Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance? 440
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Insightful)
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista, and Windows 7 is mostly an optimized version 2 of Vista. So it's no surprise that with the codebase stabilized in Vista SP1 that Windows 7 will be able to build successfully upon that.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for.
Such as force users to give up applications that ran perfectly fine under previous versions of Windows.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Such as force users to give up applications that ran perfectly fine under previous versions of Windows.
They ran perfectly fine because Windows let them get away with whatever dirty tricks they were doing — which wasn't the case with Vista anymore.
Give me an application that is coded correctly and that does not try to be "more clever" than the operating system by using undocumented structures, functions, registry keys or whatever else, and I'll show you an application that runs fine on Vista.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Informative)
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.
Vista 'helpfully' virtualizes file access and this breaks a lot of such apps.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.
Do portable progs on your fav linux distro do the same? That is, they write their configuration files to /bin or /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or whatever.
What happens when an app with no root priviledge tries to write its configuration files in /bin? It fails spectacularly of course.
I don't like vista but isn't this double standard?
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully agree.
For years we (the FOSS community) have been bemoaning Windows' poor, totally broken security model. Now, when MS attempts to fix that and inevitably breaks applications that rely on the previous totally broken security model, we want to whine and moan about backwards compatibility?
Are we going to whine the same way if IE8 standardizes but breaks web pages that rely on IE7/IE6?
Seriously, there are some among us that simply will not be satisfied, and they are making the whole FOSS community look like a bunch of children.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think that the people complaining about backwards compatibility are the same people who complained about the Windows security model?
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Funny)
What makes you think that the people complaining about backwards compatibility are the same people who complained about the Windows security model?
The fact that many people have complained about both in the same post.
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Mostly the fact that I know those people have no real grievances with Windoze; they're just OSS mujahadeen out to flame Windows for anything and everything they can.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Funny)
No way. A real "OSS mujahadeen", or, as we like to call ourselves, a real bearded Saint of the Church of Emacs, doesn't run Windows apps, so could not complain about backwards compatibility.
In fact, right now most of us don't complain about Windows anymore, we are too busy trying to get our bios-less laptops to work with the latest version of Gnewsense
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There is no 'we' (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonder why 'we' are never happy here on slashdot? Why no matter what MicroSoft does, they are vilified by 'we'?
Here's a hint: take your user Id, and subtract 1. That's about how many DIFFERENT people registered here before yoi did. Each with their own ideas about priority and values, and what to lambaste MS for.
I lambaste them for lame things like email not working right with IMAP4 servers in WinMobile 5, 6, 6.1, and 6.5. That's 3 YEARS that some as simple as deleting an email hasn't worked right in a device primarily bought to (ahem) read email.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Informative)
Hi,
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
This is simply not possible to realistically do on a linux distribution because there are usually multiple options. I admit a description field below the application would be nice.
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
There are quite a few applications that allow you to do this. Use google.
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.
Learn how a linux file system works and learn how bash processes commands. The space character is a special character in the linux command line for good reason.
To me your argument is the same thing if you were at the command prompt in Windows command prompt sitting at:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserName>
and typed
> cd Windows.
Expecting it to magically figure out you want C:\Windows.
It should know what I want right? WRONG. It doesn't and for this feature to even work it would have to index the entire file system.
Solution: Learn how file paths really work.
These are all valid /etc/X11
cd
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc
cd X11
Simple solution for a beginner: Always use absolute paths until you understand relative paths.
Alternative: Use a different shell, there are plenty of options.
4) Create an alias if you find yourself using the command often.
alias editxorg="sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf"
(See Bash Aliases for further details)
5) Tab completion plus using all lower case for file names make this trivial. I find it much faster to find things than navigating my media in explorer.
6) A shortcut on linux isn't exactly the same thing as a shortcut on windows. It probably created a symlink which makes the folder appear to be actually on your desktop to most programs. This is by design.
Create a launcher that runs your file-manager with that particular path if you want to mimic windows shortcuts
7) This is linux and not windows. Bash is much more powerful than the pitiful shell windows provides. Learn to escape spaces, avoid spaces in file names, use tab completion, or enclose spaces in quotes.
8) Traditionally extensions have no meaning in the unix world... this is by design.
9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.
It takes a while to understand but once you've got it you'll wonder why you thought it was hard.
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While I agree with most of your points, I have to take issue with no. 7:
7) This is linux and not windows. Bash is much more powerful than the pitiful shell windows provides.
It's rather newish (2006) but IMO PowerShell generally blows bash and all other Unix shells out of the water. Arguably, PowerShell is much better for Windows, as more APIs in Windows are object-oriented and thus fit better with PowerShell.
Take a look at my sig. It's a one-line, slashdot sig fitting (OP has a point: If you are handling files with spaces in them, *many* scripts will break down due to the fact that *nix shells pipes are
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing you have to realize is that most of the people who gripe about how lousy Windows is (or any Microsoft product) never actually use Windows. Or, alternatively, they haven't used Windows since Windows 98 and somehow think that it hasn't changed at all in a decade.
These are the people who complain about "constant bluescreens" in 2000, XP, Vista. The same type of people who don't realize that Windows has *two* CLI environments, one of which is admittedly quite poor (but only intended for backwards compatibility), and one of which is far superior to bash. And, over a year after IE7 added tabs to IE, I kept seeing posts on Slashdot saying that Firefox was a superior browser because it had tabs and IE didn't.
It's not just time, though. They also gripe about tools they don't use. For example, geeks here who rarely, if ever, use an office suite will go to great lengths to explain why the Office 2007 interface is far inferior to OpenOffice's interface. And frequently make statements like, "Office 97 had all the features anybody ever uses." They're not qualified to speak on this, of course, but they'll do it anyway.
In short, take everything you read here with huge grains of salt.
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CMD.EXE is superior to bash!!!?!?!?!?!?
No, Powershell is superior to bash. Reading comprehension is pretty useful, you should try it sometime. But good job writing a lengthy rebuttal to something I never claimed. Moron.
In fact, I don't think you even got the point of my post. The point was that people on Slashdot frequently express opinions on products they aren't qualified to judge, because they either haven't used them in a long period of time, or they use them extremely infrequently. For example, your ig
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Windows' new shell (PowerShell, is it?) is, predictably, not compatible with Unix shells, so I'd assume you have to learn most things from scratch.
Are there really the same quality and variety of command-line utilities on Windows? All those filters in /usr/bin are really an essential part of how useful Unix shells are.
The trick that makes PowerShell as useful as it is, is that it gives you direct access to all .NET APIs, which is a diverse bunch. You get very powerful XML processing (including XPath/XSLT if needed) and Web services, databases, pretty low-level process control, WMI, and a lot of other things.
Really, the test is: does anyone actually use the shell in Windows? How many Windows administrators use any command line? I'd find it difficult to believe that it's very good if no one uses it. The Unix shell was refined over decades, and for a lot of that time it was the primary way of interacting with your computer.
As the OP noted, PowerShell is new, so most people are still picking it up. That said, it is already very popular amongst Windows developers (especially .NET ones), from what I can see, and the more advanced admins. T
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Wow, you think application names confuse users, and yet you believe the intuitive way to
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Can I make a friendly suggestion? It's obvious you're curious enough to want to figure this stuff out. But based on your comments about not knowing that / refers to root (same as DOS, btw, cd \dir1 on current drive), symlinks, aliases, etc., there's a high potential that you're going to really mess things up at some point. Especially when that lack of knowledge is coupled with sudo. I've been there.
Pick up a book like "A Practical Guide to Linux" (ISBN 0-13-147823-0) and spend a weekend working through
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
File that as a bug with Ubuntu. RH/Fedora are starting to do what you describe, at least for typical desktop user apps, like the file browser, web browser, email, text editor and so on.
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
It's not safe to run GUI applications as root. If you insist, and your distro vendor agrees, then they may configure it (using PAM) to use consolehelper (part of the usermode package) to ask for the root password when you run it.
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal. These fail: cd etc/X11/ cd etc/X11
To be expected, unless your Current Working Directory (CWD) is the root of the filesystem, known as /, or you have a duplication etc/X11 hierarchy under your CWD. The trailing / on the first example is redundant, BTW.
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc/X11
Both those should be fine. Did you test before posting?
cd etc cd /X11
cd etc
cd X11
First pair will try to change to etc in the CWD (and fail), then try to go to X11 in the root (and fail). Second will try to go to etc in the CWD (and fail), then go to X11 in the CWD (and fail).
This doesn't: cd /etc
cd X11
Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...
It's impossible to be intuitive when they mean entirely different things. Would you expect 'CD D:\SYSTEM32' to Do The Right Thing on Windows when Windows is installed on C: and SYSTEM32 is inside the WINDOWS directory? Same deal. If it helps, think of C:\ being roughly equivalent the root of the filesystem (i.e. /). It kinda breaks down because UNIX doesn't have drive letters, and actually Windows uses the backslash in the same way as UNIX uses the slash; note how you can use 'CD \' to go to the root of the current drive.
4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.
In addition to the earlier explanations, it's really not safe to let just any old user have write access to system config files by default. At best, they might mess them up, at worst, they may make them do bad things (install spyware, delete their home directory) to other users. If you wish, if you're the owner of the file (i.e. root in the case of xorg.conf), you can loosen the permissions on specific files using chmod.
5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.
You know about tab completion in the shell, right? Hit tab on a partial file or directory name, and it'll complete as best it can. If there are multiple matches, it'll beep. Hit tab again, and it'll show them.
6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and cop
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Then you do what Mozilla does and put it in this-feature-mozilla so when the standard does come along you don't screw up the web with your unstandardised features.
Yeah, ruining the web for everyone who's not using IE.
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Do portable progs on your fav linux distro do the same? That is, they write their configuration files to /bin or /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or whatever.
Apples and oranges. The last ten years of Fav Linux Distro didn't let that either, so it's not surprising. XP, on the other hand...
Also, Linux is nowhere near standardized with directories:
jurily@jurily ~ $ echo $PATH /usr/kde/3.5/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.3.3:/opt/blackdown-jdk-1.4.2.03/bin:/opt/blackdown-jdk-1.4.2.03/jre/bin:/usr/qt/3/bin:/usr/games/bin:/opt/vmware/player/bin
Just randomly, can you guess where, say, alsamixer is?
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I'd guess it's in /usr/bin, like most of the system software.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Informative)
/usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Informative)
/usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.
I still think GoboLinux [gobolinux.org] is on the right track.
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like kill -9 `pidof firefox.exe`
killall -9 -r firefox is much easier :) (The -r option makes the name argument a regexp search, and is very, very powerful ...)
As for *nix directories, whether you use /usr or /usr/local or /opt it really doesn't matter, provided the relevant directories with executables in them are in your path. That's the beauty of the system, and that's why these analogies between Windows and *nix are meaningless.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as an IT manager, I'll be dancing in the street the day that the last app stops this.
If I had a penny for every time a user lost data because some app decided to be clever in the manner mentioned above and not save it in the users profile directory...
Truly, if you were writing a linux app would you expect this to work? It's the same thing. Your app needs to expect that it can write to the user's home directory and temp locations. Fini. Done. Need to write somewhere else, make sure you set up the proper permissions during install time, when you'll be running with privs to access those directories.
Then I know where the user's data will be and can plan backups accordingly, without playing scavenger hunt with however many hundreds of apps my users are using.
Min
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Informative)
And that'll work fine in Vista, because that's not Program Files. Like in Linux, there are a few privileged, protected folders, and pretty much everything else, including mountable r/w media like flash drives, is essentially an extension of one's home directory. (Unless you do something fancy with the permissions, of course.)
Intense Rant: Don't fucking write it there (Score:5, Insightful)
WARNING: Intense rant built up over years of raging against boy wonder dickhead programmers who think they're top shit.
Here is a great hint for all those boy wonders who write shit applications that spray their shit applications everywhere - fix your damn applications up.
It pisses me off when I see vendors spray DLL's everywhere, from their own directory to the Windows directory to the user directory and everything in between.
1) Keep your fucking application exe and all the bundled DLL's in your application director - leave the fucking Windows directory alone. It is not for YOU to place YOUR shit into. It is for Windows and Windows only.
2) Don't write shit to your application directory; if it is a universal setting then you should ask the user for permission and write it to the global registry. Is it a user related setting then save it to the user profile. No if's, no buts.
3) Don't use undocumented API's and hacks. You aren't cool, you aren't hip, it doesn't make you gods gift to the world because you're using private API calls never intended by Microsoft to be used outside their operating system development teams. Its private for a reason - private meaning it is not for you to fucking use. Hack away at Microsoft's private api's and I'll hack away at your privates.
Do the fucking job properly the first fucking time and stop turning a clean and pristine Windows installation ito a fucking dogs breakfast because you think you're top shit when clearly you're not.
Re:Intense Rant: Don't fucking write it there (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all well and nice, but there's one problem with that.
I'm just your average user, not a developer. Intuitively, when something is saved, especially something like a game save, I EXPECT it to be written to the game's fucking application directory.
Your sense of organization clashes with common sense, however I do agree with forbidding the assholes to write to system/system32 and other system-critical directories and spewing DLLs all over the place.
Re:Intense Rant: Don't fucking write it there (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm just your average user, not a developer. Intuitively, when something is saved, especially something like a game save, I EXPECT it to be written to the game's fucking application directory.
Why? What's wrong with saving it inside C:\Documents and Settings\pino\Application Data\SomeCompany\SomeTitle\SavedGames\? That can be backed up with the rest of your home dir^W^W user profile, and it doesn't interfere with the saved games of other users on the same PC.
Ok I'll ask (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think what the priest is doing to you is wrong?.
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The nature of software and progress.
Both Linux and OSX are far worse than Windows on backwards compatibility.
Adobe's creative suite still doesn't run properly on OSX (weird print driver conflict with HP Design jet, effects InDesign is a known problem, Apple admits it, but yet 10.5, and still running it in Rosetta to print).
I recently just gave up trying to get Majesty to run on mycomputer (after downloading a new installer, and updater), and from what I read, it would be easier to get the Windows version ru
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Phil
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Insightful)
My guess is this will be more of 'ready for Vista' underpowered desktop, now just in windows 'craps' (what version is it anyhow, up near 13 by now) for netbooks. Sure it will run windows, just barely, but run any applications on top and you'll get to re-experience that whole vista feeling all over again.
Personally I want my netbook to come basically complete with all the applications I will ever need at a very 'competitive' price, so when I drop it, drown it or some one pilfers it, I can just buy another one restore the data, not have to futz around with re-installing software or paying for B$ software licences bound to dead or missing hardware.
Netbooks are going to suffer a pretty hard life and the last thing you want to get caught up in, is buying the same software over and over again and you certainly don't want to end up paying three times the price in software versus what you are spending on hardware.
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Vista uswers were simply not ready for...
Darned users! Why can't they get off their rears and make themselves ready for MS's products?
Should MS have to do all the work of marketing, programming, and figuring out what these "users" want?
Users should what what MS provides when MS wants to provide it!
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If I had a cigar, I'd give it to you.
Is that a Bill Clinton quote?
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I doubt it. If there's one thing I know about Bill Clinton it's that he always has a cigar to give.
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Will windows 7 actually run acceptably on a netbook?
I downloaded that public beta of mojave but never bothered trying it. Anyone here have Windows 7 on a netbook like a Dell Mini 9?
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Oh, bullshit. It was a flop because users have seen it for the POS that it is.
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:4, Interesting)
You're wrong. The only thing that matters at all with any product anywhere is wrong with Vista; my customers don't want it and won't buy it. Therefore, it is a terrible product that I don't carry and have no interest in.
Now, with Windows 7 my customers have been showing some cautious optimism, so we'll see how it goes.
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Takes 15 minutes you say ? You must either be doing something extremely wrong or have mistaken your computer for some other device, perhaps a toaster.
Honestly, the minute you see an anti-Vista rant that brings up the old canard about "uses too much memory", you know the poster is just recycling FUD.
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Boot times so long that employees sue (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, I don't know how that got modded insightful. My Vista machine boots to the desktop and is usable in under a minute. 15 minutes is complete bullshit unless he's trying to run it on a 486 or something.
Slashdot ran a story about employees suing over not being paid while a computer boots [slashdot.org]. No, Vista isn't to blame, but some companies require that so many programs be run at log-in that a 15 minute boot time isn't out of the ordinary.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sorry, but I just don't see it. 15 minutes? Either you have Symantec's security suite and only 256MB of RAM AND have the eye candy turned on AND a ton of OEM software running at startup AND 5400RPM or 4500RPM drives, AND it's heavily fragmented or it's just a really old computer. Or, it's really loaded up with spyware or has otherwise been rooted.
I've usually seen Vista boot more quickly than XP. Once at the desktop it is more sluggish than XP, that is true, but not by orders of magnitude.
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RAM is there to be used, that's the whole point of it. Vista has considerably better memory management than XP ever had so the fact its using 800MB is a non-issue.
Vista pre-caches often used apps, which makes it sooo much better than XP (just cos it uses more RAM doesn't make it worse). It's using that RAM because it is there, not because it needs to, there's a difference.
The fact it takes 15 mins to boot means there is something very wrong with your PC and it certainly isn't Vista (dodgy driver/startup p
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Insightful? Really? It's an easy test - try running DRM protected content on a non DRM protected source and see if it works in Win7 (beta). What? It does. So you're the one spreading FUD this time? Shocking!
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er doesn't... (to nonprotected source)... no more alcohol tonight...
Re:Or maybe you're pulling that from your ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's put an end to this nonsense, shall we.
The Windows netbook has an Atom CPU, 1 GB of Ram and a 160 GB HDD. These specs are good and they going to get better. Much better.
The performance "hit" in managing DRM - the trusted path - whatever you chose to call it - isn't worth worrying about.
But if you want shelf space at WalMart, your product must deliver licensed media play out of the box.
End justifies the means (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't matter if I have a netbook or not, if this is true, then everyone benefits. Even the guy with a multimedia powerhouse machine will see an improvement if performance is the bottom line.
Microsoft's fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies has led to a consistent decrease in performance over the years, with Vista perhaps being the most obvious and poorly received example. The tide seems to be turning, though. Symantec pulled all the stops on making the newest releases dramatically lower in memory & faster, everyone's re-writing pages so they scale properly for mobile devices, now Microsoft is paying attention too?
This is a good trend. I hope it continues.
Re:End justifies the means (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft's fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies has led to a consistent decrease in performance over the years, with Vista perhaps being the most obvious and poorly received example.
Oh, please. A "fascination with taking advantage of new hardware and technologies" is not why Windows has sucked on an an epic level. Windows has always been an "also ran" when it comes to adapting "new hardware and technologies". Always.
Hardware support? Even the abysmal Mac OS 9 had more leading-edge hardware support than W9x and W2K on their respective releases. Windows XP and 2k3 can, and have been, a huge pain to install if you've got SATA and/or necessary USB devices on the system. Sure, decent support is available after you're installed - but that's not due to Microsoft.
Emerging technologies? Can you name one software/OS/desktop feature which MS was first-to-market on for Windows? I seem to remember something called Cairo that was making news back in the mid-90s, which had a feature list similar to what we now know as Time Machine - on OS X. MS still hasn't come up with such a functionality. Hell, they don't even have simple search indexing working well in Vista, yet.
No, MS has been behind the curve with implementation - and well ahead of it with outright lies and broken promises ("Vista Ready", anyone?)
Historically, these are the things a new version of Windows has been certain to bring to the table:
* Slower performance
* Bigger memory footprint with little related advantage (see "slower performance").
* The first release/pre-SP will be buggy, unstable, and nearly unusable.
* A lot of stuff that's supposed to work, won't. This includes applications which are supposedly designed for said OS.
* If it's a complete lemon, they'll silently drop actual support and focus their efforts on their next release (See: ME -> 2k, Vista -> W7).
Yes, there are various other improvements to new Windows releases. But, consider: Windows still can not approximately estimate the time it will take to copy a file from one local directory to another. That's hardly a focus on new technologies.
Though, I absolutely agree with you on the whole low-end focus in the IT industry being a good deal for everyone. Now, if only we could get away from the "the browser is the OS" idea, as we're running into all sorts of the same bloat and instability we got with OSes, as browser developers re-implement containers and other OS-level features at a highly abstracted level.
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I'm curious, what do you mean by that? It seems to be working fine for me, despite what you say.
I agree on the browser thing though; it's like the thin client all over again, but using 10x more resources than an equivalent desktop programs.
Win7 development started just after Vista shipped (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because 3 years ago when Microsoft started the work that went into Windows 7 (remember MinWin?) they were smart enough to anticipate netbooks and so they did the performance work up front that would be necessary to make netbooks work well.
Or maybe, just maybe, they realized that Vista's performance sucked rocks and they decided to fix it and Netbooks were a happy beneficiary.
Re:Win7 development started just after Vista shipp (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have said the eeepc (Score:3, Insightful)
I never saw an OLPC here in Australia or anywhere else in my travels (including 2 trips to the US last year and 3 months in Europe).
I /did/ see a lot of eeePCs. Not all of them running Linux, but the day my parents came home with their shiny new eeePC running Linux, I thought to myself "Microsoft must be SHITTING BRICKS".
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Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno...Microsoft isn't the only faction that's suffered from some serious code bloat. Computers have gotten so much faster at such a rapid pace. Linux + Gnome and OSX have gotten rather porky as well....
I'd be happy to forego all the eye candy if it would speed up the work that I actually care about.
Best,
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Funny you should mention that... OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is, in part, a return to a smaller, faster OS. So even Apple feels the heat of Core Duos and such. And there are a number of Linux distros that are pretty slim.
It is certainly a welcome trend that you don't need next years supercomputer to run a damn OS...
Re:Bloat (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing about Linux is that nearly every netbook maker is developing a custom Linux distro that removes the cruft and makes it run faster.
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Gnome will always be slow...
Re:Bloat (Score:5, Funny)
Does that include a red paint job? Everyone knows the red ones are faster.
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There is some bad news too (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, I have some bad news for Linux lovers (myself included) when it comes to the netbook. The fact is that hopes for Linux on the netbook is all but dead now that Windows owns more than 90% [computerworld.com] of this market.
I still have some hope though. KDE 4.2.1 is convincing many folks in my small world. If KDE programmers do what they have to do in terms of multimedia and the browser (read KHTML/WebKit), there is a future.
Why is this bad news? (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing is going to get me to stop using Linux, and if all of this competition means that Windows is getting better, well bully. I seriously would not mind if everyone stopped asking me to fix their computer for them.
Re:Why is this bad news? (Score:4, Funny)
The others asking you for help problem lies with people not getting better.
... that and you obviously aren't unplesant enough for them to be scared of asking you, work on that it helps.
Re:Why is this bad news? (Score:4, Funny)
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They really need to get cracking with Moore's law for people. My boss has been stuck at 4.77Mhz for at least twenty years now.
Whoa. That's seriously fast for a boss. Did you overclock him or something?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it's bad news for a reason he didn't quite mention. The bad news is that it's likely, in part, due to how pokey Linux has gotten on the desktop in the last 5 years.
We need a serious initiative within open source to push for a feature-lock for a year or two (or even 6 months), and focus on improving the ability of OSS to run within small constraints. Granted, a lot of this is happening currently (see: Firefox), but I think a more concerted effort needs to be taken.
What are you talking about? (Score:2)
I have a pretty standard Linux desktop, and just about everything happens instantaneously. It takes a second or two to start up Firefox, but everything else is just blinding quick. Really nothing to complain about.
Re:There is some bad news too (Score:4, Insightful)
Even so, 10% is pretty damn good. Ask BMW, or Steve Jobs.
I'll agree - KDE is doing a lot of attractive stuff, with it's whole interoperability of user data focus. And the default theme looks better than Leopard.
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Even so, 10% is pretty damn good. Ask BMW, or Steve Jobs.
Instead ask Yugo, because Linux netbooks tend to be the elcheapo models.
What's happening is that Windows users have found higher-end netbooks to be workable laptop replacements and not just internet appliances.
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Of course they are. Not having windows or office shaves a few hundred off the price.
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The comparison was with BMW, not the loss-leader they throw out there at $299 to bait you into buying the more profitable windows models.
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Linux netbooks tend to be identical to the windows models except that they have an 8GB SSD instead of a 120GB HD.
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Re:There is some bad news too (Score:5, Interesting)
10% of 14 million is still a sizable market share. There are countries all over the world that are smaller than that number that speak their own unique language. The netbook might not be most people's primary machine, but 1.4 million people who are now OK with using linux that would have blindly bought a windows PC before is a giant leap in terms of consumer penetration. 10% penetration is a number Apple's been clawing after for years .
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Just curious to know what your take is on the latest KDE. Do you see anything positive in it to help out the Linux cause in your opinion?
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Linux doesn't work with which iPods? My girlfriend and I have two different iPod models and they both work fine in Amarok (the KDE3 one, haven't tried in Amarok 2).
iPhones and current iPod Touch models require hacking for the iTunesDB to be usable with non-iTunes managers. Doing so rules out using the AppStore. More details. [marcansoft.com]
Maybe, Maybe not. (Score:4, Insightful)
While they claim (and reports indicate) Windows 7 will be faster than Vista, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot as soon as it's released.
And I don't think its the success of Netbooks that is making Microsoft focus on speed on netbooks. It's the fear of Linux/Android taking over where Windows Vista cannot work that is making them focus on speed for Windows 7. Amusingly enough, if Arm based netbooks take off, Not only is Microsoft screwed, but intel too.
Then again, Via Nano based netbooks are also starting to be rolled out, and they are comparable to the atom chipset. We'll see.
Nobody has made a netbook where when the lid is closed you have an e-ink screen for dual use as an ebook reader. This is totally pissing me off. I'm not the only person in the world who wants this or has thought of this.
Color Me Stupid (Score:2)
I ran Vista for a few hours before hitting fdisk, and didn't dig, but Windows 7 has ten million services I'm unfamiliar with, and everything I've read about 7's performance on a netbook has to do with the disabling tons of services for the netbook verison.
I'm pretty familiar with what all the XP services are, and which I don't need, but what NEW can I disable in 7? What is MS disabling in the netbook version?
Other than Samba sharing, I don't expect I need much more than the netbook version would offer on m
Short answer - no (Score:5, Interesting)
Short answer -- No.
First of all, the obvious: Microsoft started working on Windows 7 late in 2006, even before Vista was released. Netbooks became popular in 2008. 2007 worldwide sales of Netbook-type machines were less than half a million.
Any self-respecting computer programmer knows what's really going on. When you spend months or years working on a major new release, you're often struggling to get the new stuff working at all. Your managers are pushing you to get the thing out the door; deadlines are looming; adding more people to the team would probably be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up.
Once you get that x.0 release out the door, you take a vacation, reintroduce yourself to your wife and kids, putter around at work for a while, and then dive back in and make your code faster, cleaner, more reliable, more useful. The x.1 release that follows ends up being the one everyone likes; people say "It's what x.0 should have been!" ... Right? That's what happens!
And that's exactly what's happening with Windows 7. This isn't a major "reinvent the wheel" release... it's all about optimization, performance, better user interfaces, and tacking on some new things that have become popular since Vista was released, like proper support for SSD drives, multi-touch, multi-core GPUs, and so on...
Re:Short answer - no (Score:4, Insightful)
adding more people to the team will always be counterproductive since they'd only slow down the people who need to be 100% focused on finishing things up
Fixed that for you.
If there are any manager types reading this - THIS IS TRUE. More people does not make a project quicker to market. In fact, it has the reverse effect for a variety of reasons. A great book about this is The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks. Please. Read. Do it for all of us techs-types who already know this.
Who says it performs better anyway? (Score:2, Interesting)
Who says it performs better anyway? Arstechnica gives no information on what tests they ran. Windows 7 is really just Vista SP3, so I'm a bit sketical.
makes sense (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft will *always* improve their products. As the very last resort.
thank the netbook? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Now, however, I still do a lot of work on machines with roughly similar specs to the machine I was using in 2001.
Pretty Convincing (Score:3, Insightful)
This whole thing seems to support earlier rumours that MS was deliberately bloating Windows code in order to make people keep buying new computers. Now that the market has spoken, all of that bloat can be easily removed. Everything in Windows seems to be necessary until MS is forced to remove it.
Duh (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
The thing that breaks this paradigm is an Intel platform that moves backwards in net performance. When the goal shifts from ever increasing net performance to performance per power it's only expected that Microsoft should miss the turn.
The question is, how did they miss being informed that the turn was coming? Did they get told and disbelieve, or were they just not told? I believe the former, not the latter.
Interesting parallel in the mac world (Score:3, Interesting)
This has a few (opposite) parallels over in the Mac world.
When the PPC platform stagnated, Mac OS releases started doing a strange thing.... they actually tended to be faster than the previous release on old hardware.
I've got a 450MHz G4 in its (mostly) original hardware configuration currently running 10.3.9. Unless I'm doing video encoding, or something else similarly processor-intensive, it certainly doesn't feel like a 10 year old machine. (The video encoding example is an interesting one, given that I used the machine 2 years ago for a large video-editing project with Final Cut Pro, and simply farmed out the rendering and encoding tasks to a more powerful machine -- FCP has remarkably modest hardware requirements)
This is all on a computer that shipped 2 years before the release of OS X. (As a random sidenote, I've also always been impressed that it could handle up to 2 GiB of RAM. That was unprecedented for its time)
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
IMO, the PowerPC's limitations actually drove a lot of innovation at Apple during those few years.
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Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
What are you talking about? If you've got an Intel-based Mac, Leopard is actually faster. The kernel handles SMP much, much better, and many of the things like Spotlight received serious optimization -- try using a Tiger-based Mac and a Leopard-based one side-by-side under load and you'll see a difference.
But IS Windows 7 faster? (Score:3, Interesting)
I really want to like Windows 7.
On one hand, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy.
On the other hand, I use their software everyday at work. And if the market leader massively improves their (somewhat crappy) software, it forces the competitors to get better too.
For instance, IE8 seems much faster and better than IE7 (and of course IE6). This will hopefully wake up Mozilla and force them to improve on Firefox.
Regarding Windows 7, I can see that the memory footprint is lower, and that's a good thing.
=====> But it still _feels_ much slower than XP in everyday use! =====
I am talking about the little things that make up the experience of responsiveness. It just takes a noticeable amount of milliseconds more when I click on an icon, until the OS reacts. Opening a new browser window just have that extra lag. Copying files feels slower. Etc.
At first, I sort of liked Windows 7 and ran it for a couple of weeks. Then I booted back into XP (not a fresh installation of XP, mind you). I was depressed by how much snappier XP feels. I was hoping to have a good reason to ditch XP.
Makers of desktop operating systems should focus intensively on responsiveness. The OS should react as fast as possible on any user request, regardless of whatever else it is doing.
It's fair enough that some heavy calculation takes longer time if you have some other heavy job or service running, but the initial latency from any user request until you get some sort of reaction should be as low as possible. And XP is much better in this regard than Windows 7 or Vista (and also faster than all Linux distros I've been running).
To use an analogy from network land: I would much rather have 10 ms ping times and 1 Mbps than 1000 ms ping times and 100 Mbps.
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This is a modest Athlon 64 X2 2200 Mhz with 1GB of RAM. I realize that modern systems have more power than this, especially more RAM, but on the other hand it's not like Windows 7 is accessing the page file all the time. In fact, when I have done this kind of test, there's no hard disk activity at all, and plenty of free physical memory.
Also, we're talking about netbooks here which are even slower than this system. And while XP shines on this system, Windows 7 and Vista does not.
My XP does not get slower wi
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Well, maybe, but along those lines it could be something similar, such as the mass amounts of poorly coded applications on Windows (or anywhere really, but more apparent on Windows), so with that in mind they make the OS itself take less resources, to allow for the resources used by the crappy applications.
Neither is a good reason for improving performance, but I think in the long run I'd prefer it was for DRM rather than poor coding practices, DRM can be subverted, and generally quite easily, improving app
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ell, maybe, but along those lines it could be something similar, such as the mass amounts of poorly coded applications on Windows...so with that in mind they make the OS itself take less resources, to allow for the resources used by the crappy applications.
Wait, are you seriously suggesting that when everything else remains the same (hardware, software) except the OS, and performance of apps that used to work fine takes a sudden nosedive, it's somehow the application developers' faults and not the OS's? Even though the OS is the only thing that changed?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Quick Answer: "No"
I simply meant since XP was released, or more specifically, since the internet became really popular, and .Net was released, there are now hordes of craptastic applications out there.
Vista is pretty much irrelevant, although with Vista, they introduced (to the average windows user) things like Widgets, so now people are a little more familiar with running stupid little shit all the time, so maybe Microsoft realized that when people run all their craptastic software, they blame the OS, rath
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rivalry, 4nd we'll
Ignoring the fact that it's a goatse link; this seems to be a snippet from a larger text.
Do I even want to know which one?
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