Public Works Canada solicitation about FOSS

[Andrej Marjan]

On February 12, 2009 08:49:43 pm Christopher Browne wrote:

> As near as I can tell, the main "more featureful" aspect of Vista is
> the presence of a whole lot more "chrome-y" things in the UI, which
> pretty much explains it being bloated and slow, despite requiring
> massively more hardware.  There will doubtless be hardware compatible
> only with Vista, but that is a sword that cuts both ways in that
> there's doubtless also plenty of XP-only hardware out there.

Vista is a major revision of NT, with a new driver model, new graphics and 
audio subsystems, and DRM baked into the kernel. A lot of the stuff they were 
trying to do was overdue modernization, and on sufficiently new hardware, 
Vista is about as snappy as XP -- not bad considering the DRM overhead. 

Unfortunately the user experience is an utter train wreck. That's probably 
partly related to the fact that they threw out about 3-4 years of failed work 
and started over with Vista, then rushed to get something out the door sooner 
rather than later.

I think a big part of what Windows 7 is supposed to be is a completed Vista 
(making built-in utilities not look like Windows 95 apps, some semblance of 
consistency...).

Interestingly, the Windows 7 kernel is undergoing similar sorts of scalability 
improvements to what's been done with Linux over the last few years. I 
listened to an interview with an NT architect and the sorts of changes he 
described were eerily similar to many articles on LWN. Apparently they're 
targeting 256 cores on the server side. There were also some similarities on 
power management, like allowing non-critical timers to be bunched up.

> I'd be curious as to what *really* is a meaningful enhancement to the
> user in getting Vista...

SMB operations are interruptible. The file manager no longer hangs for a 
minute or two waiting for the kernel to time out. Seriously. Also an improved 
security model.

> Historically, Microsoft has factored the cost of updates into the cost
> of selling *NEW* versions of their OSes.  Gates had a whole "there are
> no important bugs in Windows" thing some years ago that nicely
> expressed this attitude.

Indeed, and XP represents a significant drain on resources because it *is* a 
different kernel than Vista. It's not just the cost of supporting both base 
OSes and their security patches, it's the added cost on other products, like 
having to support two versions of IE7, having to backport their shiny new .NET 
graphics API to XP (at least in a degraded mode because XP apparently can't 
support the full feature set), and now they've also backported IE8 to XP.

However there *have* been important bugs in Windows. XP was so 
catastrophically insecure that that pretty much all work stopped at MS for a 
period while they fixed the most egregious problems in a free service pack. 

Anyway that's wandering rather far afield, but I think it's worth looking into 
the recent history of Windows because it's such a large part of the computing 
landscape, and explains what's happening now.
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