Check out a comparison table of features on Wikipedia.
Here are just a couple of things from the ZFS page that are limitations, although there is a good compaign to address these issues to make ZFS more viable.
From Wiki (only including items that do exist in NTFS):
ZFS lacks transparent encryption.
ZFS does not support per-user or per-group quotas.
It is not possible to add a disk to a RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 vdev. This feature appears very difficult to implement.
Reconfiguring storage requires copying data offline, destroying the pool, and recreating the pool with the new policy.
ZFS is not a native cluster, distributed, or parallel file system and cannot provide concurrent access from multiple hosts as ZFS is a local file system.
------------ Also there are several other 'small issues' to note.
ZFS doesn't use 'Extents' and technically they would be less needed on ZFS for fragmentation issues.
ZFS also has less journalling and logging capabilities than NTFS, some are important, some are not. In theory ZFS should be fairly tough, but NTFS technically would be better at power loss or hardware failure, especially with how NTFS is used in Vista as a comparison, where self repairing and extended journaling has been taken to a new level.
ZFS is one of the best things coming around and I hope it has great success and continues to evolve, keeping Sun away from their creation should be the OSS world's number one goal so that ZFS can continue to grow and be optimized and can one day match all FS feature for feature and provide the best performance at the same time.
Come sit in my chair for a few weeks. I have the unmitigated joy of supporting one of the 10 largest companies in the world with nearly 100,000 Windows XP SP2 desktops.
And you are going to claim NTFS is the main root of your problems? Either you are making this up or are truly uneducated about NTFS.
I've done some reading on NTFS and plan on doing more but my REAL WORLD experience with it shows that it ain't all that, yet no matter what M$ claims.
Ok, you need to do a lot more reading on it. However, don't read what MS says, instead read what other IT people say about it. Or better yet go to books that deal specifically with OS design and FS design. They are NOT from MS's mouth and yet tend to be extemely complimentary of NTFS.
With 100s of millions of people using NTFS, there are 'few' problems with its inherent design. Just 'financially' if NTFS was as flawed as you think it is, MS would replace it because of the financial drain of support calls.
You also seem to forget the top large companies using Windows have DIRECT lines to MS as they have MS representatives for their licensing and tech support, and if there was issues with NTFS, they would scream louder and be heard faster than anyone. And yet, this doesn't happen.
I guess I am also surprised that you are working with 100,000 computers for a 'large' company and yet you don't know who your MS contact is, as companies with 10 licenses even have MS contacts, and MS listens to even the tiny companies like they are their best friends.
So good luck in your journey on learning about NTFS, and you might want to find your MS contact information and yell at them. You might be surprised to find how helpful they can be in finding your 'real' problems.
Ok, I have never claimed NTFS is perfect, but FAR from the horrible FS people on SlashDot think it is.
However, the MFT is not a good example of why NTFS is bad. You realize that on a 500GB volume, the 'SYSTEM' spaced used by the MFT is around 400mb at the maximum.
The MFT isn't quite so bad, especially when you consider what all the MFT holds, how it is self repairing.
So you want to bring contention with the MFT on NTFS, I ask you to show me ANY FS that doesn't 'use' space for keeping the file structure. It is impossible, so they all do.
Some FS methods of tracking files and used space are less efficient and some are more efficient.
And the MFT you are complaining about is what helps make NTFS very efficient even for incredibly large volumes with a massive number of files on the volume. Especially when you compare it to FS like FAT, EXT2, etc.
Laughable post. Now wonder Zens and other craptacular "real" media devices dominate the market place since they "automatically" work with all computers...oh wait...damn it.
Actually your post is correct, but a sad comentary on the state of the industry. Marketing is now the 'true' technology and Apple could slap an 'i' on Turd and people on the fringe of actually understanding the technology would be out in masses just to say they own an iTurd.:)
If the average user or tech person would pay attention to features or technology instead of Marketing, the iPod would be a blip in history.
The reason I mentioned the Creative Zen M, is that is has won the CES awards for the last two years, gets the best reviews for sound quality, has a higher color display, can output DVD resolution, and isn't tied to iTunes or any other software, and supports virtually all standard and even non-mainstream codecs without conversion. Next time someone here is converting a DiVX torrent to play on their iPod, just remember there are Zen users that just drag and drop it on the Zen without conversion in a matter of seconds.
You give Microsoft too much credit here for NTFS. Like everything else Microsoft it was lifted/borrowed/stolen/copied/architected/plagiari zed from the VMS file system.
Check my other post on this. But NT is more than just NTFS and both may build on some VMS concepts but far exceed anything VMS was doing or could ever do.
NTFS is also based on some FAT and HPFS concepts as well, but again it does MORE, and just because it took ideas from those FSes does not mean it is limited to what those FSes were capable of doing, nor does it have their limitations by design.
Also, the NT architecture is based on kernel and architectural designs that until NT was built many were only theories at the time, even though you will find bits of other OS concepts built upon in NT. Just like it would be impossible to build any software or OS from scratch today.
So, yes, you can find hints to VMS, OS/2, *nix in what NT is, but you will also find that it is a combination of the best ideas of the time, many of which didn't yet exist.
This is why NT has a client/server kernel that can't be defined by any of the standard 'kernel' concept classifications like micro/mono etc. It also has a lot of over looked design elements like OS API subsystem technology that you STILL don't find in other OS architecture design.
People forget MS had Xenix at the time and the NT team had the latitude of making NT completely *nix based, and instead they found *nix too limiting for a long term OS technology and they instead choose to try to create something that didn't have many of the inherent lockin or flaws of OSes of that time period. The first edition of InsideNT explains some of the 'non-technical' aspects of why NT is not based on a VMS, OS/2 or *nix OS technologies as they could not do what they wanted NT to do.
This design is also why NT is still supporting advanced OSes 15years later, and still has several architectural tricks up its sleeve to go many more years. Heck with each release they keep turning on more and features that have inherently been part of the NT architecture all along. From Multi-User in 4.0-2K days, to multi-layered driver compatibility so that two entirely different driver technologies like XP and Vista WDDM can both run on the OS without any distinction to applications outside of applications designed to take advantage of WDDM features.
(Even look at the BSD subsystem running on XP,2003,Vista - it is a REAL BSD OS Subsystem, no emulation and full cross subsystem communication via NT's architecture.)
So, ya, I stand by my statement, NT is one of the few things MS did rather well, and I say this as both an OS engineer and OS theorist that was teaching these theories at the time NT was coming to fruition.
NTFS was introduced in July of 1993... That's 14 years ago and the first go round was hardly stellar.
Actually no, many companies had NT in hand in 1992. Go look up Comdex 1992, Dec was showcasing their new Alpha CPU running on WindowsNT.
It was commercially released in 1993. Besides the 15year statement was a blanket, not a up to the minute quote of how long it has been in retail.
Rocket science and system administration are two different animals.
I was being a bit of a 'smart ass' with the rocket science comment. However you will find that the IT people at NASA to be the best in the world and I have worked with them for years. In fact several of my professors (going back some years here) were NASA IT people.
Just for giggles check your NTFS filesystem after a fresh install of Windows 2003 Server (or Windows XP for that matter). It'll likely need to be defragmented immediately (or perhaps after the subsequent few hours of patching that must take place).
There is a reason for this, NTFS is not just a File Structue FS definition only, part of what makes it click is higher level OS involvement. This is also why ZFS works well, as it is multi-part as well.
So when you do an initial install, the installer of XP and earlier versions isn't running the higher level NTFS services that assess file writes and fragmenting. This truly is not hard to understand. Think back to NT 4.0 and previous versions, the installers LITERALLY installed the OS on a FAT partition and then converted it to NTFS after the installer was done; hence the 8gb and such limits of the OS partitions.
As a side note Vista is far less prone to initial fragmentation as the PE installer is more than just a low level installer and is actually running a higher more featured version of NT. Also the image based install of Vista helps, but can leave some holes as the installer removes un-needed files during the installation.
On the other hand Ext2 and Ext3
This is actually a fun myth. Just like NTFS both of these FS will fragment as the volume usage increases. Outside the 'zealot' crowd, people realize that fragmentation does occur. Even if you take ZFS which has mechanisms to allocate space to prevent fragmentation, it will STILL fragment files on write over, so when saving files that keep growing in size fragmentation is just as problematic as any other FS in the end, even though it goes to great lengths to prevent initial file write fragmentation.
A good rule is that when your volume hits the 75% mark, you are going to get increased fragmentation, no matter what FS you are using. And yes even with EXT2 and EXT3, as they are NOT going to move your 2GB movie you are editing just to ensure the file remains unfragmented, they are going to tack on the additional space required as the file grows(fragmenting it) just like ANY OTHER FS. (This is also true of small files, the 2GB file example is just to make it clear.)
You might want to go grab a book yourself (or at the very least use google!).
No one was comparing NTFS to FAT (or even *nix filesystems). The original remark was around the ultimate slowdown of the NTFS filesystem after several months without proper maintenance. If you can say with a straight face that you can go six months on an even moderately used Windows XP machine without defragmenting at least your system drive and not experience slowness I'd have to say you're full of it.
Then I and 1000s of administrators around the world are full of it.
NT 4.0 had NO defragmentation tools, and servers in many installations, including several of my large clients ran for YEARS without any performance loss or problems, and any average NT4 tech could confirm similar results.
How could anyone be so dense not to consider NT4.0 and the YEARS it was used without 'reinstalls' or 'deframenting' and without performance loss in corporations around the world?
The second myth is that XP does not do any background or internal defragmenting. This is not true as XP will defragment many key files for the OS AUTOMATICALLY. So even if a user never runs the defrag utility on XP, the main portions of the OS are CONTINUALLY defragmented. Do a check yourself, you will notice things like the registry, the user registry, etc are almost always automatically defragmented.
The third myth is the way NTFS writes files to the volume. If the HD is using less than 50% of its total capacity fragmentation is designed to be virtually impossible. (NTFS does not stage the writes as intelligently as ZFS does, but it has always considered fragmentation when writting to the volume.)
Even Diskeeper the maker of one of the original de-fragmenting tools for NTFS themselves state that de-fragmenting is LESS important on NTFS than most FS and yes defragmenting will help performance, but it does not bring the system to a crawl because of how NTFS works and effeciently even reads fragmented files faster than most FS.
Test this for yourself, get a volume that is almost full, write a large high use file, like a VMWare HD or VPC HD so that it has as many fragments as you can get, then lauch the VM HD and test things like the boot time of the virtual OS with its virtual drive file highly fragmented on NTFS. Then defrag that file and time it again. You will find that even with several 1000 fragments on a file the performance will not be measurable in even seconds. (Even shock yourself even more, compress the freaking Virtual HD File and run it again and notice that even fragmented and compressed the performance difference is virtually non-existent to a non-compressed defragmented file.)
To continue to purport the myth that NTFS slows down is down right inaccurate, FUD, and borderline insane.
Windows could be slowing down with crap software installed and by that I more specifically mean Win32/Win64, but to state that NT or NTFS is slowing down over time is just WRONG.
So I don't care if you want to call it fragmentation or make up some other excuse of why you thing NTFS slows down with use, it is simply NOT CORRECT.
they copied much of it from elsewhere and from some other systems that NTFS and Windows still can't match. Ever hear of FILES-11 and VMS? I thought not. Believe it or not, the whole world of computers isn't just Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. BSD
Ya, MS copied everything from everyone else, because the particles they use even on their HD came from a Star several billions of years ago.
This is one of the most insane type of arguments. Of course EVERYONE built on existing technologies and even borrows from binary math. GEESH.
Sure some of the constructs of NTFS came from VMS work, but later versions of the VMS you cite that make Files-11 came after NTFS and they both borrow from VMS structures prior to that. And surprise, some of the NT engineers came from VMS and had RIGHTS to use what they did.
The bigger picture here is that NTFS is FAR more advanced than Files-11 by 10x at the minimum even if they used some of the same bitmap or b-tree concepts. NTFS also borrowed from FAT and HPFS, but WENT FAR beyond concepts used in either of these FS as well.
As for experience beyond mainstream desktop OSes, you shouldn't make such assumptions, as there are people like myself that have been doing this a long time and have probably worked on more systems than average/.nerds can even name.
There you go again. NTFS has some features that some other file systems don't and others have some features that NTFS doesn't. It depends on what you're looking for
True, but if you do a comparison, NTFS is still at the top for having a better coverage of more features, just go to Wiki to compare if you don't want to climb through the specifications yourself. ZFS is about the only FS that could be argued is as good or better than NTFS. And this is sad that the entire non-MS world still hasn't produced a FS that wipes the floor with NTFS.
Again there is too much non-standard fighting in the *nix world and this is one area standards to build on need to be 're-established'. Which is sadly ironic as the *nix world is built on a 'standard', although dated, but any modern attempts to standardize concepts beyond the basic *nix concepts are frowned upon instead of the industry coming together to define the next great foundation for an OS framework.
Ext3, Reiserfs, other Linux FSes though, all I hear is that the filesystem avoids fragmentation by itself and doesn't need to be defragged. How is that not much better than NTFS? Come to think of it, maybe a big part of the slowdown I see accumulating on Windows is because of this NTFS goodness..
1) NTFS tries to anticipate and write files much like any modern FS, just like you will find in ZFS, Reiser, etc. It does this in a way that tries to put the file in a non-fragmented space and additionally will even try to place it based on other files the application uses to add additional performance. However on all FS, fragmentation will and does happen. PERIOD.
2) The important part about fragmentation and one of the key 'important' aspects of NTFS is that it wasn't fragmentation proof, but even when fragmentation does happen the 'cost' to read a fragmented file is severly less than many other FS, espcially in comparison to FAT. This has to do with how the File Index is store and how the FS requires the OS to search around to find the fragments.
So yes, NTFS just LIKE the ones you seem to think can't fragment, ALL fragment, NTFS was one of the first FS to do a really good job at not losing performance even when files were fragmented.
(This is not saying NTFS is only FS that does well at this, but when NTFS was designed it was one of the better technologies to circumvent fragmentation performance loss, and this was on 386 hardware with SLOW HDs.)
If you are truly anal about fragmentation on a NTFS volume, search for 'contig' a tool that lets you manually defrag files and folders, and it is free.
Also both XP and especially Vista defragment important and boot order files, this is part of the prefetching and layout code in both OSes. Vista even takes this further by background defragmenting non-essential and user files during idles times.
Vista also does other FS and HD tricks, like hardware and block checks to ensure the HD is is not failing and will even anticipate failure and move data all automatically.
It actually does scare me sometimes the lack of 'modern' or NT Windows based knowledge on Slashdot. It is like all the users here abandoned Windows back in the Win9X days which is a completely different OS and they have no concept of the NT architecture or even acknowledge that the NT core is one of the few things MS ever did fairly well.
and how it's the most elite FS and never fragments. I know it's BS, most educated people reading this know it's BS, and you probably even know it's BS.
See here you are already showing your inexperience. It isn't that a FS won't fragment, even if the FS is good and 'tries' not to. The issue comes down to how the FS deals with fragmented files and lookup processes that are required to access additional file fragments. For example some FS are horrible at this because they have to play 'where is next chunk' or let's follow the maze around the HD.
The thing here is that NTFS fragments just like all other FS, even though it does try to anticipate file usage and tries to write to a unfragmented area.
However, the performance knock with fragmentation is in how much it 'costs' to access a fragmented file versus one that isn't, and in this regard NTFS is very good and the cost is very 'light' in comparison to several types of file systems, especially older ones like FAT.
So even if NTFS is fragmented to hell, the decrease in performance is going to be MINIMAL, that is why it was 'never' important and on modern HD and hardware is still less important for average desktop users.
Yes MS started shipping a defrag tool for NT in Win2k, but it is honestly more important and used more for high use and load files and PROPERLY ordering them on the HD as the OS and applications that use them would benefit from the placement.
So this has more to do with boot optimization and file layout and with XP and Vista with regard to prefetch and superfetch and less to do with the 'tiny' performance difference from a file that has 10 fragments and moving it so it only has 1.
Truly go look up fragmentation, this whole post is getting really old.
It is also getting old that you 'magically' would fix computers because 'you' knew what was wrong with them by 'reinstalling' a backup.
You may have solved problems, but it would have been from tweaking and restoring the installation from an OS install than ANYTHING to do with NTFS and you are either fooling yourself or your friends.
Take this advice from someone that has 'truly' worked in the tech industry with NT and NTFS since it was Alpha, not just a couple of years at college.
As you will find with most people at SlashDot, you may be your parent's computer genius, but you can easily find yourself out of your league here quickly.
NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage, and requires regular reformatting
Wow this is news to anyone that knows anything about the NTFS structure.
I love how people can make garbage claims like this, yet there are companies that are running NTFS volumes that are 15years old without any incident. You know companies like EDS, GM, and other agencies like Lockheed and NASA.
But I'm sure youf 'assessment' of NTFS is much smarter than the 'rocket scientists' at these organizations.
Let's take your starting line "NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage."
Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.
So please do englighten us all with your knowledge so I can call my contacts at NASA and tell them how stupid they are for trusting NTFS and explain to them that their systems are getting slower.
The lack of this competitive technological drive is probably why Windows has been the same POS for the last 20 years.
Or maybe it is because the NT team designed the OS so that it was highly extensible and would meet OS requirements for 15-20 at the minimum, considering it still has core kernel features that are not even used or exposed in Vista yet even.
The problem is, people like you, see Windows as Win3.1/Win9x and Windows of today running on the NT Core is a different OS, a different design, shares no code, and yet still has the same UI concepts so people aren't bright enough to realize that the underlying NT architecture is actually one of the few things MS has ever done right.
Go read up on NTFS, and Windows NT before you come back, you are only embarrasing yourself, and that is hard to do on Slashdot when talking about Windows and NT.
If windows would support Reiserfs, it'd be a much better option for cross platform than AWFUL ntfs/fat32.
I have to stop you right here, why on earth would MS abandon an FS that STILL outperforms and provides features even Reiser can't.
Instead of whining about NTFS or calling it 'bad' when it truly isn't, the OSS world needs to BUCK UP and STANDARDIZE on a COMPLETE and EXTENSIBLE FS instead of the constant infighting that we have had in the *nix world for 20 years.
NTFS is solid and MS designed it to be highly extensible, considering it should support users until the 17000 terabyte limits hit. Remember that feature wise it was doing most of what it does back in 1991 when other FS drastically PALED in comparison. And even today the only FS that comes close to being as features as NTFS is ZFS and it even is missing several features NTFS has had for 10 years.
You can use any iPod with multiple computers. Just set it to manually manage music and it'll work fine with any machine you throw at it.
Or buy a real media device like a Creative Zen M or 100s of others, and they AUTOMATICALLY work with ANY AND ALL computers you plug them into.
They also let users just drag and drop virtually any type of music or video format without conversion and play on the devices without Apple disabling non-approved codecs.
I feel sorry for my iPod friends that are always waiting for WMAs to convert or trying to get a DivX on their Video iPod. They sadly didn't realize that non-iPod people actually have it easier.
The important people just ask Bush to invoke Executive Privilege, and then they are free to obstruct any and all investigations.
Truly though, just because you encrypt something has no basic legal grounds of incrimination, it is just like locking up your house. However just as a subpoena could be issued to force you to open your house to legal officials, a subpoena could also force you to un-encrypt the volume.
Beyond that, they are really grasping at straws or are trying to see the world via the horrors the Bush administration has done to civil protections and liberties.
You are comparing a light DOS/Win32 assembly optimized OS with a rather large portable C based OS that has a central client/server kernel, security, and on TOP of that full subsystems that are OSes in themselves like Win32 and BSD.
If you take any fundamental feature of the NT product base that has become XP or Vista and try to compare it to a DOS/GUI hybrid OS you need to stop and compare what 'weight' the differences would have.
For example, when you start adding in Multi-languages, full Unicode support, or even the Font sizes to support the Unicode specifications, you are adding literally 100mb of space there ALONE.
Next add in security which DID not exist in Win9X, and this is NOT light security it is a full token based security system that EXTENDS beyond just the FS. And this is not even mentioning NTFS encryption abilities, journaling abilities, compression abilities, etc.
Also realize that a significant amount of the OS install is for a backup of the install media and drivers so you don't have to grab the DVD when adding new hardware or if a system file gets changed so the OS can self repair. Just in drivers alone Vista supports approximately 500 times the devices Win95 did, and just the INF files for this alone for these devices, not even including the binaries is over 40mb of data.
See how quick this starts to add up?
Now let's add in basic system disk usages, like shadow copies, system restore, larger pagefiles and hibernation file support ALL OF WHICH Win9X did not have to deal with with the exception of the pagefile and it was usually dynamic and around 200mb in Win9x. So once Vista is installed the OS is already shadowing files, managing at least one restore point, and has 2-6gb of data just for the pagefile and hibernation store.
Arguing the difference between any NT based OS and Win9X is easy for anyone that understands the massive changes in OS over the years and the difference between an assembly optimized single purpose OS to a portable scalable OS. As for features this gives users that you DIDN'T have in Win95, there is better threading, better caching, security, full networking services, multi-cpu support,(Vista even adds multi GPU support, preemptive GPU scheduling, and GPU RAM Virtualization ), and with NT there is also platform independence like running on anything from Itanium to x86 to x64 with barely more than a recompile because of the code portability that doesn't 'quite' compile as tight as was allowed with the Win9X OSes. You also have a lot of 'high' end services, servers, and features from things like *nix based printing support, SNMP management all the back to user seen features like RDP (remote desktop/terminal services), concurrent multi-user login support, etc etc.
Now to argue why Vista uses more HD than XP, start with the basic features of XP, then add in Media Center, Tablet PC Edition, and then start with support for a NEW API system for the graphics, audio, networking, printing, video, and even the animation API sets as well as the communication APIs, and this has to CO-EXIST with the older APIs as Vista still allows basic GDI based printer drivers, kernel XP video drivers, XP audio drivers in addition to the new driver models, and it also has internal compatibility layers so that the XPS printing system 'seamlessly' talks to older GDI printers or older applications printing using GDI technology or old Audio software or old Video software, and will ensure that they all convert BOTH ways so that old and new applications can use both old and new devices.
To further the XP Vista comparison, you then have to add in all the 'Vista' visible features like the search system(which even indexes ink, can do OCR on image documents, and even index voice notes so that recorded conversations can be text searched), the Text to Speech, the speech recognition, the.NET frameworks, the installers, and the MS development DLLs that never shipped as part of the OS, tons of new applications, tools and utilities, codecs, et
Clinton believed they were there, because at the time Saddam was refusing to let UN inspectors do their job. By the time Bush had invaded, the UN inspectors had already been in and found nothing.
And Clinton took action against Iraq for the removal and obstruction of the inspectors and withing a few months, inspectors were back on the ground.
The dirty little secret is Bushies keep telling people that prior to Bush's war, Iraq threw out the inspectors; however, Bush is the one that pulled the inspectors out of Iraq to force the war, not Saddam.
Go read any book or article by any of the inspectors, the US yanked them, not Saddam prior to the war.
Vista is new and replaces XP, so obviously Vista will be increasing from near zero upwards. OSX has been around for a long while now, so it is hard to expect sudden changes.
Although I agree with you, I think the point being missed is the 'predicted' mass exodus from Windows that OS X and other *nix users predicted because they saw Vista as a failure like WinME.
So in this regard, Vista has held up to the MS promised hype and is more secure, stable, and flexible and has enough 'visible' features that users are moving forward with it instead of running and trying other OSes.
The OS X and *nix industry REALLY needs to stop waiting for MS to fall on their butts and instead hit hard to not 'emulate' or be as good as, but to blow away the features offered in Windows.
This includes revolutions in everything from core technologies to compete with NT's morphic nature to new UI concepts that lead to the next generation. And these are two areas where other OSes could lead as MS is more conservative about vast drastic paradigm changes.
I'm telling them to wait until the draconian DRM, Activation on corp editions, MS Spyware, and other cruft gets removed, and the EULA gets updated so it's closer to the old XP / win2k version
This is almost the most retarded post I have seen. Do you even have a f**king clue what you are talking about?
The scary part is you are acting like you are some 'consulting' authority that is giving this horribly incorrect advice to your customers?
Hmmm, possibly just displaying lack of knowledge here, but doesn't pervasive sort of mean "included in every layer and possible application" (sort of synonymous with "ubiquitous")? Most unlikely, I don't mean to bash Windows here, actually the more of that they can cram in there the better for people using it (true for every OS), but "extending pervasiveness" seems to be somewhat of an oxymoron in my understanding.
Well it would be described as this. NT started off with a strong architecture that was not limited by older micro or mono kernel constraints. So NT had a running start of the non Win32 portion of the OS being pervasively multi-threaded.
However as Win32 has evolved and applications like Explorer that are at the heart of what people see as Windows, this 'level' of prevasive multi-threading has not been as consistent as exists in the underlying NT OS architecture.
So in a way you could say it is an oxymoron, but if you define Windows based on the inherent subsystem lines of the OS, it makes sense.
So NT itself it is already there, and Win32/Win64 are partially there with some applications needing a higher level of threading implemented.
The NT core in Vista is highly threaded and even the lower levels of the subsystem are as well, but when you get down to applications like Movie Maker in Vista it is not 'fully' threaded as far as it should be, as it does split off the conversion and processing in threads quite well, but the UI could use more threading so that while it is processing you get more just a progress dialog box.
So yes the OS itself has full pervasive threading, just not all the applicaitons or components of each subsystem do. (The same is true of the BSD and other Subsystems that run alongside the Win32 subsystem.)
And yes the Win32 subsystem thing is confusing to many, as Win32 acts like an independant OS running on the NT architecture, having its own kernel etc that is separate from the other running NT allowed subsystems. But this is also one of the things that earns NT respect with OS theorists, having a unique client/server kernel architecture that hosts subsystem OS concepts easily.
* Click with the Mouse - nothing happens. * Move the Mouse - nothing happens. * Type on the Keyboard - nothing happens. * Type Ctrl-Alt-Del - nothing happens. * Type Shift-Ctrl-Esc - Task manager does not appear.
Especially the last one is bad as the task manager should enable you to kill evil jobs.
Ah, at work especially the (on access) virus checker grinds the system to a hold.
If this is how XP runs on your system, I would hate it as much as you do. This is NOT how XP behaves, and even though it is not as refined in I/O locking or scheduling granularity as Vista, it is HARD to EVER get XP to a point where the mouse, taskmanager, etc are not 100% responsive.
I would suggest you have some major hardware issue, or you are running truly horrible anti-virus software that is tied into the kernel in ways XP wasn't designed for, like McAfee and Synamtec do.
With any NT based Windows OS, if an application tries to suck CPU or becomes unresponsive, only that application alone should ever be non-responsive and on Vista this is even reduced as Vista takes back ownership of the Application Frame so even a hung application can't obstruct its own Window even.
Seriously, if XP behaved like you suggest, no one would ever use it, as what you are describing sounds more like Win 3.1 or Win9X with the 16bit mutext going nuts.
Technically, no since Vista is compiled for newer CPU instructions and the 486 compiling has been depricated.
However, Vista would hand 99% of playing these video off to the GPU scheduler in Vista which is PRE-EMPTIVE(unlike ANY OTHER OS) and the CPU does virtually NOTHING to play video like this.
assume those 8 movies are all small so they all fit in memory and don't let the hard drive become the bottleneck, and low-resolution so they don't engage the tilt bits [auckland.ac.nz]? Vista may be a bit faster than XP, but that doesn't make it a useful operating system for people who want to go where they want to today, rather than go to whichever sandbox Microsoft has approved today
See, more FUD.
You realize that Vista Ultimate even uses HD 1080 Video for WALLPAPER with virtually NO CPU usage, with transparent windows painting on it, right?
And it runs concurrently with Videos playing in the foreground and even High performance OpenGL or DirectX games running inside a Window with the HD wallpaper running. You can even set the game to be 50% transparent and not lose FPS and see the freaking video playing smoothly behind it.
I get so tired of mindless or non-experienced responses.
Everyone bitches that MS takes other technologies and extends and embraces, but when the technology is fairly good like BeOS everyone here is so stupid to assume MS never looked at BeOS or the threading or scheduling in the OS and would have implemented good ideas from it? Give me a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out a comparison table of features on Wikipedia.
Here are just a couple of things from the ZFS page that are limitations, although there is a good compaign to address these issues to make ZFS more viable.
From Wiki (only including items that do exist in NTFS):
ZFS lacks transparent encryption.
ZFS does not support per-user or per-group quotas.
It is not possible to add a disk to a RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 vdev. This feature appears very difficult to implement.
Reconfiguring storage requires copying data offline, destroying the pool, and recreating the pool with the new policy.
ZFS is not a native cluster, distributed, or parallel file system and cannot provide concurrent access from multiple hosts as ZFS is a local file system.
------------
Also there are several other 'small issues' to note.
ZFS doesn't use 'Extents' and technically they would be less needed on ZFS for fragmentation issues.
ZFS also has less journalling and logging capabilities than NTFS, some are important, some are not. In theory ZFS should be fairly tough, but NTFS technically would be better at power loss or hardware failure, especially with how NTFS is used in Vista as a comparison, where self repairing and extended journaling has been taken to a new level.
ZFS is one of the best things coming around and I hope it has great success and continues to evolve, keeping Sun away from their creation should be the OSS world's number one goal so that ZFS can continue to grow and be optimized and can one day match all FS feature for feature and provide the best performance at the same time.
Come sit in my chair for a few weeks. I have the unmitigated joy of supporting one
of the 10 largest companies in the world with nearly 100,000 Windows XP SP2 desktops.
And you are going to claim NTFS is the main root of your problems? Either you are making this up or are truly uneducated about NTFS.
I've done some reading on NTFS and plan on doing more but my REAL WORLD experience with
it shows that it ain't all that, yet no matter what M$ claims.
Ok, you need to do a lot more reading on it. However, don't read what MS says, instead read what other IT people say about it. Or better yet go to books that deal specifically with OS design and FS design. They are NOT from MS's mouth and yet tend to be extemely complimentary of NTFS.
With 100s of millions of people using NTFS, there are 'few' problems with its inherent design. Just 'financially' if NTFS was as flawed as you think it is, MS would replace it because of the financial drain of support calls.
You also seem to forget the top large companies using Windows have DIRECT lines to MS as they have MS representatives for their licensing and tech support, and if there was issues with NTFS, they would scream louder and be heard faster than anyone. And yet, this doesn't happen.
I guess I am also surprised that you are working with 100,000 computers for a 'large' company and yet you don't know who your MS contact is, as companies with 10 licenses even have MS contacts, and MS listens to even the tiny companies like they are their best friends.
So good luck in your journey on learning about NTFS, and you might want to find your MS contact information and yell at them. You might be surprised to find how helpful they can be in finding your 'real' problems.
Ok, I have never claimed NTFS is perfect, but FAR from the horrible FS people on SlashDot think it is.
However, the MFT is not a good example of why NTFS is bad. You realize that on a 500GB volume, the 'SYSTEM' spaced used by the MFT is around 400mb at the maximum.
The MFT isn't quite so bad, especially when you consider what all the MFT holds, how it is self repairing.
So you want to bring contention with the MFT on NTFS, I ask you to show me ANY FS that doesn't 'use' space for keeping the file structure. It is impossible, so they all do.
Some FS methods of tracking files and used space are less efficient and some are more efficient.
And the MFT you are complaining about is what helps make NTFS very efficient even for incredibly large volumes with a massive number of files on the volume. Especially when you compare it to FS like FAT, EXT2, etc.
Laughable post. Now wonder Zens and other craptacular "real" media devices dominate the market place since they "automatically" work with all computers...oh wait...damn it.
:)
Actually your post is correct, but a sad comentary on the state of the industry. Marketing is now the 'true' technology and Apple could slap an 'i' on Turd and people on the fringe of actually understanding the technology would be out in masses just to say they own an iTurd.
If the average user or tech person would pay attention to features or technology instead of Marketing, the iPod would be a blip in history.
The reason I mentioned the Creative Zen M, is that is has won the CES awards for the last two years, gets the best reviews for sound quality, has a higher color display, can output DVD resolution, and isn't tied to iTunes or any other software, and supports virtually all standard and even non-mainstream codecs without conversion. Next time someone here is converting a DiVX torrent to play on their iPod, just remember there are Zen users that just drag and drop it on the Zen without conversion in a matter of seconds.
You give Microsoft too much credit here for NTFS. Like everything else Microsoft it was lifted/borrowed/stolen/copied/architected/plagiari zed from the VMS file system.
Check my other post on this. But NT is more than just NTFS and both may build on some VMS concepts but far exceed anything VMS was doing or could ever do.
NTFS is also based on some FAT and HPFS concepts as well, but again it does MORE, and just because it took ideas from those FSes does not mean it is limited to what those FSes were capable of doing, nor does it have their limitations by design.
Also, the NT architecture is based on kernel and architectural designs that until NT was built many were only theories at the time, even though you will find bits of other OS concepts built upon in NT. Just like it would be impossible to build any software or OS from scratch today.
So, yes, you can find hints to VMS, OS/2, *nix in what NT is, but you will also find that it is a combination of the best ideas of the time, many of which didn't yet exist.
This is why NT has a client/server kernel that can't be defined by any of the standard 'kernel' concept classifications like micro/mono etc. It also has a lot of over looked design elements like OS API subsystem technology that you STILL don't find in other OS architecture design.
People forget MS had Xenix at the time and the NT team had the latitude of making NT completely *nix based, and instead they found *nix too limiting for a long term OS technology and they instead choose to try to create something that didn't have many of the inherent lockin or flaws of OSes of that time period. The first edition of InsideNT explains some of the 'non-technical' aspects of why NT is not based on a VMS, OS/2 or *nix OS technologies as they could not do what they wanted NT to do.
This design is also why NT is still supporting advanced OSes 15years later, and still has several architectural tricks up its sleeve to go many more years. Heck with each release they keep turning on more and features that have inherently been part of the NT architecture all along. From Multi-User in 4.0-2K days, to multi-layered driver compatibility so that two entirely different driver technologies like XP and Vista WDDM can both run on the OS without any distinction to applications outside of applications designed to take advantage of WDDM features.
(Even look at the BSD subsystem running on XP,2003,Vista - it is a REAL BSD OS Subsystem, no emulation and full cross subsystem communication via NT's architecture.)
So, ya, I stand by my statement, NT is one of the few things MS did rather well, and I say this as both an OS engineer and OS theorist that was teaching these theories at the time NT was coming to fruition.
NTFS was introduced in July of 1993... That's 14 years ago and the first go round was hardly stellar.
;)
Actually no, many companies had NT in hand in 1992. Go look up Comdex 1992, Dec was showcasing their new Alpha CPU running on WindowsNT.
It was commercially released in 1993. Besides the 15year statement was a blanket, not a up to the minute quote of how long it has been in retail.
Rocket science and system administration are two different animals.
I was being a bit of a 'smart ass' with the rocket science comment. However you will find that the IT people at NASA to be the best in the world and I have worked with them for years. In fact several of my professors (going back some years here) were NASA IT people.
Just for giggles check your NTFS filesystem after a fresh install of Windows 2003 Server (or Windows XP for that matter). It'll likely need to be defragmented immediately (or perhaps after the subsequent few hours of patching that must take place).
There is a reason for this, NTFS is not just a File Structue FS definition only, part of what makes it click is higher level OS involvement. This is also why ZFS works well, as it is multi-part as well.
So when you do an initial install, the installer of XP and earlier versions isn't running the higher level NTFS services that assess file writes and fragmenting. This truly is not hard to understand. Think back to NT 4.0 and previous versions, the installers LITERALLY installed the OS on a FAT partition and then converted it to NTFS after the installer was done; hence the 8gb and such limits of the OS partitions.
As a side note Vista is far less prone to initial fragmentation as the PE installer is more than just a low level installer and is actually running a higher more featured version of NT. Also the image based install of Vista helps, but can leave some holes as the installer removes un-needed files during the installation.
On the other hand Ext2 and Ext3
This is actually a fun myth. Just like NTFS both of these FS will fragment as the volume usage increases. Outside the 'zealot' crowd, people realize that fragmentation does occur. Even if you take ZFS which has mechanisms to allocate space to prevent fragmentation, it will STILL fragment files on write over, so when saving files that keep growing in size fragmentation is just as problematic as any other FS in the end, even though it goes to great lengths to prevent initial file write fragmentation.
A good rule is that when your volume hits the 75% mark, you are going to get increased fragmentation, no matter what FS you are using. And yes even with EXT2 and EXT3, as they are NOT going to move your 2GB movie you are editing just to ensure the file remains unfragmented, they are going to tack on the additional space required as the file grows(fragmenting it) just like ANY OTHER FS. (This is also true of small files, the 2GB file example is just to make it clear.)
You might want to go grab a book yourself (or at the very least use google!).
The ones I helped write or other people's?
No one was comparing NTFS to FAT (or even *nix filesystems). The original remark was around the ultimate slowdown of the NTFS filesystem after several months without proper maintenance. If you can say with a straight face that you can go six months on an even moderately used Windows XP machine without defragmenting at least your system drive and not experience slowness I'd have to say you're full of it.
Then I and 1000s of administrators around the world are full of it.
NT 4.0 had NO defragmentation tools, and servers in many installations, including several of my large clients ran for YEARS without any performance loss or problems, and any average NT4 tech could confirm similar results.
How could anyone be so dense not to consider NT4.0 and the YEARS it was used without 'reinstalls' or 'deframenting' and without performance loss in corporations around the world?
The second myth is that XP does not do any background or internal defragmenting. This is not true as XP will defragment many key files for the OS AUTOMATICALLY. So even if a user never runs the defrag utility on XP, the main portions of the OS are CONTINUALLY defragmented. Do a check yourself, you will notice things like the registry, the user registry, etc are almost always automatically defragmented.
The third myth is the way NTFS writes files to the volume. If the HD is using less than 50% of its total capacity fragmentation is designed to be virtually impossible. (NTFS does not stage the writes as intelligently as ZFS does, but it has always considered fragmentation when writting to the volume.)
Even Diskeeper the maker of one of the original de-fragmenting tools for NTFS themselves state that de-fragmenting is LESS important on NTFS than most FS and yes defragmenting will help performance, but it does not bring the system to a crawl because of how NTFS works and effeciently even reads fragmented files faster than most FS.
Test this for yourself, get a volume that is almost full, write a large high use file, like a VMWare HD or VPC HD so that it has as many fragments as you can get, then lauch the VM HD and test things like the boot time of the virtual OS with its virtual drive file highly fragmented on NTFS. Then defrag that file and time it again. You will find that even with several 1000 fragments on a file the performance will not be measurable in even seconds. (Even shock yourself even more, compress the freaking Virtual HD File and run it again and notice that even fragmented and compressed the performance difference is virtually non-existent to a non-compressed defragmented file.)
To continue to purport the myth that NTFS slows down is down right inaccurate, FUD, and borderline insane.
Windows could be slowing down with crap software installed and by that I more specifically mean Win32/Win64, but to state that NT or NTFS is slowing down over time is just WRONG.
So I don't care if you want to call it fragmentation or make up some other excuse of why you thing NTFS slows down with use, it is simply NOT CORRECT.
they copied much of it from elsewhere and from some other systems that NTFS and Windows still can't match. Ever hear of FILES-11 and VMS? I thought not. Believe it or not, the whole world of computers isn't just Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. BSD
/.nerds can even name.
Ya, MS copied everything from everyone else, because the particles they use even on their HD came from a Star several billions of years ago.
This is one of the most insane type of arguments. Of course EVERYONE built on existing technologies and even borrows from binary math. GEESH.
Sure some of the constructs of NTFS came from VMS work, but later versions of the VMS you cite that make Files-11 came after NTFS and they both borrow from VMS structures prior to that. And surprise, some of the NT engineers came from VMS and had RIGHTS to use what they did.
The bigger picture here is that NTFS is FAR more advanced than Files-11 by 10x at the minimum even if they used some of the same bitmap or b-tree concepts. NTFS also borrowed from FAT and HPFS, but WENT FAR beyond concepts used in either of these FS as well.
As for experience beyond mainstream desktop OSes, you shouldn't make such assumptions, as there are people like myself that have been doing this a long time and have probably worked on more systems than average
There you go again. NTFS has some features that some other file systems don't and others have some features that NTFS doesn't. It depends on what you're looking for
True, but if you do a comparison, NTFS is still at the top for having a better coverage of more features, just go to Wiki to compare if you don't want to climb through the specifications yourself. ZFS is about the only FS that could be argued is as good or better than NTFS. And this is sad that the entire non-MS world still hasn't produced a FS that wipes the floor with NTFS.
Again there is too much non-standard fighting in the *nix world and this is one area standards to build on need to be 're-established'. Which is sadly ironic as the *nix world is built on a 'standard', although dated, but any modern attempts to standardize concepts beyond the basic *nix concepts are frowned upon instead of the industry coming together to define the next great foundation for an OS framework.
Ext3, Reiserfs, other Linux FSes though, all I hear is that the filesystem avoids fragmentation by itself and doesn't need to be defragged. How is that not much better than NTFS? Come to think of it, maybe a big part of the slowdown I see accumulating on Windows is because of this NTFS goodness..
1) NTFS tries to anticipate and write files much like any modern FS, just like you will find in ZFS, Reiser, etc. It does this in a way that tries to put the file in a non-fragmented space and additionally will even try to place it based on other files the application uses to add additional performance. However on all FS, fragmentation will and does happen. PERIOD.
2) The important part about fragmentation and one of the key 'important' aspects of NTFS is that it wasn't fragmentation proof, but even when fragmentation does happen the 'cost' to read a fragmented file is severly less than many other FS, espcially in comparison to FAT. This has to do with how the File Index is store and how the FS requires the OS to search around to find the fragments.
So yes, NTFS just LIKE the ones you seem to think can't fragment, ALL fragment, NTFS was one of the first FS to do a really good job at not losing performance even when files were fragmented.
(This is not saying NTFS is only FS that does well at this, but when NTFS was designed it was one of the better technologies to circumvent fragmentation performance loss, and this was on 386 hardware with SLOW HDs.)
If you are truly anal about fragmentation on a NTFS volume, search for 'contig' a tool that lets you manually defrag files and folders, and it is free.
Also both XP and especially Vista defragment important and boot order files, this is part of the prefetching and layout code in both OSes. Vista even takes this further by background defragmenting non-essential and user files during idles times.
Vista also does other FS and HD tricks, like hardware and block checks to ensure the HD is is not failing and will even anticipate failure and move data all automatically.
It actually does scare me sometimes the lack of 'modern' or NT Windows based knowledge on Slashdot. It is like all the users here abandoned Windows back in the Win9X days which is a completely different OS and they have no concept of the NT architecture or even acknowledge that the NT core is one of the few things MS ever did fairly well.
and how it's the most elite FS and never fragments. I know it's BS, most educated people reading this know it's BS, and you probably even know it's BS.
See here you are already showing your inexperience. It isn't that a FS won't fragment, even if the FS is good and 'tries' not to. The issue comes down to how the FS deals with fragmented files and lookup processes that are required to access additional file fragments. For example some FS are horrible at this because they have to play 'where is next chunk' or let's follow the maze around the HD.
The thing here is that NTFS fragments just like all other FS, even though it does try to anticipate file usage and tries to write to a unfragmented area.
However, the performance knock with fragmentation is in how much it 'costs' to access a fragmented file versus one that isn't, and in this regard NTFS is very good and the cost is very 'light' in comparison to several types of file systems, especially older ones like FAT.
So even if NTFS is fragmented to hell, the decrease in performance is going to be MINIMAL, that is why it was 'never' important and on modern HD and hardware is still less important for average desktop users.
Yes MS started shipping a defrag tool for NT in Win2k, but it is honestly more important and used more for high use and load files and PROPERLY ordering them on the HD as the OS and applications that use them would benefit from the placement.
So this has more to do with boot optimization and file layout and with XP and Vista with regard to prefetch and superfetch and less to do with the 'tiny' performance difference from a file that has 10 fragments and moving it so it only has 1.
Truly go look up fragmentation, this whole post is getting really old.
It is also getting old that you 'magically' would fix computers because 'you' knew what was wrong with them by 'reinstalling' a backup.
You may have solved problems, but it would have been from tweaking and restoring the installation from an OS install than ANYTHING to do with NTFS and you are either fooling yourself or your friends.
Take this advice from someone that has 'truly' worked in the tech industry with NT and NTFS since it was Alpha, not just a couple of years at college.
As you will find with most people at SlashDot, you may be your parent's computer genius, but you can easily find yourself out of your league here quickly.
NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage, and requires regular reformatting
Wow this is news to anyone that knows anything about the NTFS structure.
I love how people can make garbage claims like this, yet there are companies that are running NTFS volumes that are 15years old without any incident. You know companies like EDS, GM, and other agencies like Lockheed and NASA.
But I'm sure youf 'assessment' of NTFS is much smarter than the 'rocket scientists' at these organizations.
Let's take your starting line "NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage."
Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.
So please do englighten us all with your knowledge so I can call my contacts at NASA and tell them how stupid they are for trusting NTFS and explain to them that their systems are getting slower.
The lack of this competitive technological drive is probably why Windows has been the same POS for the last 20 years.
Or maybe it is because the NT team designed the OS so that it was highly extensible and would meet OS requirements for 15-20 at the minimum, considering it still has core kernel features that are not even used or exposed in Vista yet even.
The problem is, people like you, see Windows as Win3.1/Win9x and Windows of today running on the NT Core is a different OS, a different design, shares no code, and yet still has the same UI concepts so people aren't bright enough to realize that the underlying NT architecture is actually one of the few things MS has ever done right.
Go read up on NTFS, and Windows NT before you come back, you are only embarrasing yourself, and that is hard to do on Slashdot when talking about Windows and NT.
If windows would support Reiserfs, it'd be a much better option for cross platform than AWFUL ntfs/fat32.
I have to stop you right here, why on earth would MS abandon an FS that STILL outperforms and provides features even Reiser can't.
Instead of whining about NTFS or calling it 'bad' when it truly isn't, the OSS world needs to BUCK UP and STANDARDIZE on a COMPLETE and EXTENSIBLE FS instead of the constant infighting that we have had in the *nix world for 20 years.
NTFS is solid and MS designed it to be highly extensible, considering it should support users until the 17000 terabyte limits hit. Remember that feature wise it was doing most of what it does back in 1991 when other FS drastically PALED in comparison. And even today the only FS that comes close to being as features as NTFS is ZFS and it even is missing several features NTFS has had for 10 years.
You can tell they are all sad on the inside.
;)
What is that saying, oh ya, ignorance is bliss.
You can use any iPod with multiple computers. Just set it to manually manage music and it'll work fine with any machine you throw at it.
Or buy a real media device like a Creative Zen M or 100s of others, and they AUTOMATICALLY work with ANY AND ALL computers you plug them into.
They also let users just drag and drop virtually any type of music or video format without conversion and play on the devices without Apple disabling non-approved codecs.
I feel sorry for my iPod friends that are always waiting for WMAs to convert or trying to get a DivX on their Video iPod. They sadly didn't realize that non-iPod people actually have it easier.
The important people just ask Bush to invoke Executive Privilege, and then they are free to obstruct any and all investigations.
Truly though, just because you encrypt something has no basic legal grounds of incrimination, it is just like locking up your house. However just as a subpoena could be issued to force you to open your house to legal officials, a subpoena could also force you to un-encrypt the volume.
Beyond that, they are really grasping at straws or are trying to see the world via the horrors the Bush administration has done to civil protections and liberties.
You are comparing a light DOS/Win32 assembly optimized OS with a rather large portable C based OS that has a central client/server kernel, security, and on TOP of that full subsystems that are OSes in themselves like Win32 and BSD.
.NET frameworks, the installers, and the MS development DLLs that never shipped as part of the OS, tons of new applications, tools and utilities, codecs, et
If you take any fundamental feature of the NT product base that has become XP or Vista and try to compare it to a DOS/GUI hybrid OS you need to stop and compare what 'weight' the differences would have.
For example, when you start adding in Multi-languages, full Unicode support, or even the Font sizes to support the Unicode specifications, you are adding literally 100mb of space there ALONE.
Next add in security which DID not exist in Win9X, and this is NOT light security it is a full token based security system that EXTENDS beyond just the FS. And this is not even mentioning NTFS encryption abilities, journaling abilities, compression abilities, etc.
Also realize that a significant amount of the OS install is for a backup of the install media and drivers so you don't have to grab the DVD when adding new hardware or if a system file gets changed so the OS can self repair. Just in drivers alone Vista supports approximately 500 times the devices Win95 did, and just the INF files for this alone for these devices, not even including the binaries is over 40mb of data.
See how quick this starts to add up?
Now let's add in basic system disk usages, like shadow copies, system restore, larger pagefiles and hibernation file support ALL OF WHICH Win9X did not have to deal with with the exception of the pagefile and it was usually dynamic and around 200mb in Win9x. So once Vista is installed the OS is already shadowing files, managing at least one restore point, and has 2-6gb of data just for the pagefile and hibernation store.
Arguing the difference between any NT based OS and Win9X is easy for anyone that understands the massive changes in OS over the years and the difference between an assembly optimized single purpose OS to a portable scalable OS. As for features this gives users that you DIDN'T have in Win95, there is better threading, better caching, security, full networking services, multi-cpu support,(Vista even adds multi GPU support, preemptive GPU scheduling, and GPU RAM Virtualization ), and with NT there is also platform independence like running on anything from Itanium to x86 to x64 with barely more than a recompile because of the code portability that doesn't 'quite' compile as tight as was allowed with the Win9X OSes. You also have a lot of 'high' end services, servers, and features from things like *nix based printing support, SNMP management all the back to user seen features like RDP (remote desktop/terminal services), concurrent multi-user login support, etc etc.
Now to argue why Vista uses more HD than XP, start with the basic features of XP, then add in Media Center, Tablet PC Edition, and then start with support for a NEW API system for the graphics, audio, networking, printing, video, and even the animation API sets as well as the communication APIs, and this has to CO-EXIST with the older APIs as Vista still allows basic GDI based printer drivers, kernel XP video drivers, XP audio drivers in addition to the new driver models, and it also has internal compatibility layers so that the XPS printing system 'seamlessly' talks to older GDI printers or older applications printing using GDI technology or old Audio software or old Video software, and will ensure that they all convert BOTH ways so that old and new applications can use both old and new devices.
To further the XP Vista comparison, you then have to add in all the 'Vista' visible features like the search system(which even indexes ink, can do OCR on image documents, and even index voice notes so that recorded conversations can be text searched), the Text to Speech, the speech recognition, the
I'm still trying to figure out what XP and Vista do that Windows 95 didn't, which requires them to take up so much more HD space than it did.
If you are serious, then now you know why people call you the 'special' one.
How could someone posting on SlashDot truly be this stupid, clueless, or are you just intentionally trying to troll?
And if you really don't 'get it', then I suggest you spend sometime actually reading about or using a modern OS.
Clinton believed they were there, because at the time Saddam was refusing to let UN inspectors do their job. By the time Bush had invaded, the UN inspectors had already been in and found nothing.
And Clinton took action against Iraq for the removal and obstruction of the inspectors and withing a few months, inspectors were back on the ground.
The dirty little secret is Bushies keep telling people that prior to Bush's war, Iraq threw out the inspectors; however, Bush is the one that pulled the inspectors out of Iraq to force the war, not Saddam.
Go read any book or article by any of the inspectors, the US yanked them, not Saddam prior to the war.
Vista is new and replaces XP, so obviously Vista will be increasing from near zero upwards.
OSX has been around for a long while now, so it is hard to expect sudden changes.
Although I agree with you, I think the point being missed is the 'predicted' mass exodus from Windows that OS X and other *nix users predicted because they saw Vista as a failure like WinME.
So in this regard, Vista has held up to the MS promised hype and is more secure, stable, and flexible and has enough 'visible' features that users are moving forward with it instead of running and trying other OSes.
The OS X and *nix industry REALLY needs to stop waiting for MS to fall on their butts and instead hit hard to not 'emulate' or be as good as, but to blow away the features offered in Windows.
This includes revolutions in everything from core technologies to compete with NT's morphic nature to new UI concepts that lead to the next generation. And these are two areas where other OSes could lead as MS is more conservative about vast drastic paradigm changes.
I'm telling them to wait until the draconian DRM, Activation on corp editions, MS Spyware, and other cruft gets removed, and the EULA gets updated so it's closer to the old XP / win2k version
This is almost the most retarded post I have seen. Do you even have a f**king clue what you are talking about?
The scary part is you are acting like you are some 'consulting' authority that is giving this horribly incorrect advice to your customers?
Holy cow...
but the vast majority of Windows drivers reside entirely in kernelspace
Um... No they don't unless you still think Windows 95/98 is 'Windows' of today.
Hmmm, possibly just displaying lack of knowledge here, but doesn't pervasive sort of mean "included in every layer and possible application" (sort of synonymous with "ubiquitous")? Most unlikely, I don't mean to bash Windows here, actually the more of that they can cram in there the better for people using it (true for every OS), but "extending pervasiveness" seems to be somewhat of an oxymoron in my understanding.
Well it would be described as this. NT started off with a strong architecture that was not limited by older micro or mono kernel constraints. So NT had a running start of the non Win32 portion of the OS being pervasively multi-threaded.
However as Win32 has evolved and applications like Explorer that are at the heart of what people see as Windows, this 'level' of prevasive multi-threading has not been as consistent as exists in the underlying NT OS architecture.
So in a way you could say it is an oxymoron, but if you define Windows based on the inherent subsystem lines of the OS, it makes sense.
So NT itself it is already there, and Win32/Win64 are partially there with some applications needing a higher level of threading implemented.
The NT core in Vista is highly threaded and even the lower levels of the subsystem are as well, but when you get down to applications like Movie Maker in Vista it is not 'fully' threaded as far as it should be, as it does split off the conversion and processing in threads quite well, but the UI could use more threading so that while it is processing you get more just a progress dialog box.
So yes the OS itself has full pervasive threading, just not all the applicaitons or components of each subsystem do. (The same is true of the BSD and other Subsystems that run alongside the Win32 subsystem.)
And yes the Win32 subsystem thing is confusing to many, as Win32 acts like an independant OS running on the NT architecture, having its own kernel etc that is separate from the other running NT allowed subsystems. But this is also one of the things that earns NT respect with OS theorists, having a unique client/server kernel architecture that hosts subsystem OS concepts easily.
Take Care
Well, my XP regularly hangs - that is:
* Click with the Mouse - nothing happens.
* Move the Mouse - nothing happens.
* Type on the Keyboard - nothing happens.
* Type Ctrl-Alt-Del - nothing happens.
* Type Shift-Ctrl-Esc - Task manager does not appear.
Especially the last one is bad as the task manager should enable you to kill evil jobs.
Ah, at work especially the (on access) virus checker grinds the system to a hold.
If this is how XP runs on your system, I would hate it as much as you do. This is NOT how XP behaves, and even though it is not as refined in I/O locking or scheduling granularity as Vista, it is HARD to EVER get XP to a point where the mouse, taskmanager, etc are not 100% responsive.
I would suggest you have some major hardware issue, or you are running truly horrible anti-virus software that is tied into the kernel in ways XP wasn't designed for, like McAfee and Synamtec do.
With any NT based Windows OS, if an application tries to suck CPU or becomes unresponsive, only that application alone should ever be non-responsive and on Vista this is even reduced as Vista takes back ownership of the Application Frame so even a hung application can't obstruct its own Window even.
Seriously, if XP behaved like you suggest, no one would ever use it, as what you are describing sounds more like Win 3.1 or Win9X with the 16bit mutext going nuts.
On a 486? I don't think so.
Technically, no since Vista is compiled for newer CPU instructions and the 486 compiling has been depricated.
However, Vista would hand 99% of playing these video off to the GPU scheduler in Vista which is PRE-EMPTIVE(unlike ANY OTHER OS) and the CPU does virtually NOTHING to play video like this.
assume those 8 movies are all small so they all fit in memory and don't let the hard drive become the bottleneck, and low-resolution so they don't engage the tilt bits [auckland.ac.nz]? Vista may be a bit faster than XP, but that doesn't make it a useful operating system for people who want to go where they want to today, rather than go to whichever sandbox Microsoft has approved today
See, more FUD.
You realize that Vista Ultimate even uses HD 1080 Video for WALLPAPER with virtually NO CPU usage, with transparent windows painting on it, right?
And it runs concurrently with Videos playing in the foreground and even High performance OpenGL or DirectX games running inside a Window with the HD wallpaper running. You can even set the game to be 50% transparent and not lose FPS and see the freaking video playing smoothly behind it.
I get so tired of mindless or non-experienced responses.
Everyone bitches that MS takes other technologies and extends and embraces, but when the technology is fairly good like BeOS everyone here is so stupid to assume MS never looked at BeOS or the threading or scheduling in the OS and would have implemented good ideas from it? Give me a break.