Windows Vista - Not So Bad?

Shantyman writes "ZDNet has a counterpoint to the negative impressions of Vista's Beta 2 going around. Entitled Vista Beta 2, up close and personal, Ed Bott writes: 'I've spent the last three months running beta versions of Windows Vista on the PCs I use for everyday work. February and March were exasperating. April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.'"

Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

From the very first paragraph of the article:

Up in Redmond, Microsoft developers proudly talk of dogfooding the software they write. Running beta software is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. A copy of Windows Vista running on a test machine in the corner isn't likely to get a serious workout. To find the pain points -- another popular Microsoft expression -- you have to run that beta code on the machine you use every day.

Wasn't there a slashdot reference to an article in the last week where Microsoft "was considering" removing admin access from their employees? That doesn't sound like "eating their own dogfood". As long as they're all running Windows with the highest access levels (admin), they're potentially missing serious security problems.

Since Lowest User Access (LUA) is a huge issue around tightening Windows security, running Vista within Microsoft means little around testing security. And, unless they're shipping Vista with defaults of non-admin user accounts, the beta testing world isn't likely to bang on that code hard enough.

It's not clear from the article, nor do I know enough about the Vista beta (not about to try it on any of my machines...) whether the LUA concept is in play. Any beta testers out there care to weigh in?

Re:Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Re:Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

Also, having the developers using Vista and having grandma use Vista are 2 entirely different things. I don't have any problems running windows 2k and keeping it free from viruses/spyware/bloat. Yet this seems to be the biggest problem for home users.

Re:Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

There's one very important thing that you're missing: just because the current employees have admin priviledges doesn't mean that they aren't running with LUA, it just means they have the OPTION of running as admin.

MS employees apparently really do believe in the dogfood thing (from what I hear from an employee) so I find it reasonable to think that at least many of them usually run as LUA.

The news from the other day would remove the option and force them to run as LUA, which very well may make things worse from this point of view because then there won't also be a lot of people running as admin.

Re:Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

With Vista, even admin users don't run with elevated permissions. I'm logged in as an administrator right now. If I try to create a new text file at C:\ I get an access denied message. If I click the button to continue with the operation, I get a second dialog box warning me that a program is about to do something that requires higher permissions. This then gives me the option to continue or block the operation.

I assume with a limited account, you would have a similar experience, but would need to type in an admin password to continue.

The point is that programs do NOT automatically have permission to do admin operations. Admin or not, the user experience will be quite similar, forcing programs to work without elevated permissions.

Yep

I partially agree with you, and because of my unix background, I am running vista as a non-priviledged user.

There are two aspects of this. The first is that, if you truly are running as a low-priv user, you need to get elevation prompts at the correct times to be able to live life. This works pretty well, although I keep a cmd.exe window running as local admin sitting around sometimes.

The other aspect of this, however, is that in the real world, a lot of people just dont run as admin, and a lot of apps just can't. So a bunch of work has gone into making admins "virtual admins", so to speak, where operations that actually require priviledge use still involve user interaction/confirmation.

In that sense, people running "as admin" are getting the customer experience - and internally, the way the "did you really want to do this, Mr. Admin?" stuff works is passionately debated :)

My opinion is that people are complaining about the wrong problem - as we continue to eliminate things that require priviledge use, the amount that we have to care about putting up with a just-in-time priviledge escalation model goes down.

Re: Mod MS Employee Down (again)

Everytime I've got one of the desktops I support running something that requires a dip into admin priveleges for the apps that can't run in the user space, the OS is going to ask for verification.
Given this will be *very* annoying, I'm guessing there's a little checkbox to "remember" this decision. Lo and behold! The system is running in Admin!


So let me see if I understand this: You are discussing a "problem" with an approach that you are speculating might work a certain way, on a feature and operating system you haven't ever used?

There has been a lot of work to improve the admin problem in Vista, and there's probably more that you don't see than what you do. Please don't make up your mind on what the drawbacks of the approaches we've taken until you've at least tried - and maybe understand - them.

turn the PC into a DRM'd set-top box.

No rational person thinks this, but suppose anyway that that is our secret plan, and that we're going to come up with some scheme whereby apps can't run unless they're magically signed or some other scheme.

Guess what - we already have that, in a few forms even (i.e. SAFER, SRP, etc), and the majority of people don't use it, and don't want to, and even if we did have it, there will still need to be a box that says "run anyway". So "turning the PC into a DRM set-top box" doesn't even solve the problem you're suggesting exists (which, in reality, doesn't exist, fyi)

Microsoft IS Eating Their Own Dogfood

I disagree with your assessment of the situation. Microsoft employees running as admin means two things. Of course it means that they don't have to worry about programs that require admin (or have bugs if not used in admin mode). But even in this case, your hostility is misdirected. MS produces some of the programs most capable of performing correctly in limited user situations I've ever seen (in fact, I can't think of any notable bugs in MS programs when running as limited user, apart from obviously administrative programs, like chkdsk or defrag). That's why I was completely indifferent to the news that MS employees might have to run as limited users: they already know how to play nicely in the limited user situation. What REALLY needs to happen is that third-party developers who write these steaming pile of shit programs need to be forced to use limited user mode. There's absolutely no reason some of these programs (Intuit's It'sDeductable comes readily to mind) need to be admin.

However, running as admin opens them up to all the nasty exploits and viruses (especially if they're using IE), those being probably the biggest blunder on Microsoft's part. As a limited user, a virus can delete your MP3s and porn. As admin, a virus can reformat your entire hard drive, install a rootkit, etc. If that isn't eating your own dog food, I don't know what is.

Sorry this post is a bit scatterbrained. I'm in a pretty big hurry :P

Re: Gross Distortion of Reality

This would be Windows XP Pro on a stand-alone computer (my home computer), running Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 (I use those for all my university stuff, as well as my own amusement). Seriously, I've NEVER had to use runas to run a non-admin Microsoft program because it won't work properly on a limited user (yes, I'm defining installing new programs as admin stuff); ever. Though I must admit I've only tried running as a limited user on XP within the last couple years, and it could also help that I make sure I install the features of things like Office 2003 I need the first time around. Perhaps you could give some specific examples of major problems you've had.

Though I'll definitely admit that file permissions can be a bitch to deal with if you want to share stuff between different users/computers, or (heaven forbid) try to recover files from a physically damaged drive (I had the joyous experience of doing that; that's why I've only had this current installation of XP for six months or so). Or if you like to use naughty little programs like World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, or WinAmp (had to deal with this problem a while back; dunno if they fixed it by now) which assume they can write to their directory in Program Files whenever they want.

Re: Gross Distortion of Reality

How about some evidence for your claim that Office doesn't run in a limited user account, buddy? Before you get too far ahead of yourself. I have it on 250 computers, all running as a limited user account (and no, no domain-- we're Netware), and I've never encountered any problems related to permissions.

I'll see your 250 computers with no domain and raise you 10,000+ 2000 SP4 and XP Pro SP2 machines on a domain with non-admin users running Office 2000 and 2003 with no issues related to the lack of admin rights.

GGP is correct - MS is *very* good at making sure their modern apps follow the guidelines for working for non-admins. Almost every other "enterprise" software company is not.

Re:Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

Wasn't there a slashdot reference to an article in the last week where Microsoft "was considering" removing admin access from their employees? That doesn't sound like "eating their own dogfood". As long as they're all running Windows with the highest access levels (admin), they're potentially missing serious security problems.


I really don't want to debate this, and I think this is kind of trivial.

With that said, what you are referring to about allowing employees to have 'admin' rights on their systems is not a big issue up until this point, as the UAP system in Vista wasn't even close to a final stage until a month or two ago, and is still being tweaked to accomodate applications that were written by 3rd parties with the Win9x mindset.

What MS has been doing currently is NOT running their employees at Admin level in the sense I think you are refering to either. They have been running the computers in the new Vista Admin mode, which is like a 'default' user on OSX. Understand?

It is not the Root Admin level like previous versions of Windows. Even the actual administrator account on Vista doesn't get the conceptual 'root' access level.

What the other article was talking about was forcing MS users to not even get the 'admin' rights to make changes to their systems, which would include installing software, etc. This would be more like a hybrid between a User and Power User in the old Windows Security Groups.

Microsoft is turning down their employee 'admin' rights to ensure older applications that try to run with user credentials that never cared about NT security before still run properly in the restricted level of access.

There is no big story on this, nor a big story on lack of security. Vista is bring the abstraction between administrator and root security, to a point that even exceeds most *nix environments, while still not making it too tough on users. Think of it like a combination of the way *nixes do security with a combination of having NO Root account whatsoever to ensure people will NEVER be running with higher priveledges than they should.

Runs flawlessly

Wow it runs on at least one computer. Excellent! Good job Microsoft.

Anyone one else got it working yet? Maybe you can get your story posted to Slashdot too.

Re:Runs flawlessly

Turns out the guy didn't really get it working, he just had this [ytmnd.com] taped to his laptop.

Re:Runs flawlessly

Better yet, he claims it has been running flawlessly for three weeks, but the screenshot he posted:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?page_id=65&page=19

indicates a system crash on 5/21.

Or, to put it more accurately

MS's checks from april and may cleared.

Article is really a collection of screenshots

There's no article here. It's a collection of screenshots with a little blurb at the top. He's excited that you can change Vista's theme to one of eight different colors. This is not news for nerds.

Re:Article is really a collection of screenshots

Yes, because Slashdot has never run a story of just screenshots of KDE, Gnome, a Linux Install program, or any other pre-release software.

Does "not too bad" count as a good reason?

April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.

I haven't tried b2 yet, but from my experience with b1, I didn't so much have a problem with "stability" as the fact that it had nothing new that I wanted.

Not to say it doesn't have PLENTY of new ways to waste CPU and memory, as well as DRM-to-the-core, but I can't really say I consider those a reason to upgrade.


Rearranging the clicky-widgets doesn't make it "new", and taking away the user's rights on their own machine doesn't make it "improved". Making it harder to pirate doesn't make it "secure". Throwing in an SQL server turned on by default might make it "biger", but not in a good way.

I agree

I have to agree with this post. I ran the April and May release quite a bit, and was extremely impressed. Simply put, Vista is eye candy. In the early betas Vista was almost identical to XP, it just looked a new skin and the same old OS, but the latest releases have really turned my head. It's easy to bash something new from MS and write bad reviews about how it won't install right on your Lenovo and such, but after I actually gave it a chance, I was thoroughly impressed by the performance and usability. I can't wait to see the final product.

Running smoothly?

He says it's running smoothly, but the screenshot of the stability monitor says otherwise...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?page_id=65&page=19 [zdnet.com]

At least Microsoft has given us a way to prove how unstable our systems are... whenever Windows Vista is finally released.

Re:Running smoothly?

I love it. "Failure Type: OS Stopped Working." Real informative there!

Re:Running smoothly?

I have to say that MS must have enormous balls to add a "stability monitor" to Windows.

"Stability Index" is going to become the new "Uptime".

Java is broke

Java doesn't work. We run it on a machine with a projector in our conference room. It was looking good till we tried to join an online conference :)

Can't necessarily blame MS for Java though. Although I can blame them for trying to change the spec and the whole Sun-MS lawsuit fiasco.

The proof is in the pudding

Many reviewers wrote fawningly over Windows 95 back in the day. Their usage didn't happen to strike its biggest problems very hard. The test for Vista is when hundreds of millions of people are using it, not a few reviewers on their desktop and an odd laptop

Vista works

Me and some of my coworkers have been running vista build 5308 and I just installed build 5381 on those machines and they have been running very well. The install was improved and the interface is running a lot smoother and the new ati beta drivers are working good too. It's also running directx 10 now compared to 9L in the last build. We also have Office 2007 Beta 2 running on it and that too is working very well, We have both machines on a 2003 active directory network with exchange. The UAC does get annoying when it keeps asking you if your sure you want to do things, but a quick skim through the local security policy solved that :-) All in all I'd say Beta 2 has improved greatly over the past few releases. The memory usage at least is way down. It was using about 750mbs on our machines. I am upset that an Athlon X2 4200, with 4 gigs of ddr-400, a sata2 80 gig drive, and an atix1300 with 265mb on the card only gets a 3 out of 5 on the stupid rating system. Especially when everything works smooth, including the 3d page flip. I do feel that the "minimum requirements" that microsoft posted are of course a joke but that's nothing new.

I'm running it to post this! :)

I was just thinking "i know i like it better, but really, what do i like better about it?"

Then something occured to me.

Right now, i am copying 4GB of files off a usb disk to a network share. The shell file copy stuff has been completely re-worked (shell file operations has always been something that i have hated)

In vista, you get an expand/collapse pane to get details of what it is doing, and it seems to happen in its own thread. The copy dialog window shows up as its own window that you can minimize/restore/whatever, and best of all, it doesn't hang/slow down the shell in any way.

Note that XP and OS X (as of 10.3) get this badly wrong - the file copy dialog in both tends to be slow to repaint itself or to respond to window messages, and if you use a separate explorer/finder window to try and access the destination you're copying to, the window lurches slowly to try and redraw.

Not so with Vista.

So there you go - here is something that was so annoying to me in XP that I had just stopped using the shell to do any sort of large file operation - i'd break out cmd.exe and xcopy. Vista has fixed at least some of the file copy problems very admirably.

There are a lot of cool "small" things that I see, but maybe you have to be kind of nerdy to apprecate them? The task manager has some cool features on the build I am running. The eventviewer (eventvwr) is a completely new animal and is way cooler than the old one

A nice use of the pervasive desktop search integrated into the explorer windows is in Control Panel. We're pretty good about changing control panel wildly between releases, and I never remember which menu your system environment variables or enabling remote desktop or changing it so that the "Explorer:Start Navigation" sound is (none). Now i just hit "start->control panel", click in the search box for something like "sound" and i get search-as-i-type results that are pretty accurate and take me right to the control panel i want to go to.

Is any of that a big deal? No. Does it make me love Vista when i think about how much i hated doing that stuff on XP?

Yes

Apparently, there are a lot of "big" changes under the hood of Vista, but you don't always see them in a big way.

Re:I'm running it to post this! :)

Ok - that stuck me as odd, so I just checked it by copying an 800MB zip file onto my 1GB SD card (since I don't have one nearly as large a USB device as bmajik). The 800MB zip is coming from a Windows department server share (my "home" drive).

Not especially fast, but no screen paint issues. None of the three windows (source, target, or copy window) are showing any issues with updates. No lurches.

This is on 10.4.6 on an Intel Macbook Pro 15". I'm attached to the network via switched 100bT. I have OO.o with 5 documents (via X11) running, TextMate with two large Perl scripts, Lotus Notes, CotVNC, FireFox, Safari, iTunes, and two screens running. Also listening to music currently.

Now to be fair, I'm on pretty current hardware, but come on. That was a total troll... I want Vista to be awesome as much as the next guy (maybe more - this is slashdot) but still - that was a random unsubstantiated complaint there.

I also tried doing this copying a 4 GB DMG to my local disk - same results.

-WS

Begginers will complain about the added security..

Windows 2K brought stability to the windows platform. Windows Vista should bring enhanced security through its pseudo sudo strategy.

Although win 2k and xp had limited user accounts it did nothing to enforce their usage because it would alienate novice users who wanted to install their shinny new Easy Birthday Card Creator software. Now the process that grants admin rights will be simpler to use but I can bet that many people will complain about the extra "hassle" that they will encounter when installing software.

Of course, you can only do so much to secure an operating system that is geared towards users. It is only a matter of time before Joe User decides that it is a good idea to provide the admin password to install the latest malware ridden "Fun Emoticon" package.

The best strategy that MS could do to improve security would be to bundle an intro into the OS that explained the basics of its new security features.

I think the real news would be....

I think the real news would be "how much does it cost to buy a computer that can actually run Vista?"

Not trying to troll here, but ferchrissake! If I have to upgrade at a cost of hundreds of dollars just to run it, I don't want to know, I don't care, and I know its not going to run on that $100 laptop. While it might work for some, and perhaps many, it still looks like a very fancy gun for MS to shoot their own feet with. Testing stories so far don't seem to allude to any magical improvements, or reasons that Vista is a "must have" product. Nobody I know is buying up hardware so they can upgrade to Vista when it is released. Except for gamers and those with serious hardware requirements, nobody needs that much hardware performance really. Until streaming media is commonplace, they won't need it. Speaking of which, does anyone know if Vista does streaming media well? While its using all that hardware, does it get anywhere near acting like a multimedia system to replace all others?

Perhaps these are stupid questions, or just plain cynical thinking, but I just don't get it... to me, its sort of like building a bigger hummer with lower mpg while gas prices are climbing with nothing to stop them from continuing to climb. Not many of the bigger gas guzzlers are going to get sold....

Vista *looks* better, but ...

Judging by the screen shots, Vista certainly looks better -- but I hesitate to give Microsoft any respect for that as they've basically (once again) derived a look and feel from Mac. This time it's specifically derived from the glossy back Mac has been using here-and-there in Tiger and in their marketing material since the release of the black iPod Nano.

Still -- it does look better, I'll begrudgingly admit.

But that being said, Microsoft continues to neglect the more important although subtle useability aspects of their UI. They still insist on using huge amounts of real-estate for insignificant information. They continue to overuse pop-ups and tool-tips as band-aid solutions to problems conveying system information.

Since Microsoft has no qualms blantantly copying others' features, I don't understand why they continue to settle for a second rate implementations.

boxlight

Well, that's their marketing sorted

"Buy Windows Vista - It's not so bad!"

I wonder when Slashdot get's their creative fee? ;)

that sounds like a selling point

Windows Vista "Not so bad"

Windows Vista "Almost as good as XP"

Windows Vista "Several new themes"

I think microsoft has a winner here

and in other news

.. Denise running away with Sambora makes Charlie look like an ok guy ...

Amazing...

Ever wonder how MS get their media coverage? Here is a classic example, we are potentially TWELVE MONTHS away from widespread release on a product thats been in development for FOUR YEARS and people are "impressed" that a SECOND beta is relatively stable. And this is considered a news story.

Talk about generating buzz around a product to make people want it, and to cover up the yet more slipped release dates and the reduced functionality over what was promised. And it all comes down to a new look and feel and a bit of threading and the su command.

WOW FIVE YEARS DEVELOPMENT to get this into production.

I live in awe at Microsoft's ability to generate positive news.

My problem

My problem with recent Microsoft operating systems has nothing to do with how well they run. I have to admit that they have been progresively better about that. My problem is how intrusive they are. How much control do I have over what my computer (my property that I paid for with my money) will and won't do.

Re:My problem

Exactly. When I saw the "not so bad" headline, I assumed that the story was that Vista's intrusive DRM/Trusted computing "features" had been dropped. Those are the things that make Vista "bad". I'll take an OS that crashes over an OS that supervises how I use my data.

Sorry Microsoft, but I'll never buy (or even *use*) that kind of crap.

suse + kde

looks a lot like kde on suse, even uses lots of green and yast-like interfaces.

sum.zero

This is awesome!

But will it run Duke Nukem Forever?

Three weeks? that's amazing...

well..... No, it's not.

Let me know when it runs 366 days straight, even through patches.

People need to learn abuot program maturity. The industry is aware of it, but conviently hides it away so they can make more money.

I don't ahve a lot of hope for a product thats 4 years behind schedule. Sure it will be released, but the bloat is going to be tremendous.

For the recrd, I hope I am wrong.