Yeah so I was pretty wrong about Vista

ubrakto wrote:

Then we're having two completely different debates. I'm not arguing whether Vista is or is not a compelling upgrade for end users. I'm arguing that it's not a re-skinned Windows XP that doesn't run good, which is what a lot of people label it as.

Reskinned no. But is it XP with a new GUI and a bunch of basic new features and an annoying security system that doesn't do anything but annoy users tacked on? That I'm more inclined to say. If you look around Vista, you'll see that much of the backend functionality and management stuff is the same as XP. It looks the same and does the same things. I have no doubt that the kernel of Vista is simply an updated XP kernel and not a rewrite from the ground up as it was supposed to be. The reason I am sure of this is because Vista was originally supposed to completely eliminate the registry, something that was cut around the same time as WinFS and both of which would have required substantial kernel modification or a complete rewrite. The core of Vista is still very much NT->2000->XP.

The only thing that was potentially compelling for users beyond the shiny new interface was UAC and how secure it was supposed to make the system. I think many of us know how that turned out. The concepts behind UAC are a good idea (i.e. switching to a self-contained memory space when prompting, memory space randomization etc.) but in the end, all it is is a feature that constantly prompts you to do anything (including several things I can't see spyware taking advantage of) and which most of my customers tell me to turn off. I advise them against it but their response always is "This is incredibly annoying and I don't want it." And in the case of those that can't/won't turn it off, all they end up doing is clicking Continue without reading the warning and that's exactly how the first ActiveX-based spyware applications got through old versions of IE.

Microsoft knew that this new, much-closer-to-XP-than-they-wanted version of Vista (which they had to put out as it is so they could release it before 2010) wouldn't be adopted by most hardcore users because it offers nothing that's worth the price of admission both in money, system requirements and DRM nonsense. That's why they are unnecessarily forcing DX10/Games for Windows Live to require Vista in the hopes of forcing people to move there. Falling Leaf Systems is already demonstrating that locking DX10 to Vista is a marketing gimmick only and has nothing to do with technology.

All this adds up to something that isn't worth the money in my highly-experienced opinion. Some will disagree and they are free to but right now, I tell everything who is thinking about buying a new computer to insist on XP or at least wait until Vista SP1. Vista is just plain not worth it.

[quote=Parallax Abstraction
]The only thing that was potentially compelling for users beyond the shiny new interface was UAC and how secure it was supposed to make the system. I think many of us know how that turned out. The concepts behind UAC are a good idea (i.e. switching to a self-contained memory space when prompting, memory space randomization etc.) but in the end, all it is is a feature that constantly prompts you to do anything (including several things I can't see spyware taking advantage of) and which most of my customers tell me to turn off. I advise them against it but their response always is "This is incredibly annoying and I don't want it." And in the case of those that can't/won't turn it off, all they end up doing is clicking Continue without reading the warning and that's exactly how the first ActiveX-based spyware applications got through old versions of IE.[/quote]

What are you or your customers doing that the UAC is such a pain? I use Vista every day as my main gaming rig at home and been doing so for a while now and the UAC is a non issue.

I have 1 program that invokes UAC, and it is an old program that has to run as a privilaged user account, and that is it. Otherwise it only happens when I am doing administrator sort of stuff like manually installing a driver, messing with my NiC settings and so on.

Vista is not perfect not going to even try that but curious what others are doing that makes UAC such a big issue for them when my expereince using Vista every day for several months has UAC basically a non issue and I am what I would think as a power user.

I have no doubt that the kernel of Vista is simply an updated XP kernel and not a rewrite from the ground up as it was supposed to be

Proof? Driver developers over at Nvidia have told me VERY differently.

maladen wrote:

What are you or your customers doing that the UAC is such a pain? I use Vista every day as my main gaming rig at home and been doing so for a while now and the UAC is a non issue.

Installing software, running most of their old XP apps, invoking print jobs from certain applications, changing just about any setting under Control Panel and more. I know UAC isn't a problem for everyone and it doesn't bother me too much either. But many of my customers have complained that it annoys the crap out of them. I also try to set them up with a limited account as that's what you are supposed to do under Vista to make it secure and one of the big Vista claims is that running a limited account isn't supposed to break things anymore.

TheGameguru wrote:

Proof? Driver developers over at Nvidia have told me VERY differently.

My personal proof is what I see with my own two eyes and the fact that most of the major features that would have most certainly required a significant kernel rewrite were cut (i.e. registry removal and WinFS.) However, I do know that if the kernel wasn't redone from scratch, it was certainly changed a lot as most of the new DRM is at the kernel level. While we're asking for substantial of claims, what did the NVIDIA developers tell you?

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Installing software, running most of their old XP apps, invoking print jobs from certain applications, changing just about any setting under Control Panel and more. I know UAC isn't a problem for everyone and it doesn't bother me too much either. But many of my customers have complained that it annoys the crap out of them. I also try to set them up with a limited account as that's what you are supposed to do under Vista to make it secure and one of the big Vista claims is that running a limited account isn't supposed to break things anymore.

I can see some of that if you are doing a lot of administrator type work but a lot of the UAS "issues" I blame on the software. Old stuff wants to run in a privlaged mode and access things that it really has no need to access but the old windows model was sloppy so everybody was an admin user.

I know I have a bazzillion problems trying to run XP with limited accounts using software for XP so really is no surprise XP software on Vista is having issues.

I think over time a lot of this will go away as apps are written that conform to standards. Vista is still very new and in time I think a lot of this will go away although I know it does not fix the issues for your customers now.

Just think it is wrong to give Vista all the blame for a lot of these issues.

While we're asking for substantial of claims, what did the NVIDIA developers tell you?

Mostly about developing drivers now and how Vista handles drivers vastly differently than XP did.. due to how the entire Graphics subsystem was changed.. in fact basically the entire way the kernel deals with various components has changed from XP. Mostly excuses to why their drivers are so piss poor right now

Also this whole DX10 to XP deal that this other company is developing is essentially (according to Nvidia) a software wrapper.. they (Nvidia) dont expect performance to be much to write home about.

Its not in any shape or form "Bringing DX10 to XP"

shihonage wrote:

NTFS has always been a self-repairing file-system. They probably just increases the degree to which it repairs self. Again, meh. The days of FAT corrupting a vital system file and preventing system reboot stopped with NTFS of Windows NT 4.0 .

Just a correction on this - we regularly lose XP machines to filesystem corruption, so this isn't entirely true.

shihonage wrote:
and improved backups based on volume shadow copy can be made

Why use crappy limited Windows backups which are most likely incapable of incremental TCP/IP and/or FTP offsite transfer ? There are professional programs that are a lot more feature-rich.

Shadow copy is an assistive technology to the backup programs, and it does a lot more than just the version-control feature. It allows cleaner backups with fewer locked file problems. Everyone benefits from that.

Aetius wrote:

Just a correction on this - we regularly lose XP machines to filesystem corruption, so this isn't entirely true.

You regularly lose NTFS-formatted XP machines to filesystem corruption ?

Sounds like you have bigger issues at work there that no amount of filesystem resiliency is going to fix.

Shadow copy is an assistive technology to the backup programs, and it does a lot more than just the version-control feature. It allows cleaner backups with fewer locked file problems. Everyone benefits from that.

People who require shadow copy this badly/specifically have been benefitting from it ever since Windows 2003 Server was released.

maladen wrote:

I can see some of that if you are doing a lot of administrator type work but a lot of the UAS "issues" I blame on the software. Old stuff wants to run in a privlaged mode and access things that it really has no need to access but the old windows model was sloppy so everybody was an admin user.

You are 100% right there. The problem though? It doesn't matter to an end user whose software library consists of old XP apps. I understand the reasons why launching almost any XP based app requires UAC validation but my customers don't, it pisses them off and thus they want me to turn UAC off, despite my telling them its unwise because of all the behind-the-scenes stuff it does that is very valuable for security. My point is that Microsoft should have thought of this when designing UAC and by not doing so, they've doomed it to either be turned off or ignored by their users, thus making it useless. Even a simple "don't warn me about this program again" checkbox for XP applications would have completely solved the issue. But they blew it.

TheGameguru wrote:

Mostly about developing drivers now and how Vista handles drivers vastly differently than XP did.. due to how the entire Graphics subsystem was changed.. in fact basically the entire way the kernel deals with various components has changed from XP. Mostly excuses to why their drivers are so piss poor right now :)

I know we disagree a lot on how invasive the DRM is in Vista but you can't deny that the DRM had a lot to do with that. The DRM does work at the kernel level and requires heavy rewriting of drivers to support AACS, HDCP and other copy protection measures that utilize tilt bits. Again, I agree that the video card manufacturers knew about this for a long time and didn't work hard enough (the fact that ATI's drivers work much better than NVIDIA's demonstrates this) but you can't deny the DRM's involvement there. I'm sure the kernel was modified in other ways too (just as XP's was different from 2000's) but what I've seen shows me that it's either the XP kernel at heart with a lot of modifications or an entirely new kernel that's still based on a lot of the old conventions that were used in XP because so many of the innovations were cut from Vista.