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- RewriteAugust 20
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I was going to comment on this post from some other guy's blog but holy hell is it hard to read. Lemme see if I can rewrite.
Take 2:
Thanks for all the feedback that we have been getting.
That much of it is positive is certainly appreciated. Reading through a bunch of M$FT SUCKS! comments gets old really fast.
Everyone has done a great job sharing their views on specifics, wishes, and requests. (Short aside: A Senior VP is reading your blog comments - that is awesome.)
I love getting these mails and reading the comments. It is fantastic. I just want to make sure folks know I can’t answer each one! I have a day job, and heck, it is wearing me down.
What we are going to do is look to the emails and comments as a way of suggesting posts we should write.
Lemme tell you what the Win7 team thinks about when planning a release. (Leave some comments to let us know what you think.)
Sometimes we do big releases, sometime we do smaller ones.
When we plan Win7, we argue a lot and then decide how many people will work on it, and for how long — and then, pretty much, you (as an end user, developer, or partner) decide if the release is major or minor.
End-users are generally the most straight-forward when deciding if a release is major or minor.
For an end-user a release is a big de - 20 Features Windows 7 Should IncludeJuly 14
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(Turns out I forgot to publish this last week...)
According to Australian computer expert Vito Cassisi
My opinion:
20. Modularised OS The great thing about being modular is that the OS can be modified easily. Think Linux here - in Linux everything is modular and replaceable. For example, you can replace the whole GUI component without affecting anything else. Windows Vista is modular and (theoretically) any part is replaceable.
With the abundance of third party applications written for Windows, this would spur a whole new variety of customisation and open-source implementation.
...and Microsoft could spend an enormous amount of development time to make a feature for people who (for some unexplained reason) want to replace their ...what? explorer.exe? I don't think this is what the average customer wants us to be working on.
(Back in the day, you could make Windows load something other than explorer.exe as the shell by modifying win.ini (Shell=explorer.exe, I think...) I don't know if that still works.)
19. XP Virtual Machine It seems that the biggest issue with Vista was compatibility with older software/drivers. A solution may be to include an XP virtual machine which ensures compatibility with said software. Apple did a similar thing - Now *that's* debuggingJuly 9
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Occasionally, you only fix one bug a day. But, you have a good story to tell.
Several notes:
"One of the goals of the operating system's designers is to not allow programs running in user space to ever crash the entire machine."
Yep, yep.
Any misbehaving application can turn into the equivalent of a Fork bomb, exhausting some OS resource. (Fork bombs gobble up the number of processes that are available on a machine, but a bad application can gobble up pretty much anything - CPU time, memory, overload the disk with seek requests, etc.)
The more blocks and checks they put between us and the hardware, the slower our programs are going to run.
Yes, in theory. In practice, you are not going to notice if the OS takes a couple of clock cycles to check that your application is not doing something crazy. That's kinda the point of an OS - to abstract you away from the hardware, and to make your application play well with others.
This is like complaining that the side mirrors on your car are impacting the top speed. (True, if you are trying to set a land speed record. Not true if you are commuting.)
Imagine if the Apple said to programmers: "Ok, in order to not let you dominate the hardware, we - New York Times gets it wrongJune 29
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Windows could use rush of fresh air
Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware — is there anything Windows doesn’t try to do?
Disaster! Run for the hills! Microsoft is trying to do the bare minimum you have to do with a commercial operating system!
Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.
The oldest 'base' for Windows (if you could distill it down that way) is the NT source code. That was designed from day one to be as future proof as you can make an OS. (Trying to future proof software over more than a decade is like trying to predict the weather at 2pm, on the 4th of July 2045. Windows is pretty modern, just like everything else out there. I can't really think of any ancient technology in Windows that is beyond salvage; everything important that needs to be overhauled can be overhauled, and has been. (Hit that Comment button if you disagree. I'm not saying everything in Windows is perfect. It isn't. I just don't think we've painted ourselves into a corner an - The best blog post comment I've read todayJune 5
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