That was my experience too, until I accidentally typed `postsuper -r all|postfix reload` instead of `postsuper -r all;postfix reload` on my Open BSD 3.5/postfix box. It caused a Kernel panic.
If that's what actually happened (ie: you didn't coincidentally get hit by a cosmic ray at exactly the same time) it's a pretty serious bug. Is it repeatable ?
There could have been other pluggable API layers, but I haven't heard of them.
OS/2 (text mode apps only though) and Win32.
It was actually a really cool idea, but one that Microsoft had little interest in actually pursuing.
That's because pursuing it for the sake of pursuing it is bad business. They need an API that's profitable to plug in, before ll developing it is a worthwhile endeavour.
There's nothing there about derivative code, though (which is the part - along with a fairly generous definition of "derivative" - that makes the GPL "viral").
You say this sarcastically, but this is what Microsoft really means when they say "cross-platform": it runs on all Windows platforms. (Vista, XP, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) I'm not joking. There should be (+1, Sad, Sad World) moderation.
Yet how many people will call code "cross platform" because it's POSIX compliant...
I think it's a hybrid, actually. It fails the "super user" portion of "sudo," but passes the "do" part of "sudo" which differentiates it from "su." "Su" is just to switch users, and "runas" isn't that. Instead, "runas" is to "switch user" and "do" something, which makes it something of a hybrid "su" from "su" and "do" from "sudo."
If you want to be pedantic, "RunAs" is the same as "su -c".
However, pretty much the defining difference between 'su' and 'sudo' is that 'su' requires you to know the password of the target user (like RunAs), whereas 'sudo' does not. That is why RunAs is analagous to 'su' and not 'sudo'.
Kinda confusing that the "su" in "su" and the "su" in "sudo" don't stand for the same thing.
But they do - 'switch user'. 'sudo' isn't just for running things as root (although it's rare to see it used for anything else).
The most important data on a multi-user machine is the system data. It's far more important than any single user's data. Once system data integrity is breeched, all user's data is at risk. I'm a sysadmin, and I've seen Unix user accounts owned for various stupid reasons, but system security kept tight despite that.
In all cases the "user data" is the most important data on the machine (note that "user data" in some cases might be things like configuration files - for example a webserver that only deals in dynamic content).
Certainly, on a multi-user machine if the "system data" is compromised, the impact is a lot larger - but it can still be trivially (in the grand scheme of things) restored in a short period of time (again, relatively speaking).
Further, system data is typically static, making accurate restores from backups (rather than the reinstallation path) much more reliable. User data is very volatile and frequently changes significantly between backups.
I am of the opinion that MS has not implemented advanced security techniques to make users happy, simply because they don't really care about making users happy.
Most, if not all, of the configuration-related "security problems" in Windows - the default Administrator user being a prominent one - are there expressly for the reason of keeping end users happy (eg: by not having all their badly written software refuse to work).
Of course, that would require a sensible architecture in which software can be installed by users, for themselves, without superuser permissions. And, unfortunately, it would need secure software as a basis to avoid needing unnecessary privileges to accomplish mundane tasks in insecure applications.
The architecture of Vista (indeed, any version of Windows NT) is quite "sensible". There is nothing (nor has ever been anything) in it preventing this.
The problem is, as usual, poorly written applications.
You have a point, about Windows 98. Still, XP is their first activated product so we don't really know.
No, we don't.
We can, however, make a reasonable, rational prediction based on past events, and that certainly doesn't encompass Microsoft turning off activation to "force" people to buy Vista.
The whole scenario is, after all, just a more-dramatic-than-usual example of the whole "forced upgrade" myth.
The LAND attack, both classically and in the Vista stack during the RC, is caused by a buffer overflow.
And, of course, those _never_ happen on other platforms.
What this means is that the Vista stack does not use routines that do proper bounds checking.
Right. Because what applies to one part of a piece of software probably being worked on by hundreds of people clearly applies to all of it.
The Microsoft media centre software uses Microsoft's media frameworks and thus is an application which supports and utilizes DRM, to which I am opposed.
Why don't you list a few ways that Media Center's DRM further restricts what you can do.
Linux is faster today than it once was, even on older hardware, provided you have enough ram for the newer kernel.
Thank you for defeating your own argument.
Not to mention, there are numerous benchmarks showing 2.4 is faster than 2.6 in some areas.
a) That's not what I'm talking about - most of those threads/processes are doing almost nothing and b) if your number of context switches is not getting all that high, then running multiple threads and/or processes is not onerous anyway.
I'll say again, anyone seriously loading up a modern machine is almost certainly running multiple threads (ie: multithreaded application), if not multiple applications.
What resource-intensive tasks - that people would actually be running on Vista - are you thinking of that are single-threaded ?
I doubt it, but neither I nor google know what a "pushbike" is.
I mean a pushbike. Otherwise known as a bicycle, as the first link Google shows makes quite obvious.
They don't fulfill the same function at all, so that is an idiotic statement and you are an idiot for making it.
By the definition of "same function" you are apparently using, they do - they carry around people and goods.
You might note that it's actually easier to see what you're running with the Alt-Tab powertoy on Windows XP than with Flip3D.
That depends. Flip3D has the advantage of live window thumbnails. It also better shows what Alt+TAB is doing.
I've already told you that I'm not a mac lover. Get off the mac tip, I don't give a shit about the mac either.
I never said you did. I am continuing the discussion *you* started comparing Expose to Flip3D. If you don't want to discuss OS X compared to Windows, don't start discussions that do so.
I think OSX is an idiotic half-measure. They should have gone with BeOS. BeOS was fast on a dual 66MHz system. OSX is of about average but not amazing speed on a dual 2.0GHz system.
Of course it is. It's doing a lot more. Even if OS X was a shining example of fast OS for its functionality, you would still expect it to be slower than BeOS.
BeOS was a single-user, half-implemented OS with dismal hardware support. You cannot validly compare any version of BeOS to OS X and draw meaningful conclusions about what *might* have happened.
You know, reading all kinds of things I haven't said into my statements doesn't make you any smarter. There's no need to do it in a resource-intensive way. It can be done as resources permit so you are not slowing down the user. And you can scan the most recently modified documents first so that the most relevant documents will be indexed first.
You still have to do the full scan, which is going to slow down the system no matter how nicely you *try* and do it.
Incidentally, my anecdote that Vista's indexer has no perceivable impact on performance during the initial index carries as much weight as yours stating the contrary.
That's not what's happening here, and to suggest that it's simply the usual delay is utterly disingenuous. Dozens of major corpora
The point isn't just that Microsoft might elect not to support you, though that is certainly a possibility, the point is that you require them to support you because XP won't work without activation and anything that stops them from activating you not only kills the OS, it locks out all your apps and all your data.
XP will work for a period of time without activation. There's your "disaster recovery" scenario, Chicken Little.
Aside from the fact that they put you in this precarious position on purpose, there is little enough reason to trust the company.
Right. Because there are so many alternatives for protecting your investment in such a market.
They have clearly demonstrated predatory, not to mention corrupt, business practices.
I can't think of anything Microsoft has done, which other companies do not commonly do. The only difference is when Microsoft do it a hell of a lot more people are affected.
Sure, everything seems fine now. Nothing electronic ever breaks, right? And, no company ever goes out of business or does anything that might inconvenience you. That kind of attitude is living in fairyland. We owe it to ourselves and our families not to give people that kind of power over us.
"But what if..." is no way to live your life.
If those quotes really don't make the point, then bluntly, when someone gives me money for my product, I consider it my obligation to provide them with that product.
How do you identify them ?
(It seems such a simple question. Why is it apparently so hard to answer ?)
Do you really think that Microsoft will keep XP activation around forever? Especially once they drop "support" I would assume they would take the approach that activation is part of that. Of course they would be very sorry that you could no longer activate your software, but, well, it isn't supported any more is it?
I expect, they will keep the activation servers running for the entire support lifetime of XP (so, at least 2014) and most likely for some time after that (after all, I can still use Windows update to update Windows 98). Further, as outlined as indicated here, I expect at EOL a patch of some sort will be released that removes the need for activation.
The suggestion that Microsoft will use activation to "force" upgrades is supported by neither historical experience, nor reasonable speculation. It is the epitomy of paranoid fantasy.
However, even on the unlikely, slim chance they don't, I can't imagine there'll be many people trying to run XP in 2015+.
That's his point - he doesn't. He treats everyone like a legitimate customer, which is what he feels is ethically correct. I for one agree.
Sounds like a good way to get used. Although it's probably a reasonable course of action for niche and/or specialised applications. That hardly describes operating systems, however.
Not to mention, "slower" does not always mean "worse".
I never had any problems with the old one
That does not negate that the new one is better. The big feature everyone seems to like is per-application volume control.
It's got more holes than a mile of swiss cheese that's been walked on by a group of soccer players in cleats. In fact during the RC it was discovered that it was vulnerable to the LAND attack! That's since been patched, but it makes you wonder what other idiotic mistakes were made. I'm sure they are legion. The new stack in Vista will be bringing down the total cost of 0wnership for a long time to come.
It seems you've misunderstood what betas and the like are for.
Again, these are both inconsequential.
To you, maybe.
Third party products, in some cases free ones, are capable of doing a better job of both [shell updates and search].
Like what ?
oh goody! Some Microsoft DRM crippleware! Let me get all excited about that! [media centre]
You (unsurprisingly) don't appear to have any idea what you're talking about.
Seriously though, this makes color management easier, but it's not like it makes it possible - it already was.
What's youre point ? Lots of major updates do little more than make things "easier". This in no way negates their value. Indeed, in many cases making things easier is the single most important feature an update can have.
If a job that used to take 20 minutes now takes 30 seconds, for no other reason than it is "easier", that is a *massive* boost in productivity, yet you would write it off as an inconsequential change because it did nothing more than make something "easier".
All still crap compared to third party tools, again, some of them free. [system monitoring, deployment, remote management]
For example ?
Vista is, in spite of all this, still slower at running a single intensive task than Windows XP.
And ? This phenomenon is neither uncommon, nor restricted to Windows.
And that is the most common model for use of a computer, besides people who only use office and IE and never exercise their machine at all.
Pretty much anyone that is seriously loading up a modern machine has multiple threads running, if not multiple applications.
Uh, they perform the same function, and thus they are alike in a meaningful way.
Right. I guess you'd call a pushbike and a semi-trailer alike "in a meaningful way" as well ?
Unfortunately, Microsoft's method of doing it is stupid.
Funny how the Alt+TAB switching (which Flip3D is little more than an eyecandy update to) has been so widely used, then.
Expose is far from perfect. It's not hard at all to find scenarios it doesn't deal well with.
They do the same basic things and they both use acceleration.
It seems by your standards everything is alike because they all do the same basic things.
And IMO they both missed the boat because neither one offers you much in the way of configurability. Huzzah beryl.
Microsoft and Apple are selling you complete products, not a box full of spare parts and some badly written instructions on a stained napkin. If you don't want the former, that's your decision, but criticism that it isn't the latter is not valid.
Don't you think that's stupid? There's no need to ever do a resource-intensive complete scan. It doesn't buy you anything.
You mean apart from the ability to actually search all the data you've already got - ie: the stuff you're probably most interested in ? Are you forgetting, or just ignoring, that all the various index/search technologies [need to] do this ?
All it buys you is user frustration - like most of the "features" of vista, each of which cuts in at least two directions, like it or not.
The big deal is that down the road, they may, for reasons of policies I have no control over, decide to deny me that activation. [...]
IF that ever happens, then you have a point (not to mention grounds for a lawsuit).
I expect them to do exactly what I do: Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust, require an initial gateway that you do your best to control that you open to them when payment is received, and don't do anything that costs your legitimate customers money (like developing activation) or time (like making them activate) or business, data, or worse (like FAILING to activate for ANY reason.)
About the only useful feature is "Previous Versions" which lets you revert to older versions of files. That's pretty great.
It's unfortunate you don't see any "use" in the new display system (+video driver model), new audio stack, new network stack, shell updates, search, media centre, colour management, security features, system monitoring improvements, deployment improvements and remote managability improvements, not to mention the significant low-level updates regarding CPU and IO scheduling, locking, memory management, stability and security improvements due to better processes, etc, but that does not negate their presence.
Other than that, we get a bad clone of the OSX interface with a crap version of expose that people are complaining about right and left, [...]
Anyone who thinks Flip3D and Expose are alike, or are meant to be alike in any meaningful way, is off in la-la land. They're complete different task-switching paradigms. Indeed, about the only thing they have in common is the display of live window thumbnails.
Similarly, the UIs in general are as different today as they were back in the days of Windows 95 and MacOS 8. Which is to say, they're somewhat alike if you're looking from across the room, or have no computing experience, but in actual use they're very different.
[...] a new shell that still doesn't measure up to cygwin's bash, [...]
I'm pretty sure Vista doesn't have the new "Powershell". Which by all reasonable accounts is at least the match of bash in functionality, if very different in execution (ie: none of the UNIX luddites will give it a second glance because it's not UNIX).
[...] a new more invasive version of the indexing service that reportedly doesn't know when to stop indexing like the one in windows 2000 used to, [...]
Uh huh. Probably "reported" by the same people who say Vista's "invasive DRM" will break into your house, rape your wife, kill your dog and piss in your blender.
The indexing service only needs to do a resource-intensive complete scan at first install (just like any of the other implementations). After that, it hooks into the filesystem and updates as changes are made. Of course, since most "reviews" consist of install it, fiddle with the options and settings for an hour, then rant about it on your blog, that's the only thing lots of people ever see.
[...] desktop gadgets which are simply not exciting any more and can be provided by several third-party applications, [...]
Personally I've never found any of the "desktop gadget" implementations on any platform to be anything other than annoying, useless screen clutter, so I can't really argue with that.
[...] and some acceleration features with which Vista is still slower than XP.
On low-end (single CPU, 512M - 1G RAM) hardware, maybe. On high-end hardware (multi-gigs of RAM, multiple CPUs) it will almost certainly be faster, and the gap will only widen as higher-end hardware comes out. This is hardly a phenomenon unique to Vista. Newer versions of Linux, for example, are generally slower than older versions on low-end hardware and significantly faster on high-end hardware, because they have architectural improvements that rely on a certain minimum level of resources to be effective.
(Not to mention the improvements - especially in the game performance that you are most likely referencing - that will come from driver maturity.)
Neither Vista's hardware requirements, nor performance, are at all unreasonable. They're comparable to both OS X and contemporary Linux distributions of similar capabilities.
Can you please explain to me which of these features I am supposed to find compelling?
No, because I have no idea what you would find "compelling". However, this does not change the fact - Vista is a massive update to Windows NT, easily justifies the (5.x -> 6.x) full version bump, is roughly on par with Apple's transition of NeXTSTEP 4.x
Sure, they don't have any excuse, but MS lets them get away with it, simply because badly designed software will still work.
That's because they don't have any practical way of stopping them. Anything that doesn't involve "force" is a waste of time, because it is easily ignored. Anything that does involve "force" is an antitrust violation.
Fundamentally, it is the application vendors who beat the drum. The operating system is the chicken of the software world - it's just there to carry the flavoursome software that the end user actually wants (which is why the "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"-esque urban myths are so laughably ridiculous to anyone who actually takes the time to think about them). If the applications vendors don't play, the OS goes nowhere - *that* is why Vista usage isn't going to pickup until the application developers get off their arses and update their software and *that* why Microsoft have gone to such lengths to make old, broken software work when it should really be walking it out behind the barn with a gun.
So this changes nothing of the Windose-Malware paradigm. This attitude also does nothing to counter the risks associated with the inherently mediocre technical skills of a large user base.
So long as computers remain capable of running arbitrary software, that risk profile will not significantly change. It simple *can't*.
I'm not talking about end users conforming. I'm talking about developers.
The principle in my comment applies identically to developers.
And arbitrary plan attitude is a somewhat simplistic regarding an OS security model.
Huh ?
Eventually, the open source world will get their standards together, and gain sufficient momentum that will threaten the Windose environment. OSS (GNU/Linux) has no qualms about breaking and deprecating something old, in order to move to the "next level" in the development evolution, which will ultimately benefit the quality of the products.
Conveniently, your second sentence does an excellent job of refuting the first and saves me the trouble.
This whole "let's just break it and start over" attitude is one of the biggest problems in the OSS community. Besides the atrocious documentation and usability levels typical to most OSS projects, it is probably one of the biggest negative influences on the takeup of OSS, across the entire software spectrum.
Why hobble future development with kludgy hacks to support legacy requirements.
Because, essentially by definition, the vast, vast majority of your user base will always fall into the category of "legacy users".
This is something Microsoft *get*. It's something they get *very well*. It's one of the primary reasons for their success, the reason they expend such incredible amounts of resources with the objective of maintaining legacy support with a high level of compatibility and usability and why Vista is such a significant release for making such a relatively large break with reagrds to this legacy support.
Incidentally, there is no need for this to "hobble future development". Long transition periods like those used by Microsoft certainly slow the rollout of new technology, but they have the distinct advantage (from a business perspective) of not alienating their userbase and destroying revenue streams.
Microsoft is a _business_. Unlike most OSS projects, which are basically glorified collections of hobbiests, there are actual _consequences_ when things go wrong. Money is lost. Customers change to other products. People get fired. Technology is shelved. Etc. This is also why, for example, NT is only available on a few different hardware platforms, whereas Linux is available on dozens; For NT to be made available on a platform, there must be viable business case and the result must be a marketable product. For Linux, there just needs to be someone sufficiently bored enough to waste their time and the kernel booting is conside
Malware writers will write malware for the latest OS? And they'll try and find ways around the blocks? And in the millions of lines of code, they'll find a weakness and succeed? Holy shit, I never would have guessed!!
The only "weakness" the majority of malware succeeds against is the weakness of the user to do whatever it asks them to so they can watch porn, get new smileys, win an ipod, etc.
By definition, the user base of Windose will always wallow in mediocrity. Microsoft needs to take responsiblity for this, if it wants to dominate the OS marketplace.
"Wants to dominate" ? What _have_ they been doing then ?
I think that MS missed their opportunity to make Vista really secure. They could have developed a brand new API, and sandboxed the old API in a virtual machine environment, to maintain backwards compatibility.
Way, way too many negative tradeoffs. 99% of software would not be native and its functionality would suffer significantly.
Then publish decent standards for building applications, particularly with respect to file permissions, drivers etc, so developers can genuinely create robust applications that don't require administrative privileges to run.
What's wrong with the current ones, that have been around for more than a decade ? Hell, what's wrong with just good old common sense and decent developer practices ?
No developer has had any excuse for releasing software that needlessly requires Administrator privileges for at least 8-9 years. None.
Enforce the standards by making them mandatory for using the OS installation mechanism. Enforce proper use of the correct installation mechanisms by disabling rogue installation hacks with system updates (i.e. deliberately break third party vendor's software if it's crap).
Oh yeah. Microsoft deliberately breaking third party software. I can just imagine how well that will go over, given the flack they cop when they _accidentally_ break some random piece of software.
Good plan you've got there, tiger. If you were lucky, you might have even managed to get all of it spoken in a product design meeting without being laughed out of the room.
This isn't the open source world where developers can just go around breaking shit willy-nilly to make end users conform to some arbitrary plan for the hell of it (despite many people here insisting to the contrary).
So I'm left baffled. Vista took 5 years from announcement to release, and I'm left scratching my head. I don't know what they did with that time, what notable features were added or if it makes any sense that it took so long. At face value, which I am loath to judge anything by, it simply looks like Vista is what OS X would have been had it been horribly mismanaged (not to mention 5 years late).
Firstly, due to the "Longhorn reset" the actual development time (from a software engineering perspective) is closer to 3 years.
Secondly, your mention of OS X makes for an easy comparison.
Back in 1997, Apple bought NeXT (or NeXT bought Apple, depending on your perspective) and started updating NeXTSTEP to turn it into OS X. ~5 years later they were up to OS X 10.2, which had most of the major changes, without any major bugs. 3 years after that, they released 10.5, which has rough feature-parity with Vista - better in some areas, worse in others.
So, Apple took 8 years to go from NeXTSTEP 4 to OS X 10.5, which is roughly the magnitude of changes Microsoft have made to get from Windows 2003 to Vista.
Considering it's taken about ~3 years of real development time, or 5 years of market time, if anything Vista's schedule has been relatively fast. The difference is Microsoft haven't rolled out any interim releases to see the evolution in action (although XP's SP2 was probably worthy of at least a minor version bump - "XP Second Edition", if you will).
Vista is late, to be sure - but with Windows NT, 2000 and XP on the market Microsoft were in a better position to take their time. Objectively, it's development time was not excessive.
But there's certainly no comparison of comparisons:) between Windows 98 to Windows XP, and Windows XP to Windows Vista. Vista gives you DX10, some performance technologies to make up for the amazing slowness of Vista with which it is still slower at most tasks, and a bunch of DRMcrap designed to prevent you from using your PC, but other than that the major feature over Windows XP is eye candy.
Objectively, Vista is probably one of the biggest upgrades to Windows ever released. The magnitude of changes is similar to those Apple made to NeXT to get to OS X 10.2. It's far more a compliment to XP, than it is criticism of Vista, that many don't see these updates as compelling.
In the new internet computing environment, MS has to deal with a host of new threats that they didn't adequately prepare for when creating windows. This is exemplified in the 'Allow'/'Cancel' annoyances that early adopters of Vista are dealing with.
The vast majority of "Windows problems", including - heck, especially - those "Allow/Cancel" annoyances, are the fault of ignorant/incompetent/lazy software developers, not Microsoft.
Soon, MS will have to make a clean break from their crappy development habits, and that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst home users and application developers. Their choice will be to either continue crapware and malware to run rampant on Windows, possibly permanently souring the home user against MS products, or seriously break applications, thus demanding that application developers produce decent products.
What do you propose they change and how/why do you think it will help ?
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That was my experience too, until I accidentally typed `postsuper -r all|postfix reload` instead of `postsuper -r all;postfix reload` on my Open BSD 3.5/postfix box. It caused a Kernel panic.
If that's what actually happened (ie: you didn't coincidentally get hit by a cosmic ray at exactly the same time) it's a pretty serious bug. Is it repeatable ?
There could have been other pluggable API layers, but I haven't heard of them.
OS/2 (text mode apps only though) and Win32.
It was actually a really cool idea, but one that Microsoft had little interest in actually pursuing.
That's because pursuing it for the sake of pursuing it is bad business. They need an API that's profitable to plug in, before ll developing it is a worthwhile endeavour.
Section D is the viral clause a-la GPL.
There's nothing there about derivative code, though (which is the part - along with a fairly generous definition of "derivative" - that makes the GPL "viral").
You say this sarcastically, but this is what Microsoft really means when they say "cross-platform": it runs on all Windows platforms. (Vista, XP, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) I'm not joking. There should be (+1, Sad, Sad World) moderation.
Yet how many people will call code "cross platform" because it's POSIX compliant...
Also keep in mind that we are talking about Microsoft here - The guys who "code first, design later."
Well, it's the the OSS community's motto "as well" (heck, it's practically a warcry)...
I think it's a hybrid, actually. It fails the "super user" portion of "sudo," but passes the "do" part of "sudo" which differentiates it from "su." "Su" is just to switch users, and "runas" isn't that. Instead, "runas" is to "switch user" and "do" something, which makes it something of a hybrid "su" from "su" and "do" from "sudo."
If you want to be pedantic, "RunAs" is the same as "su -c".
However, pretty much the defining difference between 'su' and 'sudo' is that 'su' requires you to know the password of the target user (like RunAs), whereas 'sudo' does not. That is why RunAs is analagous to 'su' and not 'sudo'.
Kinda confusing that the "su" in "su" and the "su" in "sudo" don't stand for the same thing.
But they do - 'switch user'. 'sudo' isn't just for running things as root (although it's rare to see it used for anything else).
The most important data on a multi-user machine is the system data. It's far more important than any single user's data. Once system data integrity is breeched, all user's data is at risk. I'm a sysadmin, and I've seen Unix user accounts owned for various stupid reasons, but system security kept tight despite that.
In all cases the "user data" is the most important data on the machine (note that "user data" in some cases might be things like configuration files - for example a webserver that only deals in dynamic content).
Certainly, on a multi-user machine if the "system data" is compromised, the impact is a lot larger - but it can still be trivially (in the grand scheme of things) restored in a short period of time (again, relatively speaking).
Further, system data is typically static, making accurate restores from backups (rather than the reinstallation path) much more reliable. User data is very volatile and frequently changes significantly between backups.
I am of the opinion that MS has not implemented advanced security techniques to make users happy, simply because they don't really care about making users happy.
Most, if not all, of the configuration-related "security problems" in Windows - the default Administrator user being a prominent one - are there expressly for the reason of keeping end users happy (eg: by not having all their badly written software refuse to work).
Your argument doesn't stand up to analysis.
Of course, that would require a sensible architecture in which software can be installed by users, for themselves, without superuser permissions. And, unfortunately, it would need secure software as a basis to avoid needing unnecessary privileges to accomplish mundane tasks in insecure applications.
The architecture of Vista (indeed, any version of Windows NT) is quite "sensible". There is nothing (nor has ever been anything) in it preventing this.
The problem is, as usual, poorly written applications.
To be fair, Windows XP has something like sudo. It's called "runas," and I've used it for a long time now.
RunAs is the equivalent of 'su', not 'sudo'. It is a fine - but important - distinction.
You have a point, about Windows 98. Still, XP is their first activated product so we don't really know.
No, we don't.
We can, however, make a reasonable, rational prediction based on past events, and that certainly doesn't encompass Microsoft turning off activation to "force" people to buy Vista.
The whole scenario is, after all, just a more-dramatic-than-usual example of the whole "forced upgrade" myth.
The LAND attack, both classically and in the Vista stack during the RC, is caused by a buffer overflow.
And, of course, those _never_ happen on other platforms.
What this means is that the Vista stack does not use routines that do proper bounds checking.
Right. Because what applies to one part of a piece of software probably being worked on by hundreds of people clearly applies to all of it.
The Microsoft media centre software uses Microsoft's media frameworks and thus is an application which supports and utilizes DRM, to which I am opposed.
Why don't you list a few ways that Media Center's DRM further restricts what you can do.
Linux is faster today than it once was, even on older hardware, provided you have enough ram for the newer kernel.
Thank you for defeating your own argument.
Not to mention, there are numerous benchmarks showing 2.4 is faster than 2.6 in some areas.
a) That's not what I'm talking about - most of those threads/processes are doing almost nothing and b) if your number of context switches is not getting all that high, then running multiple threads and/or processes is not onerous anyway.
I'll say again, anyone seriously loading up a modern machine is almost certainly running multiple threads (ie: multithreaded application), if not multiple applications.
What resource-intensive tasks - that people would actually be running on Vista - are you thinking of that are single-threaded ?
I doubt it, but neither I nor google know what a "pushbike" is.
You are a liar.
Do you mean a scooter?
I mean a pushbike. Otherwise known as a bicycle, as the first link Google shows makes quite obvious.
They don't fulfill the same function at all, so that is an idiotic statement and you are an idiot for making it.
By the definition of "same function" you are apparently using, they do - they carry around people and goods.
You might note that it's actually easier to see what you're running with the Alt-Tab powertoy on Windows XP than with Flip3D.
That depends. Flip3D has the advantage of live window thumbnails. It also better shows what Alt+TAB is doing.
I've already told you that I'm not a mac lover. Get off the mac tip, I don't give a shit about the mac either.
I never said you did. I am continuing the discussion *you* started comparing Expose to Flip3D. If you don't want to discuss OS X compared to Windows, don't start discussions that do so.
I think OSX is an idiotic half-measure. They should have gone with BeOS. BeOS was fast on a dual 66MHz system. OSX is of about average but not amazing speed on a dual 2.0GHz system.
Of course it is. It's doing a lot more. Even if OS X was a shining example of fast OS for its functionality, you would still expect it to be slower than BeOS.
BeOS was a single-user, half-implemented OS with dismal hardware support. You cannot validly compare any version of BeOS to OS X and draw meaningful conclusions about what *might* have happened.
You know, reading all kinds of things I haven't said into my statements doesn't make you any smarter. There's no need to do it in a resource-intensive way. It can be done as resources permit so you are not slowing down the user. And you can scan the most recently modified documents first so that the most relevant documents will be indexed first.
You still have to do the full scan, which is going to slow down the system no matter how nicely you *try* and do it.
Incidentally, my anecdote that Vista's indexer has no perceivable impact on performance during the initial index carries as much weight as yours stating the contrary.
That's not what's happening here, and to suggest that it's simply the usual delay is utterly disingenuous. Dozens of major corpora
It hardly describes our product, either. We make image and animation processing software. Like Photoshop, only with more features and capabilities.
In what universe is "image and animation processing software" not "niche" or "specialised" ?
The point isn't just that Microsoft might elect not to support you, though that is certainly a possibility, the point is that you require them to support you because XP won't work without activation and anything that stops them from activating you not only kills the OS, it locks out all your apps and all your data.
XP will work for a period of time without activation. There's your "disaster recovery" scenario, Chicken Little.
Aside from the fact that they put you in this precarious position on purpose, there is little enough reason to trust the company.
Right. Because there are so many alternatives for protecting your investment in such a market.
They have clearly demonstrated predatory, not to mention corrupt, business practices.
I can't think of anything Microsoft has done, which other companies do not commonly do. The only difference is when Microsoft do it a hell of a lot more people are affected.
Sure, everything seems fine now. Nothing electronic ever breaks, right? And, no company ever goes out of business or does anything that might inconvenience you. That kind of attitude is living in fairyland. We owe it to ourselves and our families not to give people that kind of power over us.
"But what if..." is no way to live your life.
If those quotes really don't make the point, then bluntly, when someone gives me money for my product, I consider it my obligation to provide them with that product.
How do you identify them ?
(It seems such a simple question. Why is it apparently so hard to answer ?)
Isn't it inevitable?
I see no reason to think so.
Do you really think that Microsoft will keep XP activation around forever? Especially once they drop "support" I would assume they would take the approach that activation is part of that. Of course they would be very sorry that you could no longer activate your software, but, well, it isn't supported any more is it?
I expect, they will keep the activation servers running for the entire support lifetime of XP (so, at least 2014) and most likely for some time after that (after all, I can still use Windows update to update Windows 98). Further, as outlined as indicated here, I expect at EOL a patch of some sort will be released that removes the need for activation.
The suggestion that Microsoft will use activation to "force" upgrades is supported by neither historical experience, nor reasonable speculation. It is the epitomy of paranoid fantasy.
However, even on the unlikely, slim chance they don't, I can't imagine there'll be many people trying to run XP in 2015+.
That's his point - he doesn't. He treats everyone like a legitimate customer, which is what he feels is ethically correct. I for one agree.
Sounds like a good way to get used. Although it's probably a reasonable course of action for niche and/or specialised applications. That hardly describes operating systems, however.
It's slower
Until drivers mature, that remains to be seen.
Not to mention, "slower" does not always mean "worse".
I never had any problems with the old one
That does not negate that the new one is better. The big feature everyone seems to like is per-application volume control.
It's got more holes than a mile of swiss cheese that's been walked on by a group of soccer players in cleats. In fact during the RC it was discovered that it was vulnerable to the LAND attack! That's since been patched, but it makes you wonder what other idiotic mistakes were made. I'm sure they are legion. The new stack in Vista will be bringing down the total cost of 0wnership for a long time to come.
It seems you've misunderstood what betas and the like are for.
Again, these are both inconsequential.
To you, maybe.
Third party products, in some cases free ones, are capable of doing a better job of both [shell updates and search].
Like what ?
oh goody! Some Microsoft DRM crippleware! Let me get all excited about that! [media centre]
You (unsurprisingly) don't appear to have any idea what you're talking about.
Seriously though, this makes color management easier, but it's not like it makes it possible - it already was.
What's youre point ? Lots of major updates do little more than make things "easier". This in no way negates their value. Indeed, in many cases making things easier is the single most important feature an update can have.
If a job that used to take 20 minutes now takes 30 seconds, for no other reason than it is "easier", that is a *massive* boost in productivity, yet you would write it off as an inconsequential change because it did nothing more than make something "easier".
All still crap compared to third party tools, again, some of them free. [system monitoring, deployment, remote management]
For example ?
Vista is, in spite of all this, still slower at running a single intensive task than Windows XP.
And ? This phenomenon is neither uncommon, nor restricted to Windows.
And that is the most common model for use of a computer, besides people who only use office and IE and never exercise their machine at all.
Pretty much anyone that is seriously loading up a modern machine has multiple threads running, if not multiple applications.
Uh, they perform the same function, and thus they are alike in a meaningful way.
Right. I guess you'd call a pushbike and a semi-trailer alike "in a meaningful way" as well ?
Unfortunately, Microsoft's method of doing it is stupid.
Funny how the Alt+TAB switching (which Flip3D is little more than an eyecandy update to) has been so widely used, then.
Expose is far from perfect. It's not hard at all to find scenarios it doesn't deal well with.
They do the same basic things and they both use acceleration.
It seems by your standards everything is alike because they all do the same basic things.
And IMO they both missed the boat because neither one offers you much in the way of configurability. Huzzah beryl.
Microsoft and Apple are selling you complete products, not a box full of spare parts and some badly written instructions on a stained napkin. If you don't want the former, that's your decision, but criticism that it isn't the latter is not valid.
Don't you think that's stupid? There's no need to ever do a resource-intensive complete scan. It doesn't buy you anything.
You mean apart from the ability to actually search all the data you've already got - ie: the stuff you're probably most interested in ? Are you forgetting, or just ignoring, that all the various index/search technologies [need to] do this ?
All it buys you is user frustration - like most of the "features" of vista, each of which cuts in at least two directions, like it or not.
The big deal is that down the road, they may, for reasons of policies I have no control over, decide to deny me that activation. [...]
IF that ever happens, then you have a point (not to mention grounds for a lawsuit).
I expect them to do exactly what I do: Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust, require an initial gateway that you do your best to control that you open to them when payment is received, and don't do anything that costs your legitimate customers money (like developing activation) or time (like making them activate) or business, data, or worse (like FAILING to activate for ANY reason.)
How do you identify your legitimate customers ?
Hell, even if they sell the software I'm happy if they give me the source. Open source != free.
Indeed. The relationship is more like: Open source -> free.
About the only useful feature is "Previous Versions" which lets you revert to older versions of files. That's pretty great.
It's unfortunate you don't see any "use" in the new display system (+video driver model), new audio stack, new network stack, shell updates, search, media centre, colour management, security features, system monitoring improvements, deployment improvements and remote managability improvements, not to mention the significant low-level updates regarding CPU and IO scheduling, locking, memory management, stability and security improvements due to better processes, etc, but that does not negate their presence.
Other than that, we get a bad clone of the OSX interface with a crap version of expose that people are complaining about right and left, [...]
Anyone who thinks Flip3D and Expose are alike, or are meant to be alike in any meaningful way, is off in la-la land. They're complete different task-switching paradigms. Indeed, about the only thing they have in common is the display of live window thumbnails.
Similarly, the UIs in general are as different today as they were back in the days of Windows 95 and MacOS 8. Which is to say, they're somewhat alike if you're looking from across the room, or have no computing experience, but in actual use they're very different.
[...] a new shell that still doesn't measure up to cygwin's bash, [...]
I'm pretty sure Vista doesn't have the new "Powershell". Which by all reasonable accounts is at least the match of bash in functionality, if very different in execution (ie: none of the UNIX luddites will give it a second glance because it's not UNIX).
[...] a new more invasive version of the indexing service that reportedly doesn't know when to stop indexing like the one in windows 2000 used to, [...]
Uh huh. Probably "reported" by the same people who say Vista's "invasive DRM" will break into your house, rape your wife, kill your dog and piss in your blender.
The indexing service only needs to do a resource-intensive complete scan at first install (just like any of the other implementations). After that, it hooks into the filesystem and updates as changes are made. Of course, since most "reviews" consist of install it, fiddle with the options and settings for an hour, then rant about it on your blog, that's the only thing lots of people ever see.
[...] desktop gadgets which are simply not exciting any more and can be provided by several third-party applications, [...]
Personally I've never found any of the "desktop gadget" implementations on any platform to be anything other than annoying, useless screen clutter, so I can't really argue with that.
[...] and some acceleration features with which Vista is still slower than XP.
On low-end (single CPU, 512M - 1G RAM) hardware, maybe. On high-end hardware (multi-gigs of RAM, multiple CPUs) it will almost certainly be faster, and the gap will only widen as higher-end hardware comes out. This is hardly a phenomenon unique to Vista. Newer versions of Linux, for example, are generally slower than older versions on low-end hardware and significantly faster on high-end hardware, because they have architectural improvements that rely on a certain minimum level of resources to be effective.
(Not to mention the improvements - especially in the game performance that you are most likely referencing - that will come from driver maturity.)
Neither Vista's hardware requirements, nor performance, are at all unreasonable. They're comparable to both OS X and contemporary Linux distributions of similar capabilities.
Can you please explain to me which of these features I am supposed to find compelling?
No, because I have no idea what you would find "compelling". However, this does not change the fact - Vista is a massive update to Windows NT, easily justifies the (5.x -> 6.x) full version bump, is roughly on par with Apple's transition of NeXTSTEP 4.x
Sure, they don't have any excuse, but MS lets them get away with it, simply because badly designed software will still work.
That's because they don't have any practical way of stopping them. Anything that doesn't involve "force" is a waste of time, because it is easily ignored. Anything that does involve "force" is an antitrust violation.
Fundamentally, it is the application vendors who beat the drum. The operating system is the chicken of the software world - it's just there to carry the flavoursome software that the end user actually wants (which is why the "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"-esque urban myths are so laughably ridiculous to anyone who actually takes the time to think about them). If the applications vendors don't play, the OS goes nowhere - *that* is why Vista usage isn't going to pickup until the application developers get off their arses and update their software and *that* why Microsoft have gone to such lengths to make old, broken software work when it should really be walking it out behind the barn with a gun.
So this changes nothing of the Windose-Malware paradigm. This attitude also does nothing to counter the risks associated with the inherently mediocre technical skills of a large user base.
So long as computers remain capable of running arbitrary software, that risk profile will not significantly change. It simple *can't*.
I'm not talking about end users conforming. I'm talking about developers.
The principle in my comment applies identically to developers.
And arbitrary plan attitude is a somewhat simplistic regarding an OS security model.
Huh ?
Eventually, the open source world will get their standards together, and gain sufficient momentum that will threaten the Windose environment. OSS (GNU/Linux) has no qualms about breaking and deprecating something old, in order to move to the "next level" in the development evolution, which will ultimately benefit the quality of the products.
Conveniently, your second sentence does an excellent job of refuting the first and saves me the trouble.
This whole "let's just break it and start over" attitude is one of the biggest problems in the OSS community. Besides the atrocious documentation and usability levels typical to most OSS projects, it is probably one of the biggest negative influences on the takeup of OSS, across the entire software spectrum.
Why hobble future development with kludgy hacks to support legacy requirements.
Because, essentially by definition, the vast, vast majority of your user base will always fall into the category of "legacy users".
This is something Microsoft *get*. It's something they get *very well*. It's one of the primary reasons for their success, the reason they expend such incredible amounts of resources with the objective of maintaining legacy support with a high level of compatibility and usability and why Vista is such a significant release for making such a relatively large break with reagrds to this legacy support.
Incidentally, there is no need for this to "hobble future development". Long transition periods like those used by Microsoft certainly slow the rollout of new technology, but they have the distinct advantage (from a business perspective) of not alienating their userbase and destroying revenue streams.
Microsoft is a _business_. Unlike most OSS projects, which are basically glorified collections of hobbiests, there are actual _consequences_ when things go wrong. Money is lost. Customers change to other products. People get fired. Technology is shelved. Etc. This is also why, for example, NT is only available on a few different hardware platforms, whereas Linux is available on dozens; For NT to be made available on a platform, there must be viable business case and the result must be a marketable product. For Linux, there just needs to be someone sufficiently bored enough to waste their time and the kernel booting is conside
Malware writers will write malware for the latest OS? And they'll try and find ways around the blocks? And in the millions of lines of code, they'll find a weakness and succeed? Holy shit, I never would have guessed!!
The only "weakness" the majority of malware succeeds against is the weakness of the user to do whatever it asks them to so they can watch porn, get new smileys, win an ipod, etc.
By definition, the user base of Windose will always wallow in mediocrity. Microsoft needs to take responsiblity for this, if it wants to dominate the OS marketplace.
"Wants to dominate" ? What _have_ they been doing then ?
I think that MS missed their opportunity to make Vista really secure. They could have developed a brand new API, and sandboxed the old API in a virtual machine environment, to maintain backwards compatibility.
Way, way too many negative tradeoffs. 99% of software would not be native and its functionality would suffer significantly.
Then publish decent standards for building applications, particularly with respect to file permissions, drivers etc, so developers can genuinely create robust applications that don't require administrative privileges to run.
What's wrong with the current ones, that have been around for more than a decade ? Hell, what's wrong with just good old common sense and decent developer practices ?
No developer has had any excuse for releasing software that needlessly requires Administrator privileges for at least 8-9 years. None.
Enforce the standards by making them mandatory for using the OS installation mechanism. Enforce proper use of the correct installation mechanisms by disabling rogue installation hacks with system updates (i.e. deliberately break third party vendor's software if it's crap).
Oh yeah. Microsoft deliberately breaking third party software. I can just imagine how well that will go over, given the flack they cop when they _accidentally_ break some random piece of software.
Good plan you've got there, tiger. If you were lucky, you might have even managed to get all of it spoken in a product design meeting without being laughed out of the room.
This isn't the open source world where developers can just go around breaking shit willy-nilly to make end users conform to some arbitrary plan for the hell of it (despite many people here insisting to the contrary).
So I'm left baffled. Vista took 5 years from announcement to release, and I'm left scratching my head. I don't know what they did with that time, what notable features were added or if it makes any sense that it took so long. At face value, which I am loath to judge anything by, it simply looks like Vista is what OS X would have been had it been horribly mismanaged (not to mention 5 years late).
Firstly, due to the "Longhorn reset" the actual development time (from a software engineering perspective) is closer to 3 years.
Secondly, your mention of OS X makes for an easy comparison.
Back in 1997, Apple bought NeXT (or NeXT bought Apple, depending on your perspective) and started updating NeXTSTEP to turn it into OS X. ~5 years later they were up to OS X 10.2, which had most of the major changes, without any major bugs. 3 years after that, they released 10.5, which has rough feature-parity with Vista - better in some areas, worse in others.
So, Apple took 8 years to go from NeXTSTEP 4 to OS X 10.5, which is roughly the magnitude of changes Microsoft have made to get from Windows 2003 to Vista.
Considering it's taken about ~3 years of real development time, or 5 years of market time, if anything Vista's schedule has been relatively fast. The difference is Microsoft haven't rolled out any interim releases to see the evolution in action (although XP's SP2 was probably worthy of at least a minor version bump - "XP Second Edition", if you will).
Vista is late, to be sure - but with Windows NT, 2000 and XP on the market Microsoft were in a better position to take their time. Objectively, it's development time was not excessive.
But there's certainly no comparison of comparisons :) between Windows 98 to Windows XP, and Windows XP to Windows Vista. Vista gives you DX10, some performance technologies to make up for the amazing slowness of Vista with which it is still slower at most tasks, and a bunch of DRMcrap designed to prevent you from using your PC, but other than that the major feature over Windows XP is eye candy.
Reality disagrees.
Objectively, Vista is probably one of the biggest upgrades to Windows ever released. The magnitude of changes is similar to those Apple made to NeXT to get to OS X 10.2. It's far more a compliment to XP, than it is criticism of Vista, that many don't see these updates as compelling.
In the new internet computing environment, MS has to deal with a host of new threats that they didn't adequately prepare for when creating windows. This is exemplified in the 'Allow'/'Cancel' annoyances that early adopters of Vista are dealing with.
The vast majority of "Windows problems", including - heck, especially - those "Allow/Cancel" annoyances, are the fault of ignorant/incompetent/lazy software developers, not Microsoft.
Soon, MS will have to make a clean break from their crappy development habits, and that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst home users and application developers. Their choice will be to either continue crapware and malware to run rampant on Windows, possibly permanently souring the home user against MS products, or seriously break applications, thus demanding that application developers produce decent products.
What do you propose they change and how/why do you think it will help ?