Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released 334
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has finally released the final build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 'There are a few significant additions that are included in SP2: Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista, Windows Connect Now (WCN) is now in the Wi-Fi Configuration, and exFAT file system supports UTC timestamps. The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes.' A list of other notable changes is available on TechNet. SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet, but it will be 'during the coming months.'"
Like Digging Through People's Trash (Score:4, Insightful)
I can almost imagine the developer sitting at his desk getting an e-mail from their issue management system that there's a problem with Fc.exe (file compare) ... only to have him realize that his for loop that iterates over the buffer that reads the files should have the while conditions of <= 128 and not simply < 128!
This is forgivable, I code some pretty stupid errors sometimes.
What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!
Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash (Score:5, Insightful)
"What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!"
Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.
Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash (Score:5, Insightful)
Operating system experience updates
* SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.
Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
The industry rule of thumb for a software developer is about 10 lines of code per hour, on average, over the lifetime of the project. According to Microsoft, Windows XP has about 40 million SLOC.
Without business staff, PMs and SDETs, that's 4 million man-hours. That's 1923 full time man-years. Assuming Microsoft pays their SDEs $80,000 on average, those 40 million lines of code cost them $153,840,000.
Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?
Re:Windows Search 4.0?! (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, Windows Search 4.0 can be turned off. This on the other hand cannot:
SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.
And that, my friends, is why I never use MS' built in media players. Ever.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello. Open source software, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
"I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not"
Hell, I expect there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in open source software, until somebody -other than those actually responsible for the code- submit a patch.
I'm looking at you, silly little Thunderbird bug #92165 from 2001/Jul/24.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash (Score:5, Insightful)
So Atheism is the result of a divide by zero error? The result as done by hand makes sense: DNE, "Does Not Exist"
No, athiests are just like monotheists; they just believe in one less god.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe it's the initial stuff that was crap. But you know what, that makes it an even better reason to stay with what works. Stuff that has more of the bugs fixed.
I was using Win2K after WinXP SP2 came out. And Win2K was quite stable. The few blue screens in years was due to hardware going bad, or a bad NIC driver.
I'm now using WinXP SP3 on the desktop and ubuntu for my server. And both have been stable. I wouldn't use WinXP "the original release".
I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...
I think I'll skip Vista. Maybe Win7 or something else would be stable enough for me
Don't get me wrong I'm grateful for the guinea pigs and early adopters. It's just not a good idea for everyone to be an early adopter and go Vista.
Personally, I've seen Vista and Win7, and it sure looks like MS has gone nuts. They've changed a lot of "tech" UI stuff for no apparent good reason.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think UAC is great. I get home from work and my daughter says "What's your password because I need to install XYZ" and I smile. I can let her do as she pleases on my laptop and not worry about her install the latest Malware, Crapware (iTunes), etc.
The only time I've grumbled is when Firefox auto-updates while she's using it and it can't finish its upgrade without my password. (great engrish Inda)
Re:You Joke, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually there are many good reasons to drive a manual car. Total control on performance, fuel consumption, and generally not being a lazy geezer.
Re:Wireless streaming (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think that's a bug in the OS, and not just typical wifi packet loss issues? Streaming multimedia is *not* one of the things that wifi is good for-- if you're really having troubles with this, I'd recommend running cable.
Or at the very least trying it with a different OS to determine whether it's Vista or your wifi link at fault. Of course that would involve critical thinking instead of just knee-jerking every single computer problem to be Microsoft's fault...
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for Firefox auto-updates, that is firefox's fault. I've had goofiness when I hit cancel on the privilidge escalation dialog, but IMHO Firefox should be able to just continue working nomrally if it doesn't update.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.
I make sure all my Windows stuff builds as 64bit and I test on Vista64, but really for most applications there's no point.
If you need >4GB of address space it would be useful, but most applications can be written not to. Databases are apparently an exception. Still it's a bad idea to assume that you can memory map a huge file into memory, and that's the killer app for 64 bits.
In terms of performance most benchmarks put 64 and 32 bit neck and neck - ±a few percent%. Sure you have more registers, but all x86 chips use caching and register renaming to make that less significant than you'd think. 32 bit code thunks on 64 bit Windows, but the thunking mechanism is very lightweight. I've never checked but I imagine that integers are movzx'd from the stack to a register and pointers are movsx'd. You apparantly need far jump to switch from 32 to 64 bit too. But my guess is that all this stuff was agreed by Microsoft and AMD so that it ends up being efficient.
Re:It Just Works (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats the exact same shit people said about XP. Its unbelievable how much people forget. Win2k was the best OS ever when XP dropped. Everyone _EVERYONE_ swore up and down that they would never install XP and its "cartoon" interface. 7 years later and I'm the only one still running win2k. I just upgraded my home PC to XP last year.
My point is that its always the same. People will eventually have to upgrade to vista for one reason or another. This does not mean that the initial problems are solved necessarily, or that the old version of windows is inferior. Your comment of "what was the problem with it again?" illustrates this perfectly.
Re:Vista in the enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm wondering why you have a problem with the winsxs folder in Vista, but not in XP.
Windows Side by Side support was introduced in Windows XP [wikipedia.org]. It's for loading multiple versions of DLLs. Installing various versions of .NET or Visual Studio tends to bloat this directory up regardless of which OS version you're using.
If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, you'll even have versions of DLLs for different architectures than you're currently running: x86, x64, and Itanium stuff are all installed as I recall.
Re:is this that different from open source? (Score:3, Insightful)
This "value" is non-existant to 99% of the "users" in the world and I seriously wish it would stop being touted as some advantage to open source.
Fact is, for anything "open source" to escape the dungen of nerddom, it has to be being used by a lot of people that do not read code, are not programmers and have no hope of ever looking at the source. And, more importantly, no desire to ever do so. They want something that "just works". Period.
Paying someone to look at the source for you isn't really a viable option. If they are familar with the project then maybe they can be useful to both the project and to someone paying them to look at it. However, give someone not familiar with the project anything larger than the source for cat and they are likely to spend a lot of time learning about it. And someone is going to be paying for that time. Or do you think someone should just spend hundreds of hours of their time learning something like gawk or Apache for the fun of it? I suppose they should in the open source universe where nobody has to pay rent or grocery bills.
Software today has grown quite a bit past the point where you can pull some contractor off the street, sit them down at an unfamiliar code base and have them be productive. Some commercial software development has this as a goal, a future objective. Yet to be achieved. I've never seen an open source project that has even attempted the level of self-documentation required for that. Heck, I see lots of K&R style C code without any function prototypes and I would put function prototypes at the beginning of a long list of requirements for self-documenting code. And all of this ignores the real user need.
What users need is for stuff to work. They put in a CD and install Ubuntu and it works. Period. If they need something else, they can install it in a few minutes without digging around for prerequisite libraries. We're not there yet with Linux, but it is closer than it was. Windows is pretty much there in terms of overall usability and OSX has been there for a while.
Bugs? Of course there are known but not disclosed bugs. Often these are things that were discovered by developers that stand zero chance of ever being encountered by a user. Politically, you aren't going to get these disclosed because (a) they aren't important to users and (b) it feeds the idea that there are endless bugs in software. Of course there are endless bugs when you have a code base of millions of lines of code. But nobody wants to advertise it, especially those bugs that have an extremely low chance (or zero chance) of being encoutered.
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference. Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)