Hello Guest it is March 29, 2024, 06:33:40 AM

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - sandiegoRC

Pages: 1
1
Mach3 under Vista / Re: Your opinion of Vista ?
« on: May 06, 2008, 05:02:07 PM »
I just checked out the MS Vista page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/seeit/default.mspx and see very little that could not be done in XP and are things that I've had in other systems for years.

2
Mach3 under Vista / Re: Your opinion of Vista ?
« on: May 06, 2008, 04:49:03 PM »
I never said that I did not like it, just that I found it, for what I use it for to be unimpressive.

I work with half a dozen application programs and don't really "use the OS". Most of the world is moving online making the "OS" mostly irrelevant. We probably have different definitions of OS.

3
Mach3 under Vista / Re: Your opinion of Vista ?
« on: May 06, 2008, 04:12:15 PM »
I've been a software engineer for nearly 20 years and run most systems at home (XP, Linux, BSD + a few more that most people have never heard of and I've written a few myself).

I've followed the development of Vista for over 10 years. Truth be told, there is very little fundamental difference amongst OSs. Most of what people think of an operating system is just some GUI interface running on top of a kernel (the real operating system), although MS sticks much of the GUI within the kernel (from what I understand) to improve performance. This also has the side effect of lowering security, stability, etc.

XP and Vista broke with MS's preceding offerings by running on top of a preemptable spatially protected kernel. This means that each program can only communicate with another by going through the kernel. It also means that when one application crashes, it doesn't, can't, affect any other application. This is hardware supported by all modern CPUs after the 386/486, 68020, PPC, MIPS, etc.

I recently purchased a new laptop with Vista and am highly unimpressed. I've only used it for a weekend really only use it for web surfing, but have seen nothing compelling for it. This has been argued for a couple of years as MS's weakness - that given XP runs on a secure kernel, albeit with a brain dead security model, what is really the point of upgrading? This is a serious problem for MS to keep a revenue stream going.

EVERYTHING that I have seen with Vista so far is cosmetic and could have been accomplished quite simply under XP with minor changes. The new security really isn't and in a few published reports still lags behind Apple and Linux. Apple by the way is UNIX - one of the 3 or 4 officially certified UNIX vendors.

The next version of Windows (where have you heard that before) is expected to be significantly different but moving everything out of the kernel except for the required stuff like memory management and tasking, but this is in the kernel, something that only programmers ever see. The part that most people consider the OS, the GUI, is really mostly kernel agnostic. Without too much difficulty one could run XP (or Vista) on the Linux or BSD (what OSX runs on atop) kernels.

So in the end, my impression after a week, and I'm hoping it will change, is that it's just another marketing gimmick to force people to upgrade as it will be ever so slightly incompatible with previous releases.

Pages: 1