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So wait, the most interesting thing in this build is a new.....wallpaper?

Unless Microsoft has invented something to make impossible to use that wallpaper in my KDE desktop I'm afraid that is not really exciting. Aren't there big changes or optimizations on this build, or it's just that nobody knows because Microsoft doesn't tells its testers what has changed?

Edited 2006-07-17 23:54

I guess you didn't read the article, as it mentioned ongoing optimization throughout.

In non-technical terms:

They are still retouching the desktop image with Photoshop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H oops, Microsoft Photo Editor for maximum visual impact.

Wow, you have to be joking, that new bliss is a mess .. the old one was much nicer, calming even.. that rocky farce looks like a scene from an Xbox game .. not for me at all ..

I guess it's a personal taste thing - I quite like it compared to the last Bliss (esp. the XP one). This one looks far more inviting than teletubbie land.

Not that I'd be caught dead being a 'blind zombie'. Oh, wait...

Error
Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE) :

* in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage.class at line 492 (gallerycoreapi::error)
* in modules/core/classes/Gallery.class at line 240 (postgresqlstorage::search)
* in modules/core/classes/helpers/GalleryFileSystemEntityHelper_simple.clas s at line 110 (gallery::search)
* in modules/core/classes/GalleryCoreApi.class at line 1969 (galleryfilesystementityhelper_simple::fetchchildidbypathcomponent)
* in modules/core/classes/helpers/GalleryFileSystemEntityHelper_simple.clas s at line 62 (gallerycoreapi::fetchchildidbypathcomponent)
* in modules/core/classes/GalleryCoreApi.class at line 1912 (galleryfilesystementityhelper_simple::fetchitemidbypath)
* in modules/rewrite/classes/RewriteSimpleHelper.class at line 48 (gallerycoreapi::fetchitemidbypath)
* in ??? at line 0 (rewritesimplehelper::loaditemidfrompath)
* in modules/rewrite/classes/RewriteUrlGenerator.class at line 96
* in modules/rewrite/classes/parsers/modrewrite/ModRewriteUrlGenerator.clas s at line 48 (modrewriteurlgenerator::_onload)
* in init.inc at line 111 (modrewriteurlgenerator::init)
* in main.php at line 71

[misc crap]

It's gone Jim!

I guess you'd really have to know the code, reasons and techniques behind it.

Try looking up "code optimization techniques." Lots of them end up being a speed vs. size tradeoff.

Just one example: loop unrolling

Or at a higher level, they could be caching things on the hard drive now instead of generating them at run time.

Edited 2006-07-18 00:27

Have you not ever used an -O flag in gcc? Sheesh. What kind of Gentoo user ARE you!?

They're optimising for speed as opposed to size

As a simple example; in many languages, if you want to execute a method ten times; you can either put it in a loop that executes ten times, or you can say:

doStuff();
doStuff();
doStuff();
.

.
doStuff();

The first way is less code, but may be slower than the ten explicit calls. Futher optiomisation may look inside the doStuff() call, extract all the statements in it, and then just lump each group of statements into the calling code, ten times over. So now you've done away with the overhead of setting up and operating the loop AND the method call overhead too. Trouble is, you have a lot more actual code.

When MS switches from size optimisation, to speed optimisation, you will get more code, but it should run faster. This isn't an unusual practice.

I think you are not quite right. Usually compilers "decide" in favor of a smaller size for optimization of execution speed. Loop unrolling and inlining of function/method code really increases the size, but compilers rarely do that since it trashes the L1 instruction cache and even L2 cache with redundant code, thus bringing performance SIGNIFICANTLY down.
Your example with the unrolled function code AFAIK wrong in every case, since modern branch prediction in CPUs would most possibly be even faster when using a not unrolled loop, since all code easily fits into L1 cache.

Gotcha.

Thanks!

It's also the case that people at MS usually profile the code before optimizing (at least that's the advice they always give on blogs and white papers). I've seen it mentioned on either Raymond Chen or Larry Ostermann's blog that optimizing for size usually has good effects because it reduces the amount of code that has to be paged on startup and it speeds up recovery from working set trimming.

Raymond has a pretty interesting article about how O(n) algorithms can often be faster than O(log n) algorithms because they have simpler data structures which fit better into the cache hierarchy and have faster bus transfers. And usually, asymptotic efficiency does not matter when n is bounded by some system resource like memory. (For instance, the O(n) scheduler in linux was not inherently bad because it was O(n)... for most workloads it comes down to constant factors).

Unbelievable that such a stupid trollpost get's modded up to a score of 4. You obviously are at best a beginner level programmer or don't know anything about programming at all.
Thats ok of course but then please don't critisize things you have no knowledge about.

Optimizing for speed results in amlmost all scenarios in bigger files, apart from maybee reimplementing in assembly which is something noone outside of the embedded scene is going to do in larger portions of code.

ok I can admit when I'm wrong. I've taken Pascal, Java, C++ and most recently, Assembly but I guess I don't know as much as you guys about optimization. From my experience so far it mostly consisted of finding a faster/more efficient algorithm which usually equated to less lines of codes or at most, roughly the same number.

I think it was Monad or I could be way off topic here.

Monad, or "PowserShell" as it is now called, is nothing like any UNIX shell I've ever used. It has the strangest syntax I've ever seen, as if Microsoft had Larry Wall and Bjarne Stroustrup sit in a room for two weeks arguing semantics and this is what they came up with. It isn't even remotely integrated with anything that's not in a .NET class, and there's huge, gaping holes in its functionality that make it hard to really consider it a "shell" at all.

Also, nobody knows how to use PowerShell, but any even halfway competent sysadmin or programmer knows the basics of how to get stuff done in Bourne-like shells. I don't know who MS is targeting with this product, the Windows sysadmins/programmers who currently use Cygwin, or the Windows monkeys who don't know what that is. If it's the former, good luck, you're gunna need it. If it's the latter, MS is vastly overestimating these people's capacity and willingness to learn complex object-oriented scripting languages.

I like the new shell. It does have a strange syntax, and getting used to the verb-object syntax can be a little daunting, but once it clicks, it really makes sense.

The underlying idea is fairly unixy: small tools (cmdlets) that are piped together to make something useful. The difference is that unix has ad-hock communication semantics (it's all text, but after that anything goes) whereas with WPS you are communicating between cmdlets in a consistent fashion.

It isn't even remotely integrated with anything that's not in a .NET class
Not true at all. You get more bang for your buck with dotnet classes, but it can work with anything. It supports the same kind of text piping semantics that unix shells do, so it will work with any command line tool. For those, you have to handle the protocol yourself, like unix shells do now. It supports COM. It supports WMI.

and there's huge, gaping holes in its functionality that make it hard to really consider it a "shell" at all.
Examples?

It is a bit of a learning curve, no doubt there. It's not the same old shell that hasn't really changed in 30 years.

More ignorant rambling spewed forth from ChrisA's keyboard. Well, at least you're not trolling Channel9 anymore (at least, I haven't seen you there lately).

Yea you're right Chris. Over the past year GIMP has taken almost the entire market share away from Adobe Photoshop. Most desktop users now use Linux instead of MS Windows. No one uses MS Office or cares about its proprietary formats. Hardware vendors no longer write device drivers for proprietary software like MS Windows anymore, only for OSS like Linux. No one uses Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks or any other Macromedia software because various OSS have just blown that company out of the water. They just can't keep up.

Basically, MS, Adobe, Apple's software division, Macromedia and countless others will all just go bankrupt very very soon. The OSS community will make sure of that.

Edited 2006-07-18 17:12

I'm a little lost. I assume you are being sarcastic, but Its badly done. If it was done better I could perhaps find a point.

This is not really the place for "binary" vs "open source" or even the place for "open format" vs "propriatry file format".

Its not even the place to discuss, marketing, or monopolies.

The reality is most web servers run open-source software in the form of LAMP. If statistics about firefox are to belived at least 10% of users run an open source browser, and Open Office looks to be getting the same treatment.

The harsh reality is XP will be 6 years old when XP released, in Jan 2007, and Vista doesn't look to be 6 years better, Linux is a different beast in the same time.

I think it mainly targets .Net Programmers and for them it can be insanely powerfull. You could write whole .Net Applications in it since every single part of the .Net Framework is completly usable from it.

Documentation is a little sparse right now which isn't realy surprising for a piece of prerelease Software.
That is no reason to switch to Vista though, since it is available for XP as well.

Good to see the zealots are out in full force tonight

zealot is a silly word. Vista is a disapointment. Its late; DRM; features cut or reduced, and nothing exiting left.

The must have feature is directX, and thats only becuase Microsoft, have decided to not support it under XP, ans I think its the right move for them.

Microsoft is a source of amusement and rightly so for Mac and Linux users.

The reality is if you look at the latest ribbon bars, Microsoft can still do something interesting. It would have been nice to see more of this in Vista.

"Microsoft is a source of amusement and rightly so for Mac and Linux users."

I agree with the Mac users, but Linux users? Please, I've tried a number of Linux distros, and they're no better [and in most cases] worse than Windows. Vista is very late, and I agree it's not worth the price or aggrevation of upgrading. I have over 300 desktops to ponder over, and it doesn't make me feel good. I've used OSX [minimally] and it's by far a much more stable and better OS than both Windows and Linux. And before you go on a rant about how Linux is more stable and can do more by compiling this that and the other, I'm basing my comments on the end user community. Throw a PC with Win or a Mac with OSX in front of someone, and they're pretty much on their way and being productive. You can't say that about many [if any] Linux distros.

@tmanops2006
I know you are not basing anything on anything. If you are looking after 300 desktops. Then you should be aware that with a correctly configured OS, the harsh reality is the difference between the OS's correctly set up from a production point is actually very little. The user should never touch the OS. Thats your job.

@ Ridiculous
You must live in fantasy land. My point was that 90% of the users out there can sit down in front of Windows PC, or a MAC and be productive from the start. That can't be said for Linux. I actually like Linux, but it's no where near ready for prime time. And don't push that MS monopoly BullSh&t. If there was a solid Linux Distro out there, and easy to manage, and more importantly easy to USE by the end user community, companies would be migrating to it. Now go back to your room in your folks basement, and get back to that final stage of DOOM III...

It's the warm weather ...

As for apple they have a wonderful OS i will give them that but when they have the software and developer support windows has perhaps ill look at it more than just in glancing. Then theirs the even bigger reason i won't use OSX ... Why is it apple although using x86 hardware still has to play god and require "apple" hardware... grow up and share, dell should sue apple for monopolizing the apple OS... the fact is its on x86 so it should work on all x86 not just "apple" x86 ... GIVE ME A BREAK

Give *me* a break. If Dell were to sue Apple for a monopoly I'm pretty sure its a no-brainer that Dell wouldn't win that one. Apple doesn't have a monopoly with OS X because its only available on Macs. The actual marketshare of OS X is way to small to be considered a monopoly. How about Mandriva sues Dell because Dell isn't selling Mandriva Linux on their computers? C'mon....

Give *me* a break. If Dell were to sue Apple for a monopoly I'm pretty sure its a no-brainer that Dell wouldn't win that one. Apple doesn't have a monopoly with OS X because its only available on Macs. The actual marketshare of OS X is way to small to be considered a monopoly. How about Mandriva sues Dell because Dell isn't selling Mandriva Linux on their computers? C'mon....

Apple could easily say in defence also; why doesn't Dell develop their own operating system and ecosystem on which applications could be built? I mean, Dell has BILLIONS in profits, why don't they invest some of those into an easy to use FreeBSD (for argument sake), and call it Dell-OS, and work with partners to provide software through their online retail channel.

There is nothing stopping HP or Dell from replicating the vertically integrated system vendor by using their existing product or opensource project; in the case of HP, porting HP-UX to AMD64 and putting an easy to use interface ontop, or in the case of Dell, creating a customised, easy to use distribution based on FreeBSD, which gives then the flexibility of maintaining it in a closed source model (or have parts open).

The people who whine about Apple whine because thtey want the 'Apple Experience' without the Apple price tag; that Apple price tag exists because Apple use their hardware sales to subsidise their operating system development; I doubt the money they make off their operating system sales cover the cost of developing and maintaining, especially the amount of R&D that goes into developing the said products. They might break even, but the certainly don't rake in the money like Microsoft do, with profit margins of 85% plus.

The problem with a Dell-OS would be that all the spyware and bundled software would be compiled into the kernal and impossible to uninstall

LOL, na, when you turn on your machine, you'll hear the screams of pain of Michael Dell and how Dell needed to actually spend money on R&D for the first time in their history - the idea of actually hiring people who have a clue about computers, the *shock* cost that comes with it

Hence the reason I don't see Dell ever doing it; it would actually require them to do something innovative, something they've never done in their 20 or so years in existance.

It certainly sounds like you enjoy the way windows works for you, congrats, you fall into the majority.

I do not appreciate the way it stores libraries in memory, the way the priority works, or how userspace is allocated, nor do I like being restricted from controlling my computer,and i do not enjoy just using half of the bits on my processor.

I do not appreciate the way it stores libraries in memory, the way the priority works, or how userspace is allocated, nor do I like being restricted from controlling my computer,and i do not enjoy just using half of the bits on my processor.

Then there is the most annoying aspect, this assumption that all people us GUI, and as such, they castrate the CLI to the point that its useless.

Atleast with MacOS X, the developers realise that there are still some old schoolers like me out there who would rather use the CLI tools, and pipe the out put through several commands rather than having to use half a dozen tools to accomplish the same task.

Think you are right. My rather limited knowledge makes me agree with you...but just like I said...'limited'...:)

I've been saying this for a while now. All builds of vista that are released into the wild are FRE builds. MSFT doesn't ship CHK (debug) code, not even for betas. It is possible that they have extra tracing code or logging in the betas, but all of the code released into the wild is compiled as FRE.

You can get CHK builds, but they run so slow that even driver developers do not use them. These folks just replace ntoskrnl and hal.dll with the CHK builds for debugging. The 100 MB bump in size is probably from a lot of small images and other space-consuming things... not from changes to the code, which would be a miniscule size difference. Probably as the OS is nearing completion, UI image elements are being added, along with icons and a lot of other little things that add up to a lot of space.

just curious: does a "FRE" release (i.e. free of debugging symbols) generally take up less space than a debugging release?

Checked builds have actually been smaller than the free builds lately, though I haven't compared them to see why. They could exclude some of the drivers that are in the free builds, but that's just a guess.

could that explain why the release is only 100 MB larger than its predecessor, despite extensive (and possibly space-consuming) optimizations?

All of the releases have included both free and checked builds. The checked builds are mainly of interest to driver developers due to the inclusion of extra code checks. Everyone else (testers, general public) normally receives/chooses the free build which is usually faster than checked due to less overhead and is the configuration that the final release build will have. The size increase of 5472 is likely due to a mix of optimization, added/changed drivers, features, resources, etc.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/08/31/458572.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/De...

for more info about Free vs. Checked builds.

I don't think so. Actually, no.. because the last build was also FRE.

The one I downloaded from MSDN for Beta2 has a big CHECKED next to it...it wasn't FRE.

Let me see. (Having played around with Beta2 for some time)

- Slow. (Compared to XP, Fedora, Slackware, etc)
- Requires -huge- amount of memory. (No, taking 800MB just to load office is -way- too much.)
- Bring little, if any to the table. (New DirectX and having a better [?] looking UI, is -far- from being enough. ObjectDesktop is much, much cheaper, thank you!)

What reason (beyond Microsoft pulling the plug on 2000/XP without notice) do I have to switch to Vista? What exactly am I getting in return?

"What reason (beyond Microsoft pulling the plug on 2000/XP without notice) do I have to switch to Vista? What exactly am I getting in return?"

Answer (well, at least the one you want to hear): Absolutely nothing.

So don't worry about it.

Well, it has rwlocks and condvars, it seems, so porting at least some pthread software is going to be easier. At least that's what I found on MSDN the other day by accident.

I'm surprised *anything* could be slow compared to Fedora. When I started using Linux it came on less than a dozen 3.5" floppies and felt fast on my 486, but recently it just seems to feel very ordinary. I suspect that this is just the bloated UIs we have now, but then I suspect that most people's objection to XP speed is down to the slow scroll speed of cmd windows and the slower process startups affecting UNIX-style scripting.

I think the answer is: we shall see. Just as we will for the next release of anything else.

haha. a few more spelling mistakes and that would have been a world class troll

"The kernel is still XP-Like, that means nearly a Windows 2000 Kernel. Technologie from the stone age!"

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, have you??

ROFL

Ah .. the smell of fear ....

Yes, and Linux kernel 2.6.16 is in some ways based on Linux kernel 0.0.1. That doesn't mean there's been no development in the meantime. Your statement is absurd.

Yep, that's right.

The ONLY thing that MS did for the latest build, was to change the wallpaper.

Uh huh. Yup.

(How do you roll your eyes in this forum).

Yep, that's right.

The ONLY thing that MS did for the latest build, was to change the wallpaper.

Take it you didn't read the article then? Thought not.

"...If only Firefox worked on IE-only sites"

It often does if you use browser spoofing. Many times I've recevied a BS message that "this web site is designed to work with Internet Explorer. Firefox is not supported..." or some such. Using a browser spoof setting of IE 6, I am able to get into the site just fine. This of course doesn't always work, but sometimes it will get the job done. Give it a shot.

[quote]It often does if you use browser spoofing. Many times I've recevied a BS message that "this web site is designed to work with Internet Explorer. Firefox is not supported..." or some such. Using a browser spoof setting of IE 6, I am able to get into the site just fine. This of course doesn't always work, but sometimes it will get the job done. Give it a shot.[/quote]

It doesn't always work... Some sites are hardwired to IE and don't display right on Firefox/Konq/Opera.
Either way, It's less of a problem for me; I'm using a bare Windows 2K/IE6 VMW guest machine running on my Linux workstation(s). (Plus, using snapshoots, I don't really care about viruses/malware/etc)

Either way... Both solutions are way-too-complex for my friend and family. As much as I dislike giving $$$ to Microsoft, at least for now, they'll continue using XP (and IE) and I'll continue to spend time fixing their machines once things go to hell (and they always do...).

Gilboa

Just because a program is Open-source does not make it cross platform. I for one miss virtualdub.

There are lots of reasons to use Linux. I would say its fun modern, and damn it, it works just so good.

Yes, some people like editing config files, hunting down patches, hacking stuff to get it to work and it isn't anything wrong with that, it's their time. But "modern" and "just works" are far from reality.

*Never ever* have I hunted down, or patched anything. To be absolutely sure, I can't remember the last time I edited a config file.

I'm not scared of editing a text file. I'm surprised you are, but those files that needed tweeking havent needed changing since.

As for being modern, I donloaded the latest linux last week. I click a button and all my programs update themselves. As opposed to something that will be 6 years old by the time the new version is out.

I've found linux to be incredibly low maintence, and I use gentoo for hevens sake.