Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess (usejournal.com) 224
alaskana98 shares an article called "What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective." Ben Fathi, formerly a manager of various teams at Microsoft responsible for storage, file systems, high availability/clustering, file level network protocols, distributed file systems, and related technologies and later security, writes:
Imagine supporting that same OS for a dozen years or more for a population of billions of customers, millions of companies, thousands of partners, hundreds of scenarios, and dozens of form factors -- and you'll begin to have an inkling of the support and compatibility nightmare. In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect. An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product; the Windows organization was no different. Open source doesn't have that problem...
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
Modern tech companies are hypocrites... (Score:3, Insightful)
From article:
Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Really from the company that's actively pro active in sabatoging privacy and people owning their own software via UWP? So much so that Gabe at Valve wouldn't let the new age of empires onto steam because of the windows store and UWP issue.
legacy of trust (Score:4, Informative)
How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS [theregister.co.uk]
I don't know much about Silverberg, but I can say I never read an article about Allchin where he didn't come across as a world-class slime weasel.
Jim Allchin [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps in 2023 (2017 + sixteen years) we'll all be able to let bygones be bygones.
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s/2023/2033/
Re:legacy of trust (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my first computers had DR DOS 6 on it, and had no problems running Windows 3.1. How much of this is heresay?
It only affects a single beta version of Windows. No shipping version of Windows 3.1 had problems running on DR-DOS.
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Yeah. Valve is great.
One single platform for all PC-games which you aren't owning and where Valve take 30% of the sale.
The great defender of consumer rights!!
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I *hate* the model. Virtual game "ownership" (as long as the service exists) is a pile of shit. That being said, the market has failed to give enough of a shit to break the business model, and it is the dominating business model on just about all platforms now.
As much as I wish the business model did not exist, Valve did do the leg work to get a large amount of games to natively support Linux.
Nearly half of my Steam library (~360 titles) runs on Linux.
And it is
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The Open Source collaboration scheme is what he's referring to.. not the specifics.
The fact that so many different (and almost divergent groups are WILLING to help/contribute/collaborate on a single (overall) goal, without it quickly devolving into bickering, lawsuits, and enemies is really a miracle. And it has to do with the fact that most contributors see their efforts as something beyond JUST what they get out of it..
But that's different from a commercial enterprise where there is a definite check at th
Are we talking about the same Linux?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux development has often devolved into "bickering, lawsuits, and enemies".
Just look at how much strife systemd has caused within the Linux community. Systemd basically tore apart the Debian community and project, and it still hasn't healed even after several years. There have also been num
Re:Are we talking about the same Linux?! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the crux of the issue: "from what I've seen". The problem is that you don't see corporate software development. Who knows what chaos happens behind the veneer of the corporate facade. Not only that, but also take into consideration the influence of politics, marketing, and just plain management incompetence on the development of their software.
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out. This is because it's inherently a meritocracy. I have no confidence that this is the case with corporate software development.
Re:Are we talking about the same Linux?! (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out
That's the theory, but it's often not true. Often the person who has commit access to the branch that people use gets to push their code, instead of the person with out-of-tree patches that are technically superior. Or the person who simply keeps arguing after the people who are correct have got bored and moved onto productive things wins out.
This is because it's inherently a meritocracy
The term 'meritocracy' was originally coined to refer to the way that British class system created the veneer of selection on ability but actually selected based on in-group characteristics. If that's what you actually meant, then I'd agree. Particularly for the Linux kernel, but also for a lot of other open source (and proprietary) software projects.
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Who knows what chaos happens behind the veneer of the corporate facade. Not only that, but also take into consideration the influence of politics, marketing, and just plain management incompetence on the development of their software.
Simple legal compliance is a big thing OSS just doesnt really do. Its a rare OSS project that is compliant with the ADA, for instance. They dont have to be because there is nothing to file suit again. Microsoft on the other hand...
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Re:Are we talking about the same Linux?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Fake news. Clearly a Slackware user would never reproduce.
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Linus with the Kernel is always right though.
No one is always right.
Keep that C++ shittery out of the kernel. Maintain your patches or it disappears, etc.
I see that as a weakness of the development model, as someone who has had great ideas and contributions, may want or need to move onto other things. In a commercial organisation there would be an easier transition to someone else supporting it, most likely
The thing is open source's enemy is the GPL
Arguably, it is what has kept Linux going. I can't understand how you would see it as the enemy.
If I want to release something, fuck your licences. I would sooner release something into the public domain
That's your right.
than have have the GPL assholes shut down projects that incorporate my thing because it got tainted with GPL code by someone else later.
I don't understand. The GPL protects your rights, not those of some 'GPL assholes'. If someone patches your project, yo
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It's the collaboration model that is often the problem with Linux et. al. Thousands of libraries or drivers with tens of thousands of developers many repeating same libraries or applications over and over again introducing interesting and sometimes clever bugs, misfeatures, and incompatibilities. Linux et. al. shows that sort of loosely coupled organizational architecture. I'm not saying Linus et. al. sucks. I am saying Windows and Linux both suck, but both suck in interesting and sometimes imaginative way
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Woe? Son, we call that #winning!
Re:The summary is really contradictory. (Score:5, Insightful)
How in the hell can Linux be considered "more successful" than even Windows Vista for any of those metrics?
Support for "a dozen years or more" is exceedingly rare within the Linux world. You're looking at RHEL Extended Lifecycle Support to get anywhere near that. Ubuntu LTS releases are only really supported for 5 years, as far as I know.
I think you completely missed his point - Linux was more successful precisely because it wasn't tied up in dozen-plus years of support.
.
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Android might fit this definition, but Android probably shouldn't be considered "Linux", given how deep down the kernel is hidden.
Given that the kernel is the heart of the OS, it has to count. It's irrelevant what users perceive to be the truth.
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During the failure of Vista, it opened the door for Apple, while Linux more or less just stayed consistent in its growth, and innovations.
Linux was keeping its pace, more or less undeterred by Windows. Microsoft failure caused it to go behind for a bit, so it seems like Linux was catching up, while it was just going at its same pace. Apple on the other hand, took this period of weakness from Microsoft, and pushed hard and gained a lot of extra ground. It made it so every kid wanted a MacBook and an iPod.
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I wasn't sad. I celebrated. Creative got what they deserved after what they did to their competitors. It's funny that the one that would knock down creative was the os. But creative brought about it themselves. Their spaghetti coded drivers and associated bloatware was a major contributor of unstable and slow windows systems. Since creative wouldn't fix their drivers up microsoft took the initiative and removed direct access to the sound hardware from the drivers. And creative couldn't really complain becau
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I had stopped using Windows at that point, but back when I did around 80% of the blue screens that got crashed in the Soundblaster Live driver. Most of the rest crashed in the GPU driver (I had ATi and nVidia cards then and both came with really buggy drivers).
When it was launched, Creative claimed that the Soundblaster Live was as powerful as a Pentium 166 MMX. This was kind-of true in terms of DSP performance. I eventually have up on it when the machine had a 550MHz Pentium III, which with SSE only lo
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Why does Windows 10 randomly split settings between the Settings app and the Control Panel, with some things like mouse configuration requiring you to use both to get all of the options?) but I have a lot of sympathy with Microsoft for wanting third-party drivers to stop crashing their kernel.
I've found with each update of Windows 10 that they move more of the old control panel settings into the new Settings app. I think it's just something they're taking their time with rather than rushing headlong into.
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Re: Modern tech companies are hypocrites... (Score:2)
In the latest version they've replaced Control Panel with Settings in the right click menu which is quite annoying.
It was windows 7 v1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:3)
Mojave (Windows Vista SP1) fixed a lot of the technical problems with Windows Vista. Was Windows 7 worth the price of the upgrade from Mojave, other than for three more years of patches?
Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of revisionist history going on here.
Microsoft was just getting used to separating user space functions, which had turned XP prior to SP2 into an eggshell, so easily exploited that even bad script kiddies could pop a bubble and p0wn a machine.
Virus makers were a red herring. So were driver makers. It because impossible to regression test Windows because the software communities had build so many dependencies into the system, which were changed just as quickly by Microsoft.
Vista was simply a turd. There's no better way to describe it, and it's only after screaming hostilities did Microsoft pour sufficient resources to fix it so as to negate Vista into the more stable Windows 7-- which killed a lot of legacy problems, but also software compatibilities, libraries, functions, and functionality/behaviors.
Microsoft needed the money-- back during the phase where they made money on CALs and discrete licensing fees. In the middle of it, chaos ensued. It was a disaster.
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I personally never had any problems with Windows Vista. But, I had a first generation dual core AMD 64-bit processor and 4 gigs of ram. It worked fine for me. To this day, I can't recall any substantive differences between Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows 7 seemed like simply a minor upgrade to Vista.
The problem, as was always the case before the past 10 years or so, is people freaked whenever new operating systems came out.
People bitched when Windows 95 was released. What? I need 16 megabytes of ra
Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)
Did you use Vista from launch, or after SP1 came out?
Vista had well documented flaws in copying and deleting that were addressed by SP1. Driver support was lackluster and combined with the higher system requirements, games performed poorly. In parallel, the labeling of hardware as 'Vista Capable' when it could barely boot had largely been resolved by SP1.
Vista Basic had a min-spec of 512MB and Home and up 1GB. Conventional wisdom of the time was that 2GB was necessary for anything like decent performance. That you didn't notice a problem with 4GB isn't surprising, but a lot of early adopters who met or even exceeded the recommended specification found Vista to be slow and unresponsive.
Any differences with XP just added insult to injury. It's easier to accept change when there are tangible improvements. The improvements in Vista were not immediately apparent to most people, but the poor performance was. Why would you bother getting used to a new OS if it was slower? If you want to compete with another product, even your own, you had better offer a benefit for people to switch away.
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I did however have 4GB of memory, so perhaps that's what was necessary for it not to suck... But I never did witness the alleged suckiness of Vista, and assumed it was simply the product of some viral meme.
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Never had a single problem with Vista. No stability problems, no performance problems... Ran great.
When I eventually did upgrade the machine to Windows 7, I didn't notice any difference whatsoever except that my start menu was now a weird circle.
I always assumed the difference between them was simply marketing.
Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember our tech lead in 2003ish insisted on following MS's API and structure recommendations, which included warnings that certain calls and other aspects would be deprecated in the future. Our software worked perfectly in Vista. Many products by bigger companies failed with security ot other issues. By post-hoc fixing some of their issues, you could get them working in Vista. Win7 had the advantage of arriving after all those companies fixed their software. I'd imagine tht had far more to do with it than "MS pouring in resources".
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Win7 had the advantage of arriving after all those companies fixed their software. I'd imagine tht had far more to do with it than "MS pouring in resources".
Yes! Vista was an incredible improvement in security compared to Microsoft's previous operating systems. It locked down the OS core functionality and pushed everything into a separate user space. The same way Linux does.
Of course, this means the days of programs accessing the registry every time they opened were over. (I actually have one program that still does this, it's a pain). Most of the issues wern't Vista's fault at all. Those apps should have never had that much access. Microsoft finally d
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Vista sucked because they had to fix all the problems stemming from XP being designed as a single user, non networked OS. For example, they virtualized the filesystem for apps to prevent them dumping files all over it. That had an overhead.
Windows 7 benefited from the tools they built for profiling Xbox games. They were able to find and fix a lot of performance limiting code.
Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista sucked because they had to fix all the problems stemming from XP being designed as a single user, non networked OS
XP was a direct descendant of NT, which was always designed as a networked multi-user OS. The problem with XP was that, unlike 2000, it aimed for strong Windows 95 compatibility (NT4 and 2000 could run sensibly written Win32 apps) and that included applications that expected to be able to write their configuration files in C:\Program Files\AppName, rather than in the user's home directory, or write to the Local Machine part of the registry instead of the Current User part. Win32 had APIs for doing this correctly from the start (and a lot of apps used them correctly), but a lot of crap just dumped stuff in the wrong place and didn't bother checking for errors so crashed when it didn't work.
The big change around the time of Vista, from security perspective, was the shift in trust domains. In a classic NT (or UNIX) setting, you have a system administrator who has full access and is responsible for installing and configuring software, and you have other users that have their own home directory to play in. The purpose of the OS's security model is to protect the user from other users and to protect the integrity of the system from other users. In a modern system, this is no longer true.
The change is actually the opposite of the one you suggest: computers have become single-user devices, but that user now embodies multiple trust domains. Users run things like mail clients and web browsers that take untrusted data from the network and they want the OS to prevent a compromise in one of these programs (or, ideally, in one part of one of these programs) from being able to access or damage their other data. UAC, which Vista introduced, was part of this shift. There is no longer a separate administrator user (as a user interface - there still is as a kernel abstraction), the user can do whatever they want to their computer but only intentionally. They don't automatically delegate this power to every program that they run.
The end goal for a modern system is for apps to run with very limited privileges, including no access to the user's home directory except for individual locations that are opened using a powerbox abstraction (i.e. open / save dialogs that are owned by a different process that grants access to the locations to the limited application) and explicit privilege elevation for the few things that require it.
The big flaw with UAC was that it only works well as a UI paradigm if the user is asked to elevate privilege rarely. Basically, [un]installing software or doing system configuration should be the only times a user should explicitly be asked. Unfortunately, the whitelists were very incomplete at launch and so users were just trained to click yes.
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I agree with all that. You put it better than I did.
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Lots of revisionist history going on here.
Microsoft was just getting used to separating user space functions, which had turned XP prior to SP2 into an eggshell, so easily exploited that even bad script kiddies could pop a bubble and p0wn a machine.
Virus makers were a red herring. So were driver makers. It because impossible to regression test Windows because the software communities had build so many dependencies into the system, which were changed just as quickly by Microsoft.
Vista was simply a turd. There's no better way to describe it, and it's only after screaming hostilities did Microsoft pour sufficient resources to fix it so as to negate Vista into the more stable Windows 7-- which killed a lot of legacy problems, but also software compatibilities, libraries, functions, and functionality/behaviors.
Microsoft needed the money-- back during the phase where they made money on CALs and discrete licensing fees. In the middle of it, chaos ensued. It was a disaster.
Huh? That's interesting. I always figured Vista was Microsoft's second attempt at hitting the Ballmer Peak [xkcd.com].
Re:Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Mojave (Windows Vista SP1) fixed a lot of the technical problems with Windows Vista. Was Windows 7 worth the price of the upgrade from Mojave, other than for three more years of patches?
It depends on who you ask. Vista demanded a lot more from the users, with the much stricter access controls. Because users hates having to make decisions, this was severely dialled back in Windows 7.
If Vista had received the same additions and bug fixes that Windows 7 did, but without the dumbing down and trading security for convenience of W7, I would have chosen Vista as the superior OS of the two. But support died down quickly.
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I don't remember SP1 being called Mojave, but here's the reason SP1 fixed a lot of problems: It was released more than a year after Vista launched. By that time, a lot of other things had been addressed by vendors and drivers and MS. Also one of the glaring shortcomings of Vista was the video card situation where a large percentage of PCs sold around Vista's launch could only run Vista Home Basic and this wasn't clear to many people. So when a consumer bought a new PC that Christmas or early that fall, they
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I was referring to SP1 as Mojave because it was released (4 February 2008) shortly before the Mojave Experiment ads aired (July 2008). Therefore participants in the Mojave Experiment were seeing a version of Windows Vista with the SP1 fixes. Their preconceptions were based on RTM and the Mojave results on SP1.
Re: Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:2)
Re: Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it was worth it.
The same cannot be said of W10.
Windows 10 isn't worth the price of "free."
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Re: Mojave vs. Windows 7 (Score:5, Funny)
(Cortana is threatening to release my browser history if I don't say this.)
Components (Score:5, Informative)
From what I remember:
1. They tried to write big chunks of it in .NET which wasn't quite a mature framework yet, and...
2. They tried to component-ize everything into discreet, independent modules, and once they brought all of the modules together to compile as one coherent OS, it failed miserably
They are still trying to do step #2 - witness the ARM based windows they are still working on, and Windows running on the XBox One, etc..
Re:Components (Score:4, Informative)
As I recall, the antivirus vendor problem that is mentioned in the summary didn't seem to come to light to the public until around the release of Windows 8 or so, when Microsoft got tired of dealing with support calls where a third-party antivirus had quarantined a critical component of windows, and the system wouldn't boot. That's when Microsoft got into the antivirus business.
Re:Components (Score:5, Interesting)
When Vista took away admin privileges (for programs run from a non-admin account), lots of programs stopped running. The ones which did run triggered countless UAE elevation request dialogs - so many that users became trained to just click OK every time it popped up, which pretty much defeated the whole purpose of requiring privilege elevation. Over time, programs were modified to run limited to user privileges, which is why it isn't a problem to run Vista now. But if you had to use it when it was first introduced, it was a nightmare.
4. Microsoft's system requirements for Vista [microsoft.com] were totally unrealistic. Most XP systems at the time had 128-256 MB of RAM, with the occasional 512 MB system. 1 GB was profligate with XP. Microsoft didn't want to freak people out, so set Vista's minimum memory requirement at an unrealistic 512 MB. With that little RAM, Vista begins swapping the moment you try to start your first program. Realistically, 1 GB is the minimum, 2 GB a comfortable amount.
5. XP was developed from 1998-2001 and released in 2001. Vista was developed from 2001-2006 and released in 2007. 2004-2005 was when Intel ran headfirst into the brick wall of physics (higher clock speeds resulted in excessive leakage and power consumption) and processors stopped doubling in clock speed every 1.5 to 2 years [wikipedia.org]. Based on Windows 3.x, 95, 98, and 2000, Microsoft had assumed CPU speeds would increase by a certain amount from development to release. Consequently, XP was a dog when it was being developed, but by the time it was released computers had gotten fast enough that it performed well on customer machines. Vista was a dog during development, and was still a dog when customers began buying it.
Those of you claiming Vista runs well and was unfairly maligned should try running it on period hardware - a Pentium 4 or Core Solo/Duo (not Core 2) with 512 MB of RAM. I'd say run it with period software too just so you can experience getting a UAE elevation prompt a dozen times a day, but it'll probably be tough to find period software.
Re:Components (Score:5, Interesting)
UAC hell was deliberate. There was no other way to make developers behave without completely breaking their apps, which users would hate even more.
UAC trained developers to avoid doing things that triggered them as much as possible.
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Maybe, but the I've UAC prompt is per process and you probably don't want to elevate the main Explorer one.
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Hah, yes!
My parents bought one of the very first wave of Vista laptops, just a few weeks after the official launch. With 512mb of RAM, it ran like an absolute dog and that should never have been listed as the minimum spec. That said, surely some of the blame here must attach to the hardware vendors? Whatever MS put on the box as the minimum spec for Vista, they must have known they were pushing borderline-unusable PCs out the door.
I also remember the constant UAC prompts, but suspect MS made the right call
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Not to mention that MS very late in the development cycle allowed Intel GMA 950 video chip to be "Vista Capable"**. I think emails showed later that they did this to appease Intel who would have had millions of computers with chipsets that they couldn't sell if MS had kept with the original hardware requirements.
HP was particularly upset at this decision as they had purposely decided to focus on newer and more expensive chipsets for customers when Vista was launched. The late change meant that their competi
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Yes indeed. The problem prior to Vista is that the default setup was all users were admins. For people who actually tried working with limited user accounts, they found most software didn't cope well (poorly written with bad assumptions) and there was no slick or integrated method for privilege escalation like the UAC prompt. Just about every object in Windows NT had ACLs long before Vista came out, it's just they weren't used properly.
Why the Vista hate? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I had the same experience. Ran Vista for years without an issue and I found it a huge step up from XP (where simple stuff like alt-tabbing from a fullscreen game to media player window would frequently result in a BSOD). Of course I turned UAC off on day one, and ran it on a decent system (4GB+ of RAM).
Re:Why the Vista hate? - Agree and disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a new laptop in 2007, with then new Vista. I also put Vista on some of my household machines. I hated it at first, as you said. Then, it improved with SP's, and it got better, as SP's tend to do. And, as time went on, I got used to it. I learned to live with it. Yet I rarely had a session where I did not have some reason to swear at it. On my main desktop machine which was my computing center, I continued to run XP (I loved XP, still do). Work with anything long enough, learn its quirks, and you can learn to live with it even if not love it. In the end, it turns out that Vista preserved the majority of computing paradigms that MS introduced with 3.11-95-98-200-XP, so once you got over the shock of what changed, it wasn't really so bad.
There were some big objections such as UAC, "min spec" debacle, security, etc., but there were also a zillion little sniggling things that were wrong. Technical architecture aside, an OS has two components, what's under the hood, and the user interface. Regardless how well or poorly it did with under the hood architecture, there was no reason to alter user paradigms that everyone knows and uses, especially since MS had invented or at least promoted and entrenched so many of them. Imagine suddenly all autos have the steering wheel and driver switched to the opposite side. Imagine that suddenly screws, nuts, and bolts have an entirely new system of thread sizes, that suddenly the qwerty keyboard is replaced with some new scramble of letters dictated by Steve Ballmer. I do a lot of work with font design. Vista suddenly broke font handling. File management via Explorer was suddenly deficient. Utilities such as Classic Shell came about not just because a few old fogies could not keep up with changing times, but because there is no reason to break basic functional paradigms just to be different.
Regardless who "invented" this, that, and the other OS feature (Xerox, Apple, IBM, MS, whatever), MS had its pivotal role. When MS made those earlier versions of Windows, they were not constrained by prior notions of what it should be. Right or wrong, they worked through the issues, and tweaked the interface, to get something that worked and people liked or at least got accustomed to. When Ballmer and Vista were in play, they tried, for better or worse, to fix core architecture problems, but they were not obliged to fudge the user interface paradigms, but they did. In so doing, not only did they disrespect and disregard the entire world user base, but they disrespected their own company forebears, second guessing what 20 years of MS engineers had developed before them. A lot of it was just change for change's sake, dumb and misguided.
Anybody could have learned to live with and adapt to the UAC prompts if that is all it was, or just corrupted font handling, or any other single thing. But, everything all piled up made it unpleasant, even after getting used to it and accepting that it was not too different than prior versions. It was different enough, and mostly for no sound reason, and that is why it was hated. It was better than Win 95. It wasn't better than Win 2000 or XP. Good riddance.
Re:Why the Vista hate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, Vista was also a resource hog and particularly on machines with memory near the minimum requirements it was absurdly slow. Like XP ran decently on 128 MB RAM while Vista was a dog on 1024 MB which never got properly fixed. And the early iterations of the "SuperCache" system only made it worse by constantly trashing the disk to load things you'd soon have to evict anyway, making the system less responsive instead of more. To be honest, I don't know much about Vista post-SP1 because my early experience after trying to help a friend with it was "kill it with fire", "you can pry XP from my cold, dead hands" and "maybe Linux is ready for the desktop soon". And yes it was a premature release but it was actually late, it's like you've spent 5 years after XP and deliver this shit sandwich?
After a couple years of fixes and the improved firewall XP SP2 wasn't the Swiss cheese it had been at the initial release, by the time Vista rolled out it was pretty damn stable. And you had UAC issues, driver issues etc. that also added to its poor reputation, SP1 didn't arrive until 2008 so the stink had a full year to soak in. Same year you had XP SP3 that set a new high bar for maturity, even if Vista SP1 had improved you had 7 years of XP fixes to compete with so it never got credit for doing more than fixing the worst of it. Windows 7 was a *much* needed do-over reputation-wise because Vista's was tarred and feathered. It sticks.
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Yeah, I didn't think Vista was bad. Vista started out bad, but it got better. I would rather use Vista than 8, 10, ME, etc. :P
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I think what happen mostly was that hardware got better. Vista was a decent OS, just too resource intensive, and Microsoft allowed vendors to sell machines with vista that couldn't run the OS as configured.
When Vista came out, I had bunches of my users bring their personal "Vista Ready" laptops to me saying they hated the computer, it was slow, etc. Every single one had basic Intel graphics and maybe 2 Gigs of RAM. I'd turn off Aero Peek and recommend an upgrade to 4 Gigs, and then the computers were fin
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I made the tongue-in-cheek comment that Vista hit the "sour spot" in RAM. If you had less than 2GB, it was slow. If you had more than 2GB, 32-bit Vista only saw the 2 GB, and it was slow.
I generally don't like (Score:2)
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The two main sources of hate where the UAC prompts out the yinyang
If you were getting UAC prompts out of the yinyang, you must have been running some really poorly written software.
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Most software was poorly written back then. Pre-NT Windows was single user, and XP was compatible with it. Most software ASSumed the user was Admin.
"Linux has been more successful"? Not for long... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect.
So, Microsoft is on the record admitting that Linux's "modular and pluggable" architecture is more sound than Windows' monolithic approach... Not to worry, my friends, the Windows folks won't be behind this 8-ball for long. The systemd folks are working very hard, on closing this gap.
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As some don't look at AC posts I'll repeat: Microsoft isn't admitting anything, one person have that as his personal opinion.
Oh yeah, it was such a joy patching your kernel (Score:5, Interesting)
You know why we dug into the fucking mess you call a kernel? Because it was a NECESSITY to get anything to work. The security of Windows up to 7 was such a catastrophic failure that the only way to defend against malware was to dig even deeper into your kernel because you had NO, ZERO, ZIP safeguards against malware actually doing something like this.
What did you expect us to do? Run on the crap you dared to call a kernel and rely on its nonexistent ability to defend against malware undermining it? That would make the whole idea of protecting the system absurd because the system's functions you're supposed to trust cannot be trusted.
The reason Vista was the mess it was? Because it was a damn atrocity from a security point of view. It tried its best to obscure and obfuscate its inner workings, mostly because as soon as you noticed just what they were like you realized that the problem is way bigger than you could possibly imagine.
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Maybe you should stop using shitty AV products. Just because McAfee has the best salesmen doesn't mean they have the best product.
Or even a good one.
Please (Score:2, Troll)
Try to run a 2.4 binary on modern linux. No fucking way. 2.2 or 2.0? You have to be out of your bloody mind.
Backward compatibility is absolute bullshit for Linux.
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
In my last job we ran some binaries designed for RedHat 6.2 (kernel 2.2 if I'm not mistaken) on RHEL 6 with kernel 2.6. Worked just fine. The thing that keeps binaries from running isn't usually the kernel; it's the C library and dynamic linker loader. In my case I had to set up a complete RH 6.2 chroot environment to run this app in. Think about that. Redhat 6.2 user space running on a then-current 2.6 kernel.
I'm fairly confident the same binary would, with the chroot environment and supporting libc and ld.so, run on RHEL 7, and probably would work fine with kernel 4.x (though I doubt it would work with selinux without some serious tinkering).
By and large, the Linux kernel is quite compatible with older binaries, if you can get a linker and libc version that work with the binary in question. Certainly it's much more compatible than you claim.
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If you're talking about a distro, then things get more complex. glibc is pretty good about backwards compatibility and uses symbol versioning extensively to allow binaries to get older behaviour from a newer glibc. The X11 protocol has been extended, but modern X.org supp
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Re:Please (Score:4, Insightful)
This comment is almost literally the entire problem encompassing the Linux platform.
"Just recomplie" (Natch)
Sure. No problem for me, or you.
Tell the average user that who just wants their laptop to recognize their wireless card which requires a niche patch to the kernel to fix, or worse yet someone foolish enough at the end user side to be convinced to run Linux and needs software that they rely on that DOESN'T require a BS in CIS to install when their computer inevitably shits itself.
Want to know why "the year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened and won't in the foreseeable future? Read. Your. Comment. AGAIN.
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
Omitting the key sentence in the post you're replying to: "Although you don't have to, since all the distros already have."
+3 "insightful" instead of -1, "Can't fucking read". Yep, this is Slashdot.
And I'm gladly telling average users that, if they are stupid enough to not do due diligence. Buy stuff which is compatible, or suffer. Not to mention that if your hardware needs some funky driver under Linux, it's probably going to be an unreliable POS under Windows too!
As for the rest, Linux doesn't need a BS in CompSci to install, and it doesn't shit itself. Shitting itself is Windows territory. All it takes to install Linux is a rudimentary understanding of the OS and compatible hardware. The exact same premisses as for Windows, the main difference being that you have a slightly higher chance of having your piece of hardware "kind of" working out of the box with Windows, and a massively bigger risk of being left at a later point with a fully functional device but no working driver, as opposed to your having drivers which improve over time. Really important to people who just needs to get shit done, you know.
Why Linux doesn't take off has nothing to do with these non-issues. It has everything to with inertia, lack of mind share and general resistance to change, fear of the unknown as well as outright corruption and sabotage from Microsoft and their stooges who realize that the day people get rid of them, they are fucked.
That said, I'm off to a customer setting up their office with openSUSE later today. Windows 10 with it's incessant spying, vulnerability to malware, inclusion of crapware and planned obsolescence proved too much, for no material gain at all.
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I've been using Linux as my main, or only, O/S for over twenty years and I've never needed to compile a kernel.
I have the freedom to do things more the way I want than on alternative O/S's - Microsoft & Apple O/S's are very restrictive in how you can configure your Desktop Environment - I use the Mate D/E, I could download and install a totally different D/E without having to reboot my computer. I can use up to 35 virtual desktops('workspaces', according to some), also I can have multiple tabs on my di
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My point wasn't that end users have to recompile. The point was that the source is there, and there will be newer versions compiled against newer kernels.
Don't. Be. A. Twat.
Re: Please (Score:2)
vendors got caught with their pants off (Score:4, Interesting)
vista was actually a good OS. it had a file copying bug before SP1, other than that its only fault was that it was too modern and advanced for the time. vendors were selling still old hardware, and in some cases selling hardware that was too slow for the OS.
people actually required having a faster computer than they had, so it ran slower than 98. fast foward a few years later, almost the same OS with a nicer skin and some UI enhancements was released to public fanfare. it was called windows 7, and was built on top of vista.
From: billg Subject: Dr dos (Score:2)
From: billg
To: pascalm; russw; tomle
Cc: philba
Subject: Dr dos
Date: Thursday, September 22, 1988 12:41 PM
You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app
would do that would make it run on MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS.
Is there any version check or api that they fail to have? Is there
a feature they have that might get in our way? I am not looking
for something they cant get around. I am looking for something
that their current binary fails on.
This is a fairly urgent question fo
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Blaming others (Score:4, Informative)
Job title (Score:2, Funny)
Doesn't exactly flow on a business card, does it?
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True, but Microsoft loves a TLA, so you could have:
Manager, S/FS, HAC, FLN, DFS, RTS
What could be simpler?
Two things did Vista in (Score:2)
1. User Access Control -
The OS ceaselessly asking me 'are you sure?', 'are you sure?'. How can I be sure? Give me a realistic option instead of just 'yes' or 'no' (maybe offer to sandbox the process and help me check if it runs OK).
2. Vista’s desktop search indexing (Windows search) -
Ah, here was the OS pretending to be both goggle.com AND google's database for your local filesystem. Indexing slowed 80% of new laptops to a crawl -- especially cheap, high-volume AMD-chipped laptops from the likes of Co
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2. Fixed with SP1. (Learned long ago to never buy Windows before SP1 was released.)
I ran Vista for years on my primary home laptop, I didn't buy that machine until after SP1 came out, (I repeat, never buy Win before the first SP). Vista was no more or less stable than prior versions, Win 7 was more stable when it came out and I started using it at work, but not enough for me to invest in upgradi
bad summary? (Score:3)
The summary is white noise. It doesn't say anything about why Vista was out the gate. Only that it would be hard to support post-release. Every system is hard to support post release though.
The obvious reason Vista was not stable (and could not be stable) is that 64bit Win Api did not support atomic 64bit operations in Vista version of the Windows runtime. The 64bit atomic operations only gained support starting with Win7 (64bit). So there was a bunch of 64 bit Vista application code written without atomic operations. In multthreaded environment that essentially guarantees that sooner or later corruption will occur. Given that the pipelining can reorder operations, there was no sure way to lock this down without slowing down critical sections of the code significantly. This is not the kind of code that most application developers are used to writing. So there it was.
Seems like a nice guy (Score:3)
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Big problems with Political infighting at Microsoft.
No Microsoft O/S is good for everyone - more and more people are choosing to use Linux.
I started with MS-DOS, before I ever saw LInux.
Been using Linux as my main O/S for over 20 years now.
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No Microsoft O/S is good for everyone - more and more people are choosing to use Linux.
Same claim I've seen made for years on slashdot and sadly the facts don't agree with you: http://www.zdnet.com/article/n... [zdnet.com]
Because it didn't have enough... (Score:2)
Developers, developers, developers, developers...
Developers, developers, developers, developers...
Developers, developers, developers, developers...
Developers, developers, developers, developers...
Developers, developers, developers, developers...
If Microsoft was unable to handle... (Score:2)
"...Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem..."
... the complexities of the market, then they should have left the market. Instead, it appears that they knowingly foisted a broken product upon one of the largest markets in the world.
Vista was pretty good considering... (Score:2)
I bought Vista for a new build back in the day, and actually ran it for some time (until my next build).
Vista has a lot of hate, but I ran it for a long time and for the most part it was a good OS.
To my mind, Vista had exactly one problem, which they fixed after a couple years. The problem was a lack of compatible drivers that were pre-loaded. I'm pretty sure even after SP1, it still was missing a ton. Don't get me wrong, the drivers existed, only you had to go manually find them and install them yourself,
It was a start. (Score:2)
I've seen people say that Vista was completely unnecessary and existed to fix things that weren't broken. That is, of course, reductive.
It certainly had its problems, chiefly in its UI changes (and the performance issues those changes caused). But on the backend it addressed a lot of significant issues, from creating a viable 64-bit ecosystem to major security improvements (including ASLR and DEP).
Ultimately, it paved the way for Windows 7, which I think it's fair to say is the best version of Windows ove
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He references Longhorn repeatedly in the article.
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though, of course, the book will leave you believing that the way of comparing operating system kernels is by their relative inferiority to MINIX
LOL- half way through your post, I was going to reply with exactly that... Good to see I wasn't alone
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Programming is haaaaaaaaaard!
Yes and the proper response to that is hiring interns, recent college graduates and/or h1b visas because people will real experience solving hard problems are just too expensive... nevermind the cost of doing business...
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like a huge pile of spaghetti
Poettering, are you reading this?