Why Vista Took So Long 761
twofish writes, "Following on from Joel Spolsky's blog on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, Moishe Lettvin, a former member of the Windows Vista team (now at Google) who spent a year working on the menu, gives an insight into the process, and some indication as to what the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu actually did. Joel has responded in typically forthright fashion." From the last posting: "Every piece of evidence I've heard from developers inside Microsoft supports my theory that the company has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum, and overstaffing. The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly. In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991–2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product."
Linux development model? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux development model? (Score:5, Insightful)
To call it "the Linux development model" is somewhat arrogant I think. It appears more that Microsoft is trying to take their time and putting in extra effort to make this release literally the best Windows release to date, because the last thing they want is another Windows ME. This process applies to any software group, be it OSS, Apple, IBM, and yes, Microsoft.
To borrow a quote from Shigeru Miyamoto, "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." I think that applies to pretty much any software project, though of course "good" is relative to the user.
Re:Linux development model? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux development model? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux development model? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Longhorn project was officially started in 2001 (or possibly earlier). Longhorn initially had a number of OS-level features that would've made it on par with some other OS's in the same time peroid, had it been released in its original time window (late 2002, I believe). By my recollection of events, they originally started with the Windows 2000 Server codebase, and attempted to bolt the new fancy features onto the side of it. The effort failed miserably.
By 2003, Microsoft had realized that doing "add-on" development to Windows 2000 was a lost cause, so they literally called a do-over: this time they started with the WinXP Update 2 codebase. By the start of 2005, they were still having serious trouble getting all the new features to play well together, so they started removing them one by one. By 2006 all of the exciting new OS features had been removed, except for the new display API. This became the new feature set of the Vista release: eye candy.
Feel free to correct my from-memory summary of the history of the project. But my point is that they weren't polishing the silverware until it shone brightly; they were just trying to get the dinner table set before it was time for breakfast.
Re:Linux development model? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wholly agree: from the external perspective, it sounded like a lot of the developers fell into the classic S/W development trap: re-write something for the sole reason that "We can make it better this time". Very rarely does this ever fit a customer's actual desires... but developers almost always want to do it anyway (myself included).
I'd love to hear the internal perspective of how the 'reset' decision
Re:Linux development model? (Score:5, Interesting)
But...
There is never an ROI on doing code cleanup and making it easier to maintain from a manager / new development programmer's perspective.
As a maintenance programmer tho... I see faster, more stable, easier to maintain code out of even the little things I manage to sneak in. A solid code cleaning can cut weeks or months off of other projects on the same code base. From everything we've heard- windows source is a mess.
What they probably need to do is spend 6 months and do an architectural code cleanup. There would be no immediately ROI however every project for the rest of time would benefit so theoretically their ROI is infinite.
As a maintenance programmer, I've frequently taken multiple pages of code out of programs without changing their functionality. In a large number of cases products are shipped by the development staff with dead code, goofy code, very inefficient code, redundant code, etc.
Unit Testing (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, the decision to not re-write and keep ugly legacy code itself (rather than just the API) isn't always the correct one either. The judgement of
Re:Linux development model? (Score:4, Informative)
1) Longhorns original schedule was mid-2003 (Whistler Server (eventaully called Windows 2003) had been scheduled for 2002 for almost a year before XP Shipped).
2) Longhorn started with the XP codebase.
3) The Longhorn reset started with the Windows 2003 SP1 codebase.
4) The "Reset" happend in 2004, not 2003.
5) It was not "add-on" development, it was essentially re-architecting the entire OS to be
6) They didn't have problems "getting the features to play well with each other", they simply weren't ready, and wouldn't be ready for the OS ship. In the case of WinFS, it was simply an over-architected solution to a simple problem that was much better solved by simple indexing.
7) Not "all" of the exciting features were removed. As I said above, WinFS turned out to be something that wasn't really needed or wanted. Monad was relagated to ship post launch, EFI turned out to be useless because no computers were using it in consumer PC's, and NGSCB (Palladium) was so highly criticised that nobody wanted it anyways.
The features that were dropped were largely irrelevant, or unwanted, meanwhile the list of things that are new in Vista is huge. Check out the wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
Now, that may still not be enough for a lot of people to upgrade, or they may not be features a lot of people really care about, but to claim that "all the exciting new OS features had been removed" is simply bogus.
Re:Linux development model? (Score:4, Informative)
They've renamed it Powershell and it's available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techno
I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a slashdot article, at least so the bash fanbois can go on about how blatant a copy this is...
Re:Linux development model? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the developer world is ready for it. And the users can only benefit if the developers accept it.
MOD DOWN PARENT (Score:4, Funny)
Welcome to inevitability (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Funny)
No, that's because they used 5-bit ids in their database.
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Interesting)
wrong Steve (Score:5, Funny)
They're stuck with the other one
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And look where they are now...about a 2% marketshare of the PC market!
Actually that is about 5%, which is to say considerably more than they had before Jobs took over.
Could you imagine the Zune supporting MS? Cause the iPod seems to be the only thing keeping apple around
The iPod certainly makes Apple a significant amount of money, but they're making more money total than ever before, both from PC sales and other products. It's hard to argue with results, but I guess you prove, if you get your facts w
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:4, Interesting)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061019-802
It goes DELL, HP, GATEWAY, then APPLE.
People tend to buy into the whole branding thing. People aren't as clear as Mac or PC users. People are either a DELL user or GATEWAY or HP or APPLE or IBM or Toshiba or ETC. Apple has always been the leader in the creative world. Technology of today is allowing even average people to become more creative. With more average people thinking they're creative, this will drive people to buy the 'creative platform of choice'. A mac.
It would seem a few years ago I was the only mac user in my group of friends. It now seems every single one of my friends has either a mac in ADDITION to their PC or have exchanged their PCs for Macs. These are interesting times. I only HATE microsoft because I used to lead a life of tech support for my job and friends and family. Friends and family always used to come to me to help them with their myrid of problems. Every incompetent windows user has a somewhat savey techie behind them formating their drive, installing windows, cleaing up viruses, installing programs, fixing things, etc. I got sick of being that person. I tell people now to buy macs. They buy a mac and generally just use their computer to get things done. No more fuss.
[rant]
If microsoft can ever prove to me that their applications can do what they promise then I will jump on the microsoft bandwagon. Prove to me that updates will no longer crash my machine, prove to me that re-installing my operating system (which seems to occur frequently with microsoft) isn't going to take 2 hours of loading and 4 more hours of installing fixes -- patches -- updates -- combined with 35 reboots. It's the reboots that are so dang painful. To click on a patch and watch all the other patches you just clicked all go 'grey' and have a dialog box pop up that says, "Sorry, this patch has to be installed individually." BUT EVERY PATCH has to be installed individually. What the hell? Prove to me that your operating system can run for 2 years without having to be reinstalled for some random reason to get the speed of the machine back to what it used to be.
[sigh] . . . [/sigh]
My beef with microsoft is real and valid. I have now been running a mac exclusively for just around 4 years now. My latest mac is about 1 or 2 years old. I got it from the apple store pre-loaded with OSX 10.4. I have yet to re-install it. Has run perfect just as expected this whole time. Sure, a mac has it's qwerks, but if you're sick of microsoft, the apple qwerks are much fewer and far between than dealing with microsoft's.
[/rant]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Is that some new kind of quirky keyboard?
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Interesting)
It's changed business models a few times. It started out as a playing card company. If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years. It's got just a few layers of management and at the top 183 cardinals report to the Pope.
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty impressive when you consider that for all that time their ONLY product has been vapourware.
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Interesting)
Conversely, when you are far enough past your competition, you have to decide where you want to go. Microsoft's business vision looks backwards (defensive) and sidewards (leveraging its unique position in desktop os and office software to gain entry into new markets and new revenue streams). They don't seem to be looking where they are going, because they're already where they want to be.
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Funny)
Not really. They're near-impossible to housetrain!
(A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. No it sodding didn't.)
Re:Welcome to inevitability (Score:5, Funny)
* France: never was communist
* It seems you recognize only 5 democracies in the world, one of which is Chile
* You seem to think it was possible to do cool things in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy
* You lump Nazi Germany and fascist Italy together with Holland or Sweden, totally ignoring the huge differences in favor of superficial similarities
* You ignore that that Holland and Sweden are democracies
* If you believe France is communist, why not Sweden?
* You ignore that Nazi Germany had a huge bureaucracy
* You ignore that many democracies in Europe actually have cut bureaucracies over the last 3 decades. Not enough for some tastes, but nevertheless.
I am tired of this.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
* France: 1.) Wikipedia is not a source. 2.) You didn't even read that
* You pick 5 democracies from one third of the world's countries that britannica.com lists as democracies. Why shouldn't I question that?
* Yes, we were talking about bureaucracies, so 1) why do you bring up the ability to do cool things (can and
Wait for it, wait for it (Score:5, Funny)
Why RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why RTFA? (Score:5, Informative)
What if the "Bye" button... (Score:5, Funny)
Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
So why hurry? For money? In my experience hurrying to make money never works out.
TLF
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I like having my computers available instantly when I want to use them.
2. Turning a machine on and off many times can be harmful, so it is said. Others say it's a myth. I don't know who to believe, but it seems feasible that this could be so.
3. I run back-ups and virus checks during the night.
4. The computers work on protein-folding during their idle time.
5. My machines are in my bedroom, and they keep me nice and warm at night. Besides, there's nothing like the low purr of case fans so send you off to sleep
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well with a Desktop you can suspend to disk and then come back rather quickly, with a power off in between. This way you get the power savings, but you also get the fast "boot" time.
But let's look at me. I had a Dell laptop at school. I'd use it at home. Turn it off. Take it to school. Turn it on for class. Use it. Turn it off. Take it to next class/home and repeat. Suspend was very iffy (and didn't help much in the battery life department).
Then I got a Powerbook G4 (which I still use today). Run it at home. Close the lid. Take it to school. Open the lid. IT WAS READY. Within 3 seconds I could start working. When I'm done? No "Start->This->that" to be sure it worked. Just close the lid. I know some PCs worked that way, mine never did (reliably) that I remember. Next class/home? Open the lid. If it got low on power, I'd plug it in. My little laptop has had up to 3 months of uptime (mostly due to major security updates that require restarts). I NEVER need to turn it off. The last time I did was when I was going on an airplane (didn't know if they'd like it suspended during takeoff/landing). It boots relatively fast, but nothing compared to waking up and going to sleep.
If you're a desktop user, I understand your comment. But as a laptop user who has had the pleasure of a Mac, a fast reliable suspend is a HUGE time saver.
Now I'll note that some other people at my school had newer laptops that could suspend/resume just fine. But they took much longer. Some of them approached boot time length, some could do it in 20-30 seconds. No PC there matched my Mac (note: I never asked the few Linux users if they had it working on their laptops). I could suspend/resume my Mac 3 times with ease in the time it took the fastest XP users (and I'll ignore the "Click here to sign on" screen most of them didn't disable).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Remote access. I'm pretty sure that's why we programmers don't have laptops at my office in the first place. Hard drive speed and the fact that we all have home computers are probably factors, as well.
I do turn my home computer off, but my wife doesn't. She likes to have every web page she checks often constantly loaded, and ready for her when she sits down to her computer. I prefer to close any
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm working on code, I've several editor windows, compiler and terminals open. And usually, if I have to shut down my computer, that would imply I would need to close all those windows and all those applications. Why should I do that when I could just have my computer hibernate or sleep?
I mean, if I am on Linux, I have four active desktops with several browser windows, code and other things.
Shutting down my system implies closing down everything and starting afresh. Why should I, when I can put my system to sleep and restart it with my windows and state preserved?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
That's one of the previous Unix admins I worked with.
He was so clueless about his boxes that every week he'd say "I just wish I had windows servers instead."
The modern DVCSs would all do better (Score:4, Interesting)
"Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes."
Monotone, BitKeeper, git, bzr, and so on would all handle this situation efficiently and gracefully; all the repositories can sync to each other and none need be more than a few minutes out of date. Amazing that Microsoft's solution is so poor by comparison
Re:The modern DVCSs would all do better (Score:5, Insightful)
When you get beyond a certain stage of complexity, you need to change the mode of operation. You can't just have everyone submitting random changes.
You have a subgroup of people that work with each other. When something is stable, it gets submitted to the integration branch. Periodically the integration branch is tested and verified that all the various things feeding into it interwork with each other. That stable version is then propagated into the other teams for them to work with.
Linux uses a variation of this. People work off the mainline tree. Riskier stuff is in the -mm patchset, so if you want to play with it you need to sync from multiple places.
The real problem with the scenario as described is the repository organization, likely not in the repository tool. There should have been a way to manually make a child stream that started with the stable version, then pulled in the latest changes from the kernel group, the tabletPC group, and the shell team. That would have allowed them to all work together and see what each group was doing.
Re:The modern DVCSs would all do better (Score:5, Interesting)
The branching / merging etc in the tool set (which btw we didn't invent, we source licensed from someone else and then have been continually improving) are quite good actually.
I don't know for a fact that the systems you mention arne't "up to the job", but how many multi-TB bitkeeper repositories are there? How many concurrent developers do any of these support? How many branches? How often are RI/FI done? How often do developers sync? What is the churn rate?
I think you also don't understand the problem. The SCCS can RI and FI (reverse integrate, forward integrate, respectively.. those are the terms we use for moving changes from a descendante branch upstream or moving fixes in a parent branch downstream) quickly and efficiently but there are reasons not to. The 99 USENIX paper on the MS internal SCCS talks about some of these issues. For isntance - what good is there in propogating a fix to every sub-tree or branch in a matter of minutes when it subtly breaks 80% of them?
The issue with lots of branching isn't the SCCS. It is the gating that you say "should be possible". Not only is it possible - its standard procedeure. And as your code gets closer to the root of the tree, the quality gates get harder to pass through. The latency involved in turning the crank on a regression test in Windows is very high, and if you got it wrong, the latency of a build is high, etc etc.
So it's not the underlying SCCS, it's the processes built on top of it. Everyone hates process when it slows them down and everyone wants more process when someone else breaks them. "We should put a process in place to prevent that guy from breaking me, but uh, i should be exempt".
As an aside, there are "fast track" branches/processes that let critical changes move through the tree very quickly.. on the order of a day or two from developers workstation to something that shows up in the next main-line build that an admin assistant could install.
When I work with our repository, which is on the order of 10GB and a few hundred thousand files, a new branch create takes a few minutes. Pulling down the repository takes hours. Our churn rate is such that with a handful of developers, ~5 days worth of changes can take 30mins to sync down.
When I RI or FI, it happens only in my client view. This gives me a chance to do merge resolution, and then to build and run our regression tests before "infecting" the target branch with potentially bad code. If building takes on the order of hours (not minutes), you've got latency of hours above the actual RI/FI time. If running tests takes hours (not minutes), you've got more latency. If after a build + test cycle, you see an integration problem, now you've blown a day before you've even found the problem.
I don't mean to say that there aren't problems, i'm just pointing out that like most process problems, this is death by 1000 cuts. The SCCM isn't a key limitation - even for the windows project (at least, not to my knowledge).
What you read was that the SCCm sucks. What I'm hoping to illustrate is that the process is unweildy at times, not due to any particular technology limitation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FTA, the shutdown menu relied on the shell team and the kernel team, and they only shared root. So how do you know if the menu's broken unless it's synced with everything? Can't test a new menu without the most recent kernel and shell build... Or you can, but once kernel re-syncs, who's to say menu won't up and br
I'm Not That Suprised (Score:4, Informative)
I've read other blogs in regards to Windows Vista, and from what I am gathering the primary reason why Windows Vista took so long to complete was because of management. Philip Su argued how the gargantuan amount of code included in Vista slowed it development dramatically, however I think that this strengthens my point and the point made in this article.
However, I'm not terribly surprised that this occurred for Vista. The higher execs at the company wanted Vista to be a revolution and had a clear and concise goal that they wanted this operating system to achieve. In order to do this, from what I've read, they needed to form many more separate divisions inside of the Windows division to concentrate on small parts of the operating system. This probably sounded like a good idea, but the problem was that none of their work was in sync with each other. Some had more work completed than others. Furthermore, rifts within divisions such as the one present here spurred disagreement after disagreement, that including the decision to switch the codebase of the OS to the one present in Server 2003 (something that from what I understand should have been decided from the beginning). With all of this, it was only inevitable that confusion and miscommunication would occur.
All in all, while I think Windows Vista is definitely more capable than Windows XP and warrants itself a much needed upgrade, I feel that the actual improvements of the operating system [wikipedia.org] do not warrant a five-year delay. Okay, so the compositing manager, networking stack, and audio stack may have needed some time to complete, but five-years? I am not a programmer, so my impression may not carry a lot of weight, but being that Linux and UNIX based systems have already included some of these "future technologies," it becomes naive to deem this delay as acceptable.
Vista: An Enigma Wrapped In a Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
In the past days of clicking through endless options and dialogs to configure things such as encryption certificates, etc I often wondered if this was really better than editing a single line in an easy-to-find text file.
Start menu? Hardly ever used the damn thing. Shortcut keys with and I put the quicklaunch bar off to one side with the 40 or so frequently used programs I use.
Vista doesn't support dragging the quicklaunch bar off of the stat menu and off to one side because it was "confusing to end users." No one seems to have found a registry override as yet.
Vista doesn't handle symlinks properly. It used to be "c:\documents and settings" but now in vista it is c:\users. I see a clever little "C:\documents and settings" shortcut on my C drive. OOOOoo is this a symlink? No? I get Access Denied when trying to double-click. Opening the path via an API however works fine. Go figure.
BUGS. Features? Half-Features? Call them what you want. I think most technical folks that have to work on this know these problems exist but architecturally or bureaucratically they are hard or impossible to fix.
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run. I would say this is just an odd quirk about me and how I think menus take too long and too much work to do something, but now the run area has been replaced with a little place you type in stuff and through the magic of windows desktop search it finds whatever you type in the area above that normally occupied by program icons. The bug? You have to let it search. No matter what. Yeah, WTF? This works great on a home PC where you maybe have maybe 10,000 files. Network drives? Oh no. You can't just type n:\ then hit enter. You have to physically wait a sec for it to pull up n:\ in the list of programs above the start menu THEN hit enter. WOW, WHAT A GREAT FEATURE. No more control-esc n:\ enter for me. It is nowctrl+esc n:\ wait..wait..wait.. enter. Otherwise I get some random program like Notepad. Or Flash. Or Firefox.
On the one hand I can see how the start menu splaying itself all over your screen as you "drill down" to whatever the hell obscure program you need might be unappealing. On the other hand confining the entirety of all programs available to you to a 400x600 pixel window doesn't seem like a good fix.
This is just the start menu. Don't even get me started on the new file explorer, which is the least half-baked area of Vista in my opinion. Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments? I'm sure I could go on all day.
I take all this as evidence that a lot of new features in vista are based on good ideas.. new paradigms in UI design.. it just seems that the vast majority are implemented poorly at best and implemented recklessly at worst. I would not expect this in 2006 when others are able to produce such polished and solid OSs. I would have to agree this seems like code-rot from the inside out probably due to the megalithic internal structure at MS
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you have a Windows key? Win-R. One chord instead of two, and a less akward stretch than ctrl-esc if you do it with one hand. The Windows key sucks when gaming, and if you're a Model M fan you won't have one, but those are the only two arguments I can think of against it, because it really is useful. I personally use Win-E (open Explorer) and Win-L (Lock) routinely.
Maybe win-r will still work f
Does /. have a rant option (Score:3, Funny)
Does Slashdot have an option for submitting a rant and getting comments?
You're already using it. Go right ahead...
Compare and contrast. (Score:4, Insightful)
And while I am at it, the start menu requires input from the kernal team. WTF? This is violating some very basic software design principles. The OS should just be basic services, then the applications, including the UI, should ride on top of the kernal without really caring much about how the kernal works.
I can see integration with the shell, but the kernal? It looks like MS policy of tight OS integration with the applications is biting them *hard*.
Re:Compare and contrast. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a master "train" for a release; projects that don't change are "forwarded" to that train, meaning no source changes are required. When a project needs to be submitted for a change for the new release, a new "view" is created for its specific changes. Every few days, a build is produced, sometimes using previously compiled bits from the old "train", sometimes its a full world build (which can take several days) but otherwise building all the latest submissions.
Then there's a fairly labor intensive "integration" phase where the built bits are all put on a box and booted. If a "quicklook" QA process shows that the build is hoarked, the integrator goes and pesters the submitters of the latest project that was submitted and gets them to fix it. (Some percentage of the time, the new code has exposed a bug elsewhere, regardless, the project that is the proximal cause of the failure is rolled back to the previous revision, it anticipation that all the projects that need to rev be submitted at once.)
The whole thing is set up through symlinks via NFS, so if you want to see the latest version of any piece of code in the system (modulus those projects that are "locked down" for security issues) you can just get your release name, append the build number, and you've got the source code, symbol'd binaries and build log *for any release* at your fingertips.
When a new build comes out, you just do a clean install. It takes about two hours on the internal network, so typically you pull the disk image and slam it to a firewire drive, (usually, you can bum a disk with the image already grabbed from a teammate) and do a full install in 15 minutes. I can't imagine having to spend a day (as some other posted mentioned) setting up a machine...
Most projects have 3 or 4 contributors. In many cases, and entire framework is the responsibility of a single person (and he or she may actually own several small frameworks.) Lots of small projects produce cleaner interfaces that lead to fewer dependencies. (Of course there are dependencies, and circular ones, but these are kept to a minimum.) Projects are encouraged to use public API from other projects, rather than SPI or other project internals. If there's something useful enough for some other project to use, its first made into SPI for internal consumption, with the goal that developers will eventually be able to use it through a public API.
Most groups don't have dedicated QA by the way - the engineers are responsible for their code, and everyone is generally just very smart about what they're doing.
As to this start menu problem: the entire UI team is about 5 individuals, plus Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall - and they're likely to say "Thats fucking stupid, just do this" and boom(tm), the decision has been made the product ships, and life goes on.
You think that's bad (Score:4, Funny)
...and OS/2 became Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Mountain != Molehill (Score:5, Insightful)
1) There's a power button. That shuts things down fully. ("I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off.")
2) There's a lock button. That leave it running, but keeps others out of your stuff. ("I am going away from my computer now.")
3) There's a menu of choices if you care to look at it, and the button is much smaller than the other two and has a nondescript arrow icon on it which makes it much less attractive to non-techie users.
Yes, his suggestions for combining lock with switch user and sleep with hibernate are good, but I don't think what they actually implemented is all that difficult to understand. His problem is that he's "one of us" and went looking for all the extra options. Most people will never click that arrow to make that menu appear. Ever. It's kind of unfair, even to Microsoft, to rag on something for being unfriendly to non-techies when non-techies are never going to even see it. Usually Joel Spolsky's observations are spot-on, but this time I'm going to have to give him an F for eFfort.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mountain != Molehill (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to click three more times to find the true shut down or restart, and if you forget you've got to wait around 90 seconds for the machine to hibernate and resume. Before you can actually shut down or restart properly.
Don't get me started about some of the other UI choices made in just the start menu. The limited programs scrolling area, for example, takes a nasty interface and makes it utterly unusable for someone who has more than MS Office loaded.
Hollow eye candy that makes the machine run like a slug, and to add insult to injury it's eye candy with horrid usability that takes upwards of 40% of my processing power and frame rate compared to XP SP2.
Only on slashdot... (Score:4, Funny)
Too much complexity?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I'm not a Microsoft employee, but even as an outsider I've seen some hints that it might be the "promiscuous dependency taking" that has delayed Vista.
1) Integration of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft claims that IE and Windows are inextricably linked together, and at least for Windows 2000 and newer this seems to be true. For instance, if you type a URL into the address bar of the Windows Explorer, it will show you web pages. IMHO a stupid design, the web browser should be an application, not a fixed part of the GUI.
2) The RPC service being responsible for things a "remote procedure call service" has no business handling.
In August 2003, a worm called MSBlast spread by exploiting a buffer overflow in the DCOM RPC service (see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBlast [wikipedia.org]). At that time me, trying to be clever, thought:
"I don't want anyone remotely executing stuff on my PC anyway. I'll just switch the service off and be fine".
Lo and behold:
After turning off the RPC service, various local functions were dead as well. Including the Services menu in the control panel. I was lucky that I could reactivate the RPC service by manually editing the registry, else I would have spent a day reinstalling.
So it seems quite believable that Microsoft is choking itself by lack of discipline in designing Windows
zune software doesn't run in Vista. . . (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft: Shadow Stalker (Score:5, Insightful)
"In an almost spooky series of events, Microsoft has shadowed Apple's brush with death, making the exact same set of moves exactly ten years after Apple:
- In the mid 90s, Microsoft rapidly built upon its past success with MS-DOS to establish Windows as a vast empire
...just as Apple used the success of the Apple II as a stepping stone to launch the Mac in the mid 80s.
- From 1995 to 2001, Microsoft rapidly delivered advancements to its desktop Windows product
...just as Apple rapidly advanced the Mac System Software from 1985-1991.
- In 2001, Microsoft began announcing technologies that would be released as part of Longhorn and later Blackcomb
...just as Apple described new technologies intended for Copland and Gershwin a decade prior.
- From 2002-2006, Microsoft dropped features, changed plans, and started over several times in protracted efforts to ship Longhorn
...just as Apple had fumbled around with Copland ten years earlier.
- By 2006, it was obvious that Microsoft's Longhorn was not going to live up to the hype, and would really be just a refresh of the existing Windows XP
...just as Copland had been gutted in 1996 and its salvaged remains delivered as the optimistically named Mac OS 8.
- Microsoft outed Blackcomb as vaporware
...just as Apple admitted that Gershwin had never been anything but a list of deferred goals ten years earlier.
What's Next? The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that today, in the final days of 2006, there is no equivalent to a 1996 NeXT waiting in the wings to swoop down and fix Microsoft's mess. Leopard vs Vista 5: Development Challenges [roughlydrafted.com]There's a blog on the shutdown menu? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:5, Informative)
Hibernate writes the RAM contents to disk, then when it starts back up it writes back from the disk to the RAM, and brings up similar to sleep mode.
Sleep is faster, hibernate takes it down farther and shuts power off completely.
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
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"sleep" sends a computer into a low-power mode, but leaves the machine running, and information stays in RAM.
"hibernate" sends RAM data to an image file on a hard disk, before turning the computer off, powering it down so the machine can be moved/unplugged/or just use no energy...
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There are ways to switch user and restart. Both are in obvious places but you never see them unless you want.
And there's more! If you want to use the MacBook with the lid closed, plug in an external keyboard. Done. I wish my PC laptop did these things.
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:4, Insightful)
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Haven't you ever started a hibernate, closed the lid before you were done and when you opened the lid you completed the hibernate and had to power up the computer again to come back from hibernation?
Having only one choice can be better (i.e. when I said "Done" I meant, that's it, that's all you can do). It sounds like Vista is starting to become (if you'll excuse a reference to Larry Wall) as much of a post [perl.com]
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I stubbornly refuse to shut down using any other manner than the one I find most convenient: Hibernate.
It'll work fine for a while. Long enough for comfort to begin to set in. But there's always that little increase in my pulse-rate when I drop my laptop into the docking station on my desk and hit the power button. The Resuming Windows bar moves across the screen. Fingers are crossed, and I turn to face Mecca whilst gripping a rabbit's p
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I don't think that's quite what he's looking for.
I think he's looking for an option that reads more like "When laptop screen is closed and no keyboard or mouse are plugged in, do nothing, otherwise actually go to sleep."
He seems to be looking for a bit more intelligence in his OS than what is currently available to him. If OS X gets him what he's looking for, then
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:4, Insightful)
Switch User - Leave your apps running and switch to another user's desktop. Useful to switch to Administrator quick to fix/install something and then go back to work on your user account.
Log Off - Close all your apps, closes desktop to user login screen. This is good for corporate and multi user PCs. You close all your apps and allow background services to keep functioning (printer sharing, etc).
Lock - Keep your apps and desktop in place, only you need your password to get back to your desktop. This is very useful if you need to walk away from your computer, but want to get back to work when you come back to your desk.
Restart - This is going no where anytime soon.
Sleep - The computers state is suspended into a low power mode. In theory, you can come back to your computer and it will be ready to use in a quicker fashion than a cold boot.
Hibernate - A deeper sleep. Instead of the computer state suspended in RAM, it is written to disk. Useful on laptops, as the computer is really off but still "sleeping".
Shut Down - Everyone should know what this is.
I agree the UI for this menu is terrible, but the options aren't. The solution I believe is to allow all options. Go with the simple menu and you get the three primary options. If you are a power user or admin you get the whole list. Choices are good.
Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to most people. Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices. Past this point, more choices just add confusion. You do not need 255 different ways to tell a laptop to "close up for later use". A true geek would want to be questioned for each process about whether it needed to be persisted or killed. This is a problematic mindset.
Re:Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek proble (Score:3, Interesting)
To appease this type of geek wannabe, MS makes all 7 options available via the shut down menu. However, if the "power" and "lock" icon do what they seem they would do,
Re:Sleep vs Hibernate (Score:4, Insightful)
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Bwahahahahaha
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Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Funny)
You run Windows Vista on your kid?! Not even Linux users would do that!
Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml [strangehorizons.com]
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista's UI is nice, and I like that it finally uses non-boneheaded names for system directories (e.g. c:\users\blincoln\documents instead of c:\documents and settings\blincoln\reparse point that sometimes shows as 'my documents' and others as 'blincoln's documents).
However, no way is that worth the upgrade price.
The Success of the OS is Predetermined. (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Sales/Marketing's job is to force this product down OEM's throats. Good, bad, whatever, just buy it.
3. There is no accept or reject market mechanism. You WILL be buying Vista if you choose to buy a new PC later. It will be the very rare individual who switches to a mac or just slaps linux on their current box.
4. There is no incentive to establish a more productive developer environment.
Therefore, chaos and mismanagement won't ever harm the beast.
Joel's comments are fun to read, but the scale at which MS develops their OS makes it too easy to criticize from Joel's relatively tiny company.
Finally, How many hours did the developer spend/waste reading
Re:The Success of the OS is Predetermined. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Success of the OS is Predetermined. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there's still vendor lock-in, which pushes in the opposite direction (decreasing the power of those competitors and increasing the price of Vista), but competition is far from absent.
Re: MS Has Competition.... Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac market share that still stands at less than 10% of total market share despite being the superior mass-market OS?
Linux/BSD? Desktops.... Nope. Not even close.
Either you are astroturfing for MS to prop up the appearance of competition or you haven't examined the history of MS's share of the desktop computing market.
I urge you to consider the issue with a bit more objectivity.
Re: MS Has Competition.... Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
In order for competition to have its benefic effects (on prices and innovation), all is necessary is that MS be afraid that, should it do some wrong move, it would loose market share to competitors.
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First of all, has Mac's market share gone down any time recently? There's a trend to look at, not snapshot figures.
Another example - is the Linux/BSD desktop getting worse, is it losing more users than it's gaining? Where was it five years ago? Or ten years ago? How could you really tell for that matter - what counts as FOSS "market share"? Ubuntu CD download counts? Come on, market share is a fallacious argument when discussing MS' competitio
Re:The Success of the OS is Predetermined. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's an exaggeration. Microsoft has at least 3 competitors: Linux, Mac and Pirated Windows (TM)
The number of Linux licensed sold or pre-installed for the desktop is tiny. It is not enough to significantly influence the market in any way. Maybe if Walmart decides to push it it can be. Mac OS X does not compete with Windows. Apple maintains a separate vertical chain and competes with Dell and other PC vendors. It does not sell OS X to PC vendors and is thus in a completely different market. Pirated Windows does compete with them, but more than anything it severs to kill the low end market where MS will not legally profit and where competitors might gain a foothold. For the most part, this is a win for MS.
From an economic perspective, their is no significant competition for Windows. That is not to say the price is not regulated by the market, it is set at what they think will maximize profit though, not what will allow them to beat the competition. It is, thus, much higher than it would be in a competitive market and slowly climbing as they embrace more and and more markets and add that cost into the whole.
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Re:15 ways to turn off a cumputer (Score:5, Funny)
I bet I know what you use your PC for.
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In order to properly set up a windows box with all of the programs I want and the settings I prefer takes about a day. That's not something I want to do once a week/month/quarter.
Re: Why Vista Took So Long (Score:4, Funny)
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