for example is just a bit of crap. Even on the buisness side it really doesn't need to be. Secondly: There are millions more linux programs all greed(good greedy) in their own right of what they want in a kernel. Some benifit from others and even companies that have steake in it to make it better for all sorts of crazy reasons. Thirdly: What difference would it make for Windows? They aren't after that aspect of the market. With linux being capable of getting free and replicating at no extra cost for super computers. Trying to come in now and sell something just doesn't make sense.
exactly.
Take the ribbon, love it or hate it, if you really look at it the ribbon all it does is change the shape of the menu system of earlier versions of office. The exact same dialog boxes are there behind the scenes, showing up when you least expect them.
Even in windows 8 if you look around you can find the old windows 9X series dialog boxes and components in the seldom accessed areas. They are slowly being phased out but they are still there.
[Have Disk...]
Copy manufacturer's files from:
A:\
You still have to test. The last time I changed a string and pushed management for a release without testing, I got screwed. An update to VisualStudio broke something completely unrelated. IFF your build environment hasn't changed at all (no updates to the SCM, compiler, make, linker, etc.) then you can get away with it, but typically you still must test.
An early boss put it to me this way: In the corporate world, you are only ever going to be motivated to be just better enough than the competition to convince people to buy your product over theirs. If there are competiters, that means you get into a spiral of 'little advancement by one, followed by copying and little advancement in the others.".. its slow innovation. In a monopoly, you get no innovation at all.
In the open source world, you're motivated by what the problem really is. You're doing it to make a batter product, that meets a better need. It leads to much greater innovation. You don't stop when you're better than the competators. Whats more, if the need is great, anyone else can move it forward, not just the company/individual.
This is not unique microsoft, its something nearly every company struggles with.
- --
"I Hate Quotes" -- Samuel L. Clemens
There is no posh
or Ginger or Sporty. If you meant polish, I think we can safely assume it was exhausted on all the prior turds.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
one of the advantages Microsoft has is that they're paying people to do the boring parts. It's hard to get people to finish making open office stable and user friendly because all the glory is in adding new features. After the features are added and they work in 90% of the cases nobody does the dull work of making them work for that last 10%. Trouble is if you use it a lot you're gonna hit one of those last 10% cases sooner than later...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
To be fair, Oracle did something similar to java and broke thousands of apps. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/oracle-rebrands-java-breaks-eclipse/2012
I meant posh. It is a word. :) Although I'm a Sporty fan myself.
When you can show me ONE distro, just one, that can pass "The Hairyfeet Challenge"* then you have something to brag about.
*.- For those that don't know "The Hairyfeet Challenge" simulates the typical 5 year cycle of your average PC, we take one random laptop and one random desktop out of the pile, we install ANY distro release from 5 years ago and we update it to current. Wanna guess what happens when you hold Linux up to just HALF the Windows lifecycle? it DIES, it DIES HARD, it shits all over its drivers and by the end you'll be lucky if even 30% of what was working at the start is 100% functional at the end.
Well I for one, are introducing the "Reverse Hairyfeet Challenge".
You do the same with Windows. But with one little specific detail: you do it from the point of view not of a corporate user, but a at-home end-user.
So you try surviving going all the way from Win98, all the way though WinME, and end up with Windows XP Home. See if you can keep you sanity going through this mess.
(I could have been even worse, I could have asked to start the challenge at Windows 3.11 and end-up at Vista, but I would probably get arrested for violating international laws against torture just for suggesting this).
And even if you managed to keep sanity you would probably not keep the hardware: at each major jump you'll end up noticing that your hardware is from a noname aisan manufacturer who since long went belly up and didn't bother writting drivers for the newer OS architecture. Requiring you to buy another piece of hardware from another manufacturer).
For the record, the laptop on which I am writing this is happily running opensuse for more than 2 years now, each update being done simply by live-updating to the newer version - while the distro is still running and used at the same time.
And 2 years ago, this laptop wasn't installed clean from scratch. I simply carried over the disk content from its predecessor. (Yup, try doing that with windows without entering a world of pain: you take a running Windows XP from one laptop, then yank out the disk, plug it into another laptop, and have it start. On linux, its mostly without problems. On Windows, your only hope is to clear huge part of the registry and configuration, to put it back into a "fristboot mode" where all the hardware is scanned again).
And I've got probably desktop carrying over the same installation for much longer. I think the jump from 32 to 64 bits was the last time I did a fresh install, then kept simply ugrading over.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If Linux fails to keep up with the pace of change in the graphics/GPU computing world it will never be able to rival Windows as a gaming platform.
Still, the recent incursion of Valve and its Steam into the linux world, the big success that Humble Bundle has among Linux player (they are significant propotion of the buyers, and on average tend to pay the double than windows users*), and the fact the lots of the crowd-funded game project very easily reach their "Stretch goal: Linux support" (or has the most vote for that extra option), etc.
all these fact tend to disagree with your idea that linux is never going to have any luck at gaming.
There is a market already for linux games. It was just untapped because until now, the big corps behind AAAA title didn't bother paying attention. but recent trends in indie and crowd-funded development has shown that there is indeed a market, which in turn is getting picked up by big names.
Not to mention that Linux has pretty much won also the embed market since long (with Apple's BSD-distant-derivated system having also a significant share specifically with tablets and smartphones) Windows on ARM is just a joke.
And slowly, the graphic cards manufacturer are collaborating to make things better:
- AMD/ATI have been actively helping opensource driver efforts (to the point that now, the opensource driver is the preferred for most older GPUs).
- Although they don't help much on the desktop, nVidia have very recently started helping support opensource tegra, simply because they now that they need linux for the embed world and past mess of every company keeping their own fork at fixed old kernel revision just doesn't work anymore.
- Intel has always being opensource to begin with
- In the process of bringing source engine to Linux, Valve has collaborated and fixed bugs or brought amelioration to both open and proprietary driver stacks.
So no matter what you think, serious gaming IS coming to Linux.
*: Well for obvisous socio-economic reasons. Linux users are likely to be computer savvy, thus probably work at tech jobs and thus higher paid and can afford more. A Sysadmin is more likely to have more money to spend on games than some guy flipping burgers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
E.g. going from one mainline trunk to another (e.g. Ubuntu 8 to Ubuntu 13). That's not a fair comparison.
Well, either the system is designed with a long-term maintenance cycle or isn't. Most Linux distros aren't, period. Most userland apps from 10 years ago won't even run on a modern system without recompiling. I'm actually a huge fan of FreeBSD and OpenBSD - I can pick a 10 year old FreeBSD system and upgrade it to the most stable version without (mostly) no issues. I'll probably have problems doing the same on a 2 year old OpenBSD system. That is also ok, some operating systems require a reinstall to truely work properly. And a ton of software changes - the configuration files change, the syntax changes, shared libraries are different, etc. There is nothing wrong with that - its just the way it is.
Try taking your Win XP box to Win 8 and see how that works out for you unless you've got bog standard gear, in which case your Ubuntu upgrade probably worked too.
Did you tried it? Windows 8 actually runs better than XP on not-so-old hardware. I have a 6 year old laptop with it, and works quite well. And I can run 10 or 15 year old apps without a problem. If I really need XP, thats fine - I can even run a virtualized version of it. The release cycle for Windows is different than for Linux. Microsoft needs to make shure it doesn't break compatibility with most of the huge application catalog available. Linux has a different development pace, different priorities, and it is used on an ecosystem where most of the important stuff can be recompiled, and/or are provided by the companies that drive the change in kernel (Oracle, IBM, Redhat, etc). Long-term compatibility isn't a priority - at all. But there are a lot of users for which long-term compatibility is important. Denying it is just stupid.
This reminds me of what people said about the PS3's exotic cell processor and what it would do to gaming. The problem with that rosy view of Sony's CPU prowress on their consoles is one thing: It doesn't have an upgradable GPU. PCs have an upgradable GPU, which means that despite having a worse bus for multicore (not nearly as bad as you say by the way), all of that multicore CPU oomph doesn't matter when you have a much more up to date GPU on the PC. When gaming, GPUs, and a power supply to drive them (which is why they have to be custom-built desktops most of the time), are what matters. Not the multi-core CPUs that are in both consoles and PCs, at least, not beyond a certain point of diminishing returns. Right now, a PS4 is very nice by the way, because its GPU is just under the top tier of GPUs. In another year or two, that'll no longer be the case, and in another 5 years, well, even a mobile ARM GPU might be ready to outperform it. (Which is why this is often called the "final console generation".)
Can you get 10 years worth of patches for Ubuntu 8? No? then sorry it very much IS a fair comparison and frankly the only comparison you can make, unless you are actually sitting here arguing that the lifecycle of a PC is the same length as an Ubuntu release, is that what you are trying to convince us of here? When you have one OS that abandons users after a pathetic year and a half and another that gives you 10 years then frankly the ONLY comparisons you CAN do is to base the simulation on the hardware not the software,otherwise no comparisons can be made at all.
But like so many others here whether by design or just by not thinking you ignored the fundamental point...I'm giving you a test ALREADY rigged in your favor by only making your OS have HALF the lifecycle of your competition and nobody will take the challenge because they know even in a test rigged in Linux favor they WILL lose, thanks to the piss poor driver model.
As a PC retailer I can tell you the typical lifecycle of a laptop is currently 3-5 years depending on how much or little they baby it, and for desktops its even older, with plenty of first gen C2D and Athlon X2s still running in homes and offices across America...do you dispute this? if not then what is the problem, other than you know the product is so poor it won't pass even a simple simulation?
At the end of the day either your product works or it don't and the challenge can trivially let anybody see that it doesn't. If I as a retailer can't even put your product on a shelf because there is a damned good chance that the first update will break wireless, the second sound, and so on so that in 3 years time they have a system that makes an old XP box filled with malware look like heaven because at least the hardware works, what is your selling point? that if they want to get a masters in comp sci they can fix it themselves? Who gives a shit?
The simple fact is Windows can pass this test with flying colors, I can take a 10 year old box and install Win2K and simulate the entire lifespan of the OS, from the very first patches to the ones released a month before it went EOL and the drivers working at the start WILL be working at the end, with your product? Even only picking 2 random systems off the shelf and only having to show half the length of time your OS WILL FAIL, hell in just the past 5 years you've had both major DEs tossed by the devs, ALSA replaced by the shitastic Pulse that is deep fried ass to this very day when it comes to stability, and of course you got Linus crapping all over the kernel so shit that worked in Foo won't work in Foo+1. if your system was great, why has nobody, not a single OS, adopted it? Not BSD, not Solaris, nobody.
Ironic that so many here can only throw insults which is just further proof they are afraid because they know the truth, its the same thing Dell saw when they tried selling Linux units which riddle me this: If one of the largest OEMs on the planet can NOT get your product to function without having to run their own fork? What chance does a normal user have?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
ribbon would have been a-okay if.....
it wasn't made explicitly proprietary and happen to break anything that ends up having to deal with it. as sharepoint is used far and wide, this is a gigantic fuck you to anyone not using IE in that sense - as the ribbon simply does not function right in any other browser, which includes mobile. considering that no userbase uses exclusively IE unless their app is that poorly coded, this is so hamfisted that it simply reflects on Metro in the same light.
I don't doubt there are great MS employees who have passion and seek to do good things, but that's one very small side of the coin vs all the shit we've seen MS do over the years. you'd think they realize this by now, but I think the execs are so old and stubborn that I don't see a long term existence on the horizon for MS anymore.
I've replied with my own example. So, you're wrong?
No offense intended, but you sound like a number of college co-op students I've been charged with in the past. People new to the neighborhood trying to prove something with all of the great new tech they've been learning in school or on their own time. Certainly that is not inherently a bad thing, but often they don't understand the big picture particularly with regards to existing documentation, library dependencies / escrow environments, and test / V&V efforts.
made the code more elegant (refactoring)
As a general rule, I kill this in the cradle. A noble cause, but rife with risk and not worth it unless certain new requirements can justify such a change.
Yes absolutely, depending on the type of software you write. I've seen cases where someone removed an unused variable from the stack in a C function which, because of the change in stack sizing, caused a previously unknown buffer overrun to now corrupt a different, used variable. All sorts of hilarity ensued when this caused a problem in release builds only and not debug builds, which of course the developer was using exclusively.
If you make such a change to the braking system in my car, you're damn right I want that entire code base retested. If it's a change to some simple financial software, I still want some modicum of retest so I don't get embarassed by breaking a previously working program to my customers, but might forego the entire week-long test.
The OS isn't worthless. The fact it's used on so many devices shows it has value, and the fact it hasn't died despite the fierce resistance from a lot of sectors in the industry still shows it has value. However, it's probably a waste of energy to press for desktop domination at this point in time. Time to give up that battle and appreciate where Linux already has dominance as the primary OS or as the base OS used for specialized systems (embedded devices, supercomputers, etc). The desktop can be left to Windows because frankly, the desktop is where Windows excells. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I will say though, I am deeply disappointed that the Linux community seems to attract a huge number of douchbags. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only sane man surrounded by dickheads.
... component owners are generally openly hostile to outside patches: if you're a dev, accepting an outside patch makes your lead angry (due to the need to maintain this patch and to justify in in shiproom the unplanned design change), makes test angry (because test is on the hook for making sure the change doesn't break anything, and you just made work for them), and PM is angry (due to the schedule implications of code churn). There's just no incentive to accept changes from outside your own team. You can always find a reason to say "no," and you have very little incentive to say "yes."'"
Yeah, that's exactly true in open source sw also, especially the projects maintained by larger corporations. All the devs are payroll with a lot to lose and nothing to gain in just the ways outlined in the article.
Add to that the devs are also clubby in the extreme. They are easily slighted in online communication and it takes just one sufficiently high level dev branding you as undesirable for any reason and you're done.
Believe me I've seen this happening from the inside and to people who just wanted to learn and contribute to our project. The human mind is a wondrous thing and apparently you don't have to actually meet someone in person in order to develop an irrational hatred of them . I have watched as our own prickly pear in the hierarchy, a guy with effective hire/fire power over others bad mouths an outsider and the result is that no one is going to be caught dead helping that person online much less think about accepting that person's contribs.
We all know,even if only unconsciously, that this is the politics of open source. You see that knowledge leaking out in the obsequious responses hopeful acolytes give to being abused, curtly replied to or insulted online by some gate keeper of the project. People just take it because they have to and when they can't take it anymore, when they've worn out their paper-thin welcome, they just stop appearing.
People come to wield extraordinary power in OS projects because generally they're the one person who knows about X. Its their world and they make up the rules. There is precious little redundancy WRT dev knowledge, build knowledge, module knowledge etc etc and the devs like it that way.
Unfortunately, for a large segment of the population, that kind of power leads directly to despotism. Wikipedia is often cited as having this problem WRT Wikipedians with super powers, so it's not limited to just writing code.
The price we pay is hard to see because it's in what never happens- innovation. Innovation is the worst thing for a project, on top of all the other reasons the OP cited, there's potential prestige that would flow to the innovator that a lot of payroll devs would be jealous of. Anything that smells like innovation is unconsciously threatening to them. It's just a natural fact that if your cycles aren't sucked up by an overabundance of ordinary programming duties you have a better chance of a reconceptualizing a problem more broadly You see this everywhere too. In a lot of fields the people who run the experiments aren't the ones who think them up . That falls on lab workers. The researchers who make great advances aren't the ones who run the classes and grade the papers and homework, that falls to the TA.
Meanwhile, what is erstwhile the innovator supposed to do? That person hardly has the power to fork a large project and the studies of projects which have been forked by charismatic outsiders show that, almost universally, forks are ultimately abandoned , maybe some contribs folded back in, but more generally just fail owing to a lack of resources.
The likelihood of this outcome is also unconscious knowledge for most devs and heavily influences their interactions with project owners. In the end, those project owners are really as much gatekeepers / people whose egos need to be pleased and never ever offended as any corporate boss.
We are a
How about we keep this in the current millenium?
Of course the migration path from Win3.11 up to Windows 8 is almost impossible, I'm half joking. But I try to attract the attention to a few key points (yes I know. Don't explain the joke...):
- HairyFeet's challenge works more or less because he's cherry picked a few key point (I wanna have working wifi) and a specific time frame (very recent history of windows, where it is more or less the same kernel under the hood, with only relatively minor additions).
The thing is, before comparing, you have to decide which criteria you're using to compare in order to avoid comparing oranges and apples, and be sure you're on a common ground. What's constitute an actually good common ground can be somewhat subjective.
My joke is about breaking the test by changing these conditions. Selecting things which are completely unfair to Windows.
You mention that a machine able to run Win95 or even able to run Win3.11 is very unlikely to have the ompf to run Windows 8. Simply order of magnitudes differences in requirement.
Well, just think about Linux. It happens that you can run lots of modern distribution on *very old* hardware.
Of course, it does require some tweaking (during the "upgrade game", installer would probably suggest jumping from KDE 2.x to KDE 3.x and then KDE4.x because that's what most people needed back then. If you need to run your distro on out-dated hardware, you might need to prefer jumping to another DE with much lower requirement and stick to it. FXCE is a possibility, LXDE is another. There are even other environment with simpler requirement).
Linux has two big advantages: the ability for the end-user to tune its environment for much lower requirement, and better support for older hardware (older hardware for Linux means more time to get tested and better support. For windows it usually means the maker went belly up and nobody is here to write driver for newer versions of windows, so usually every big upgrade also means throwing away all your cheap old noname peripherals).
Starting with your "stay at the same millenia" criterium, I could also speak about "staying with approximately the same generation of technology". .SYS and win3x .DRV, then Win9x. VXD, then WinME's ugly hack, then WinNT's .SYS - 100% guaranteed breakage)
Hairyfeet's challenge exactly as formulated is unfair to linux because, under the hood there's almost no difference between Windows 2000 and Windows 8. It's a nearly identical kernel with nearly identical APIs during the whole lifetime. The only minor changes are a few changes with the graphic driver model (but which isn't covered by the Hairyfeet challenge. But which regularily kick you back into non accelerated famre buffer mode at each major change - indeed breaking) and security having been overhauled around the time of XP SP3 and Vista, because microsoft was forcibliy dragged kicking and screaming into doing it, because of business needs. (For why just everything else stagnated, just refer to TFA - yes, I know, slashdot, etc.)
(If we had started earlier, we would go thourgh racidally different types of drivers, dos
Meanwhile Linux has seen quite a few changes in architecture and its a miracle that you can actually upgrade accross so much distribution generation. This miracle is mostly due to package managers being clever (hal is deprecated by udev and everything is un-installed and re-installed as necessary, thank you RPM-/DEB-'s dependency checking !) and the software being opensource (at each generation switch, package manager can have access to almost everything needed to make sure that everything plays out nicely).
Only two exceptions exist:
- graphic drivers - they are produced by 3rd parties and not in control of the distribution's package manager. Distribution could play a little bit around (writing package which try to automatically pull the correct blob while leveraging the package dependenc
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
[citation needed]
Seriously, though: imprisonment for slander? You're full of shit.
There's nothing like $HOME
Natalie P0rnmat?
there, ftfy
why don't they just plagiarize from linux?
as long as windows source code stays closed, nobody can really prove anything... they could maybe change the name of a few constants, reorganize a couple of for loops, etc.
and this approach probably fits right into microsoft's business ethics
Put it out in the open source community and watch the magic happen
you mean put it out in the open source community and watch it pilfer the few useful remains of windows and use them to improve linux :)
They could have easily introduced a smaller lighter kernel with vast performance improvements
shit i thought for a moment you were implying they should have used the linux kernel for windows 8... now that would have been a story!
Nothing to do with the Kernel. MS could release an enabler (patch) to Win7, that allows you to run Metro apps. (you can btw)
But they wont, because Metro IS WIN8.
Its not our opinion, its what MS is telling us.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I am glad this information was released. It only makes sense, with Microsoft keeping the Windows kernel closed source. Let's face it, the Linux kernel is setting the bar in business and datacenters; Microsoft is becoming more of a desktop and consumer company. VMware, appliances, and everything in the datacenter all run on the Linux kernel, and has for years. The Windows kernel is too slow and bloated, not to mention more expensive, to run these services. That's why I use GNU/Linux on all desktops as well, it's rock solid and allows me to get the most out of the hardware.