Preventing Another Vista-like Release With Windows 7 396
CRE writes "An article at the OS News site details how Microsoft could best avoid Windows 7 becoming another Vista-esque release. The author advises Microsoft to basically split Windows in two. Windows 7 would be a new operating system based on the proven Windows NT kernel, but with a completely new user interface, with backwards compatibility provided by VMs. In addition, to please business customers and other people concerned with backwards compatibility, Microsoft should create 'Windows Legacy', basically the current Windows, which will receive only security and bug fixes. Relatedly, APCMag is reporting that Microsoft has moved Julie Larson-Green (the driving force behind Office 2007's Ribbon UI) over to work on Windows 7's interface."
Re:How about pulling a Mac? (Score:5, Informative)
But what makes you think Windows is less stable and less secure than *Nix or OSX? Other than people and their dogs running Windows as administrators (that's more an education problem vs Windows security), Windows is not less secure than *Nix or OSX. In fact, things like file system security is better than *nix, IMO. Windows ACLs just own, it's a breeze to use them versus the obscure *Nix FS security.
And for stability? The only time my Windows box crashed was because of piece of shit ATI drivers. People need to get away from the Windows 9x crashing every 3 minutes mentality. XP is rock solid (didn't drive Vista enough to tell on it's stability). I am currently running a VWare GSX server on Windows 2003, the only time I reboot is to install OS patches. Crashes so far: zero, nada, zilch. Been running it for 7+ months. Hardware: Do it your own el-cheapo components.
The vast majority of Windows crashes are due to defective hardware and/or drivers. Ever installed an unstable driver on Linux? Ever had a hardware failure on OSX?
Businesses don't want the "Advantage" (Score:5, Informative)
For example. here where I work, we had Vista running everything most office workers need; Office, IE, SCT, Even wintegrate, which is an ancient terminal program from 96. There was three reasons we didn't go to vista. One was the System requirements we were not ready to meet, another was that F-secure did not have an official Vista version at the time, but the real reason we decided to stay with XP was simple. The Genuine Advantage is for lack of a better word a total pain in the ass.
In vista there are two ways of handling corporate keys. One with a Key Management server and the other with a Multiple Activation Key. Under KMS. You are required to have a KMS server on your network, tie it to DNS and give it your VLK (which can be changed if your old key is disabled and propagated to networked PC's). once you do that it will activate any Business version of vista automatically every 3-6 months without entering any keys, but if the computer is no longer on the network (say a Laptop) after 3 months, the system locks you out in a reduced functionality mode which can be described as useless.
The Second method; MAK isn't much better. basically MS handles the KMS for you. this means that you don't have to worry about traveling users not being disconnected from your network for too long since it works over the internet, but now MS is handling your activations, and you have to contact them every time you hit your quota in order to activate more windows. (which isn't as bad as it sounds. According to MS activation isn't counted against your licence count, and you can request indefinitely) However, if MS sees a huge activation spike. (say your activation rate average goes from 100 a day to 10000000 a day) they disable your key (which brings us to reduced functionality mode for all MAK'ed PC's) and then you must go to each and every MAK managed PC and change the key to a new one supplied by MS.
So basically, to use Vista you either have a server on your network and pray no one's laptop cripples while their on a business trip, or you contact MS until the break of dawn and pray that no one pirates your key so you don't have to touch 1000 Crippled PC's with the Dreaded "YOU ARE A PIRATE!" message
Office 2007, however, doesn't have the "YOU ARE A PIRATE!" system built in it and still has the old VLK licencing system like XP. I can guarantee that it's adoption in business is much higher than Vista. I know we're using it here, but Vista is sitting on the shelf.
Deja vu (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Try Linux (Score:1, Informative)
I'm going from memory here, so someone correct me if I'm wrong!
Re:Try Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Lets play "Guess which user has a weak password"! The game is much easier if you start with all of the user names.
Nice rant there. You can turn it off (first), and second, the username is not supposed to be part of the secret, just the password is (I know for example your Slashdot username is Gription. Got weak password?). Ubuntu will also show (among other distros) list of users on startup.
Re:Vista is not a failure (Score:3, Informative)
Second, you can develop 64bit drivers all you want. Vista, by default, will only load signed 64bit drivers. You can either obtain a signing cert from a company like Verisign (for about $400), or you can TURN OFF THAT RESTRICTION. Wow, is that so hard?
Lastly, I have no idea what you're talking about regarding UAC. If you turn it *off* it disallows admin's the right to write to the temp folder? What temp folder? In your profile? Is it a permissions issue?
Re:10 years ago (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How about pulling a Mac? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, they already do this [microsoft.com]:
Re:Vista is not a failure (Score:3, Informative)
Most studies show that Vista is about the same as XP perf wise when tested via benchmarks, and overall "feels" more responsive than XP. The key here, I think, is RAM. Vista is very aggressive at caching things it thinks you'll need, and because of this it can take much better advantage of RAM. 1GB is a minimum, 2GB seems to be a sweet spot. Considering a 1GB DIMM costs about $70, it's not that bad an upgrade.
Can you describe your machine's stats?
Is NT a good foundation? (Score:2, Informative)
Thom Holwerda puts forward a convincing argument that Windows needs two operating systems, a backward compatible operating system and one on which future application development can be done. He is far less convincing in his contention that the Windows NT kernel is a good design for a long range committment as the basis for future software inovations at Microsoft.
Windows development got into trouble through poor design. In order to bundle application with Windows Microsoft consistently designed applications to be non-modular. Pieces of each application were scattered throughout Microsoft code, including the kernel. This meant that the total bundled software package became more and more unwieldy as development progressed. Adding a new application entailed rewriting all Microsoft software instead of simply adding a new module containing the new functions on top of the existing stack. As Microsoft's software became more and more unwieldy the development effort slowed until in Longhorn it failed.
Now Thom Holwerda is proposing that Microsoft start over by taking the NT kernel and throw all of the entertwined legacy code out of the kernel. This will make development on NT a lot easier. But what about the current set of applications? DRM will still be intertwined through the NT kernel and probably the other current applications will be also. This lack of modular design will still hamper development on NT even though by getting rid of the legacy code the development effort now becomes doable. And what of future applications? Are they going to be intertwined into the NT kernel just like the existing applications? If so, then the new NT development tree will eventually suffer a Longhorn like crisis serveral years down the road.
Microsoft might be able to slough off a lot of legacy cruft by switching to a NT kernel with the legacy code removed but the basic design flaws remain to bedevil future development of Windows NT. Microsoft would be best off to design a new operating sytem from scratch and get rid of the lack of modularity once and for all.
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Steve Stites
Re:Try Linux (Score:4, Informative)
(Oh, and I just told Synaptic to mark Gnome and every package that depended on it for removal, and it said that 315MB would be freed. Vanilla gnome with no other apps installed, then, must take up less than 315MB. I think KDE uses a bit more. Linux+basic terminal apps+X takes up MAYBE 200MB, so the 500MB low end of my estimate was closest to reality for a no-app (or, rather, apps comparable to a vanilla Windows intallation) system with a full-featured GUI.
Re:How about pulling a Mac? (Score:1, Informative)
I can tell because Outlook 2007 doesn't use the Ribbon interface.
Re:Try Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Animated system tours
High resolution graphics (especially Vista)
Backup copies of most important system files (XP is essentially installed twice, FYI)
Drivers for every printer made before the OS was released
Backup copies of every patch and service pack ever installed
Speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis engines
Larger dictionaries for spelling and grammar checking
Fonts for foreign languages
Registry and filesystem snapshots (System Restore and Shadow Copies)
Thumbnail caching for pictures
Document and filesystem indexing
Copies of different versions of system files for programs that can't use newer versions
aaaand
Copies of the installers for most programs you've installed (to facilitate that "repair" option). Go ahead - check out the folder size on C:\Windows\Installer, and C:\MSOCache if you've installed Office. Don't forget to collect your jaw before you leave.
Now, the real question that you have to ask is - is it worth it? I'm inclined to say "yes" for almost everything except the backups of patches/service packs, and those tours. The rest contributes to my ease of recovery when something goes wrong, the stability and compatibility of the system, the time saved not having to dig up drivers for when I plug in that old-ass HP LaserJet, the speeding up of the browse through my pictures, and the text-to-speech engine is just a plain bit of fun (you can't deny having enjoyed making it say stupid things).
Re:Try Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but what about compatibility mode? Well, it's true - with WinXP they included this fancy new "Compatibility Mode" feature that Win2K didn't come with, that let you (so the story goes) run programs just like they ran in the version of Windows they were originally programmed for. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But wait! That exact same compatibility mode was also made available in Win2K. That's right. It was a part of SP4 that was obviously not much publicized, due to that same "compatibility mode" being a selling point for XP. (Hey look kids, a new version of the NT OS that supports DOS and Win95 programs!!)
So please, I beg you start listing your "lots of games" that work in XP but not 2K. I assure you when actually check them all out on a Win2K install with SP4 and the latest updates, your list will end up pretty short or outright non-existent.
Re:An OS lesson from... STAR WARS??? (Score:3, Informative)
The nearest equivalent in mundane computers is the serial or parallel port printer, which will attach to and work with just about any PC from any era. (We'll ignore the problem of driver availability for this discussion... tho I use the HPLJ2 driver across over 20 years worth of PCs and a dozen OSs, and it works with a wide variety of printers... so even that isn't an insoluble problem.)
As to your parent post, this 8 year old computer I'm using agrees with you 100% -- it would really suck to have those years of faithful service rewarded by being relegated to the scrapheap, even tho it's still not only fully functional, but also does everything I really need done. After all, most of the time, the computer need only outpace the user's typing skills, since it spends most of its life waiting.
Re:Try Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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