>>>AA6YQ comments below --- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, "n7zxp" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have been sitting here reading all this things about Vista. Now lets go back to when XP was new. Everyone said and wrote all this stuff about XP. >>>That's not true, Lane. At birth, Windows XP was broadly praised for its stable kernel (inherited form NT), strong device support, and freedom from the architectural "resource exhaustion" defect in the Windows 9X family. Before that it was Win98 and so on. I am heavy into the computer industry and a programmer. Most all of the people that write all this neg about Vista have no idea about what they are talking about. >>>I spent days tracking down the runtime defect that results in the Vista File Manager completely corrupting the screen if an application updates its title bar with any frequency (e.g. to present the current UTC time). Fortunately, I'd recently met with the manager responsible for these runtimes and sent him a minimal faulting program; as a result, Microsoft issued a hotfix and (I hope) included the correction in SP1. The fact that his dad was a ham helped a little... >>>The change in the sound APIs that limits the use of PSKCORE and MMTTY is similarly cut-and-dried and indefensible violation of upward compatibility. Vista is a good program and is superior to XP. >>>None of the "pillars of Longhorn" -- the key sources of end user value -- made it out the door in Vista. All that's left is Aero's eye candy and the immensely intrusive User Account Control (UAC). If Vista offered any significant advantages, enterprise adoption wouldn't be well below 5%, and Microsoft wouldn't be dropping the price a year after launch. If people take the time to update drivers and software that is normaly free they would have no problems. But they would rather grip. I run MANY Ham related programs and have updated and no problems. The one's that are not updated yet are being worked on by the software makers. >>>The technical and financial litmus test for an operating system is not "some programs work". Its *all* programs work. The amount of work involved in a new OS is behond the comprihention of most all people. If you think this is wrong sit down right now and write a program that will play a simple card game. Now imagine what goes into a program as complex as Vista or XP. >>>As an operating system, Vista is conceptually trivial; it implements nothing that wasn't well understood 30 years ago. Its complexity arises from the absence of a resilient architecture, long- term accretion without refactoring, and a poor software software development process. All of these were and are avoidable. Microsoft finally appears to be addressing some of this with MinWin (see for example http://www.crn.com/software/202404947 ). As far as he goverment goes they are happy with Vista as they are he one's who requested to have all the security features in the Vista. >>>Everyone wanted Microsoft to produce a more secure implementation of Windows. But UAC is so annoying that most users disable it. That's hardly progress. Do you really think Bill Gates makes a new OS and does not talk to them as for as what they want. Think people... >>>Then how would you explain the extraordinarly low adoption rate of Vista by companies -- around 3% when last I checked. The primary driver for Vista adoption has been PC manufacturers bundling it with new models, much to their user's unhappiness. Microsoft has already extended the "XP is no longer available on new PCs" date by 6 months, and has dropped the price of Vista to encourage sales. If there were anything of compelling value in Vista, none of that would be necessary -- even with all of Vista's defects. No matter who makes a new program knows it will have bugs. >>>That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're a programmer and you think that way, then your work is practically guaranteed to contain defects. They turn it lose on the public becouse instead of having just the Microsoft crew give reports they have the world. When people give reports on the OS they mke changes. Thats what a update is. If they did not do it this way we would all be using DOS. Would that not be fun. >>>That is not true. Had Microsoft used modern software engineering practice to build Windows, its engineers would be spending a far greater fraction of their time introducing useful new functionality onto a framework designed to accomodate it rather than chasing down thousands of defects after the fact, regression testing their fixes, and issuing patch releases week after week. The cost of poor to the organization that produces and maintains it is enormous. >>>You can't test quality into the kinds of applications we build today; the only way to build quality software at this scale is to establish high-performance teams, create a high-quality architecture, and use modern software engineering practice (risk-driven iterative development, modularity, automated testing, modeling, etc.) to implement that architecture incrementally. 73, Dave, AA6YQ
