Two weeks ago, I published an article in which I explained what was wrong about Randall Kennedy's "Windows 7 Unmasked" article. This was noted by Infoworld's editor-in-chief Eric Knorr, who suggested that Randall and I enter into an email debate regarding the various points made in our articles. We agreed upon publishing this email thread as-is, unedited (I didn't even fix the spelling errors), on both Infoworld and OSNews. We agreed that Randall would start the debate, and that I had the final word. Read on for the entertaining email debate (I figured it would be best to give each email its own page, for clarity's sake. My apologies if this makes each individual page much shorter than what you're used to from OSNews).
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Member since:2006-02-05
The professional doesn't know about thread pools. Mid way through a development cycle, (build 6801 is not even a beta), you are not going to be doing things like optimizing the thread pool size, so of course the count is going to be the same.
My guess is the "professional" wrote a line of business app that used some sort of parallelism, and now considers himself a domain expert. Both his assertion that thread pool size is a good indicator of feature count on a kernel mid way through its dev cycle, and a bunch of other things he said in his article (like how MDAC is in the kernel) shows a real lack of understanding on how windows works.
I don't pretend to understand kernel development, but I do have a high level understanding of MDAC and worker pools, enough to know that what he is saying is just silly.
Member since:2005-07-06
When people use phrases like 'mid way though a development cycle' and 'not even a beta' it's because they know nothing has changed but they are insinuating that something will change later on. Using the "Oh we don't know what will happen" argument is just daft.
You don't go mucking around with kernel thread handling and integrity when you start releasing public builds the last I checked, especially when you have stated that drivers and applications will be completely compatible with a previous kernel version. This doesn't just mean binary compatibility, because you have to account for timing and all sorts of other extreme quirks.
In the absence of source code then we either go on hearsay as to what has changed, or someone looks at some evidence as to what has changed.
MDAC as in Microsoft Data Access Components.....?
In what way? Unless you affect fundamental changes to something that impact on developers, and possibly users, then there is very little change you can have beyond limited bug fixes in Windows - and even then, somebody might start depending on the bugs that exist in a previous version! It has happened before. On top of this, we have a kernel that will allow existing binary Vista drivers to work, which places even more restrictions on it.
That's the way Windows works, and nothing will change that. Restrictions == no change, and the limited evidence bears that out. Sorry, but "They said in this blog post that this has changed" isn't a rebuttal.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Well,not quite a dialog. It seems that one person knows what is talking (with arguments) and that's Randal while the other one is just filling the screen with words to match up the word count Randall's emails have. And that's Thom. Euphemistic, it's a discussion between a professional (Randall) and a hobbyist (I was about to say dilettante).