[mdlug] Cracks in the Evil Empire

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Joseph Vartanian

> A lot of people have been saying that Vista is just XP with a pretty
> new interface.  I've even seen several IT folks at work saying that.
> This is wrong.  There are many dramatic changes in Vista under the
> hood, but most of them aren't obvious to your typical user.

 Can you name some of them? I'm not aware of many beyond the user interface
stuff.

 1. Security changes. Consists almost entirely, from what I can see, of
reinventing 'sudo', badly. ("Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned
to reinvent it - badly." -- Henry Spencer.)

 2. DRM 'enhancements', which we've already discussed:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

 3. Nerfing OpenGL. Apparently designed to interfere with cross-platform
games.

 4. "ReadyBoost". Basically a special swap partition that can be put on a
flash drive that has certain characteristics. A mildly interesting hack,
but their time would be better spent making the system less memory-hungry
overall.

 Anything else? I write this as someone with a Vista Home Basic computer
at home. (My wife uses it because she insists on MS Office.) Note that
Home Basic does *not* use Aero, so the *only* changes I would see would
be non-GUI stuff. And the above is all I've seen, aside from the fact that
XP is usable in 1GB of RAM and Vista is astonishingly sluggish.

> Just to get you to maybe believe what I'm saying, think about
> this...Why would they need 6 years to develop this OS if all they did
> was to add 3D effect to the GUI and some DRM?

 As has been pointed out, it's largely because they gave up and started over.
Their codebase is Huge (capital 'H' intended) - *well* over 40 million lines,
just for the operating system. A project that size is nearly unmanageable
without careful design and strict discipline following that design. Neither
of those traits have been much in evidence at MS for quite a while. They do
not maintain good separation of functionality in modules (the word 'incestuous'
comes to mind), and the control flow in Windows operation is exceedingly
complex. For example:
 http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=311

 Not to mention the fact that developing for Windows is just plain more
complicated than for Linux. I wrote some comments about that here:
 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/bf055025af897210

 So no, I'm not surprised that there's so little 'there' there in Vista.
What I'm really amazed about is how so few changes suck up so much more
memory.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                                (313) 227-2317
 
 If we teach everybody... habits of skeptical thought, they will probably
 not restrict their skepticism to UFOs... Maybe they'll start asking
 awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious
 institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power.
                Then where would we be? - Carl Sagan

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