Teflon Computing

[jeff_duntemann]

Pete Albrecht sent me a link to an article that means well but doesn't quite hit the bullseye. No one seems to be asking, Is Vista really necessary? What does all that complexity actually buy us? Why is Vista better than XP? Or how about that now mostly abandoned but still pertinent

Comments

the case for something new

[anonymous]

I contend that the innumerable complaints about Windows security issues are fundamental to the notions embodied in .NET. Moreover, I suspect that the research by MS has shown that high on the hit list is the problem of memory leaks, now to be solved by GC. Adding .NET onto the existing Win32 structure will be, at best, a partial fix. The better path will make .NET and GC intrinsic parts of the OS

Re: the case for something new

[jeff_duntemann]

Maybe I'm just too old, but I consider ever-increasingly complex screen pyrotechnics a big drawback for operating systems. I like seeing one window at a time whenever possible--helps me focus.

The other major problem Windows has had is trying to suck every last little useful utility into the OS itself, and to tie every component to every other component in nonobvious ways. This makes the OS harder to extend back at the source, where MS has had huge difficulty making Vista happen.

I still haven't seen how either XP or Vista will make my everyday work as a writer/editor/publisher easier or faster. To the contrary, the snappy performance of Win2K on a 3 GHz machine with loads of RAM puts the performance of XP to shame.

MS OS performance is basically running in place, as complexity rises to the point where even MS has trouble making it work. OS/X is a good example of how to make a user-centric OS out of Unix, but I don't see anybody in the FOSS world trying to learn from Apple's example.

By the way, I liked BEOS too.

Re: the case for something new

[anonymous]

I don't know what the future will bring in terms of an OS, but the way things are going, I anticipate we're not far from having 2GB display cards with three times the processing power of that needed by the OS. One of the problems is that, 25 years ago, it was hard (for me) to imagine a processor being able to do anything useful to a video signal in real time. So much for my crystal ball!

I recall back around 1983, in a discussion with a young friend who was then a CS major at UCSC, complaining about the way functions were being stuffed into the hybrid CM/P - CDOS OS our client was using. He replied that it was easy to make the case for the OS to provide practically any service you could imagine, from date and time calculations to the more esoteric math needed for television timecode. It appears that such was the thinking in CS circles of that day, and Windows has clearly inherited from that philosophy. And yes, Windows does happen to provide functions in support of television timecode -- but not the math needed Then, of course, comes

We reinvent OSs all the time!

[anonymous]

Jeff,

the issue with Windows is that they Never Throw Anything Out. The Black-Scholes calculator your grandfather wrote still works. Vista is a gargantuan vat of least common denominator. They don't want to take a chance that someone will buy Mac OS X or Linux when their fave 25 year-old app stops working. Instead of supporting old OSs, they support the current OS only, because everything will work on the new OS, go buy it. Even the CPU has compatibility circuitry to let old binary run.

I want an OS that supports what we need to use in 2006, not 1986. All that rancid baggage is smothering what once was 25,000 lines of code; you can sort of make out the creative bits among the tracts of bloat, but it is harder than it should be.

What you suggest is the easy part. The hard part is chosing the set of commonplace services worthy of it.

-bentley