60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten 662
Alien54 writes "Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems, according to this report. In an effort to meet a deadline of the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas Microsoft has pulled programmers from the highly succesful Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. Much more at the link."
Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:5, Insightful)
But please don't use this 60% figure as proof that Vista will suck. Because it doesn't necessarily mean that.
Once again, we have the Slashdot spin to deal with: Scrambling to fix problems? If they're saying their release date is sometime in 2007, I don't think they need to scramble. They actually seem pretty lax about when this is going to be released. Hell, I heard about Longhorn years ago and they sure haven't been "scrambling" to do anything with that. Stop making it sound like Microsoft is running around with their heads cut off. Because I highly doubt it.
I interpret this to mean that Microsoft is stepping up to the plate and taking responsibility. They have identified so many problems that it needs major revision and good for them.
Do you remember Windows 98, first edition? Do remember how much better second edition was? I do. Why the hell they didn't just wait on the release is simple. Money.
They could release Vista prematurely but now we wait until 2007. And if you hate Windows, like I do, why do you care? We're still going to be using Linux anyways.
So please, look at this move as a gesture to try and release a quality product and not slop out some POS OS that they are only releasing for the sake of income.
60%? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I think there's trouble brewing for any company that chants “innovation” like some apotropaïc mantra: you have it or you don't (and it tends to go hand in hand with testosterone).
manpower (Score:3, Insightful)
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." - Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mythical Man Month. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, adding more programmers to a late project, and not slipping the date even more to account for them, [b]probably[/b] means that the final result [b]will[/b] suck.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I really don't care when it comes out. I waited until sp2 to jump on the xp bandwagon anyway, and I typically wait a couple of years before adopting a new operating system, just to let the bugs shake out.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems, according to this report.
How exactly is that comment "Slashdot spin" when it's the first line of the article linked to?
60% Is NOT IN THE ARTICLE (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, this 60% number is made up. Not only would this be impossible in less than a year, 60% of the code in Vista isn't even new to Vista.
Hey Slashdot editors... I know you guys are really into MS bashing and you want to satisfy the thirst that most Slashdotters have for MS blood, but at least check to make sure that articles your posting have a shred of truth in them.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding?
Let's put aside the possibity that the 60% figure is probably total hogwash, because that's not what you're arguing.
Rewriting over half the code of a project that you've spent years working on and are supposed to release in about a year is a desperate situation. It's not possible to acomplish. If they said they had to rewrite 10% of the code, I'd say they were in a bad situation, since that last 10% of the code often takes the most time.
I don't believe the 60% figure, because if it were true, the project leaders would be looking for new jobs already.
It's because of WWDC (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who disagrees with me is a Microsoft fanboy.
Sounds like "Telephone" (Score:5, Insightful)
You can think as little as you like of Microsoft's management (and you'd have to go pretty low to match me) but I can't see even them being so flagrantly (stupid|dishonest) as to promise a 2007Q1 delivery of a 60% rewrite of something that took five years to get this far.
Perhaps... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're actually doing this (I've my doubts...), then Vista won't be out when they say it will be- it'll be delayed by another 2 or so years like Windows 95 ended up being (95 was started approximately 4 years earlier and was only supposed to take a year, year and a half to do- the delays were so bad that the press was making all blow and no go jokes with respect to the codename for the product, "Chicago".).
Re:60%? (Score:3, Insightful)
a) a journalist wishes to appear to more knowledgeable than they are.
b) they want to create a lot of page impressions / ad revenue.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a "Meeee Toooo", or a nay-sayer (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at it this way: It takes major cojones [wikipedia.org] to admit to a huge re-write (especially if the re-writes involve core bits and pieces). This is particularly true when you're talking about a system of software that literally affects many tens of millions of computers worldwide.
Looking at it another way. If I'm going to have to use it (at work, that is), I'd rather it be very stable and transparent to my work. If it takes them five more years, that's fine with me. XP spanks the 9x Windows clan, and seems more stable than the Win2000 desktop versions I had to use at work.
The good news is that Vista's delay won't effect my music, my personal computer musings, or personal software development - I'm perfectly happy with various Linux distros, Solaris, and OSX... Windows is fine, my family does use it from time to time, and I'd like to see if Vista can maybe fuel some future competition for better OS software.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:4, Insightful)
Given what we know is in Vista, it doesn't make much sense for the entirety to be rewritten. Why would they choose to recode the Registry and then follow through on actually including it? Similarly, look how many things are being backported to XP, and easily at that -- that doesn't sound like Vista is "all new" to me. But it appears that by NOT doing what Allchin said they were going to do, they now get to "scramble" and rewrite tons of code. I'm sure that's significantly less efficient than simply starting from scratch in the first place.
Re:Apple, "MacOS W", & the real reason for the (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition to that logic, what compelling reason do we have to upgrade immediately? For MS Windows users, will Vista do anything that they can't already do on XP? Will their applications be ready for Vista? Will any applications only be available for Vista? Eventually Vista will be released and eventually MS Windows users will move to that platform, but why are people in a hurry to do so? I don't look forward to the retraining of the users at work, the rollout (testing applications and custom projects), etc....
I'm fine if they take a little extra time to hopefully do a better job with this. MS WinXP hasn't been too bad so I'm sort of looking forward to the new OS to see what is available, but I can certainly get these from reviews too.
Jim
Sadly, this won't affect MS desktop sales. (Score:2, Insightful)
I have roughly 1,500 machines (25% of the total) that would be perfect candidates for a Linux desktop roll-out but I'm still defending our non-MS infrastructure from the "Everyone else uses MS, why don't we?" every day. Actually trying to move away from MS at any level would be suicide at the first hiccup.
Until some major companies publicly dump MS from the desktop the rest of the world is going to stick to the "standard". Even Novell (home of the Novell Linux Desktop) employees still show up with laptops running WinXP (they do use OpenOffice at least) when they make a site visit.
Re:Already covered and discussed on digg.com (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet we don't FSCKING care! If digg is do damned great, why are you here? Go back and play with the other digg idiots. Us Slashdot idiots don't want you here if the most constructive thing you can come up with is "We're already discussing it on digg". I'm sure it is being/has been discussed a lot of places online. Now we're discussing it on Slashdot. Get over it.
Karma be damned!
Re:The Mythical Man Month. (Score:5, Insightful)
In any given project there are just so many parallel tasks. The optimum number of developers is about the same as that level of parallelism (plus a secretary and a manager). It allows compartmentalizing things, so each developer has a chance to become an expert in that area and be productive. Adding more developers just increases communication overhead, training overhead, petty squabbles, micromanagement of the mess, etc. Taking away developers leaves holes that will require additional time to complete.
I hope the article summary is wrong and that Microsoft isn't so incompetent as to substantially re-write an operating system in the last year of its development! Talk about a death spiral.
"That's no moon, it's the accumulated mass of all our new bugs!"
Windows X & the REAL real reason for the delay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:4, Insightful)
Legacy code causing issues, so they re-write it, thus Vista is essentially a clean new windows? Or is is the new stuff not working, which means that there is even less reason to pugrade from XP? Which half is bad really does matter in this case (at least to me it does).
-nB
Ha...ha...Re:Apple, "MacOS W", & the real (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:2, Insightful)
They care because everybody here who talks up linux has a dirty little secret: their windows partition. The one they use when they need to get stuff done, like use photoshop or illustrator, or use a word processor that actually works, or a browser that works with their bank's website (granted, not fair, but true), or a play a game other than gnu chess, or print to that fancy new color laserjet down the hall.
Ok mods, have at it, but before you do look deep inside your hard drives and you'll see that what I say is true! :-)
60% is bad no matter how you spin it. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the upside, Windows has needed a major rewrite since about 1995, so things are looking up.
________ Interesting Timing
The timing of this is interesting. It's coming after the European Commission lambasted their documentation. perhaps that horrid documentation is what they actually use and, when they went whole hog trying to document what they had in a sane manner, they realized in their guts just how horridly crusty their crown jewels really are.
In any case, With this major of a rewrite, I'm expecting Vista to be the kind of fiasco that ME was. I'd strongly suggest that people wait at least until the first service pack before they put this thing in production.
Cairo? (Score:5, Insightful)
I first heard about Longhorn under another name, in the early 90s when it was called Cairo. Take a look at the "feature list" of that vaporware sometime. Then recall that the feature list was in response to OS/2's actual features, that existed in 93...
How far we haven't come in 14 years.
BTW, take a look at the original feature list for Longhorn, and the current list. It's interesting too. And we're now 2 years later than the original "Longhorn" date, and only 14 years past Cairo.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:5, Insightful)
The truly sad part is that it doesn't matter, because they're going to sell millions of units anyway. Every single new Dell sold in 2008+, and every computer at companies that uses Windows desktops (which is almost all of them) is going to have Vista installed on them, and Microsoft is going to be paid for every one of those copies.
Just because no one will go out and purchase a $400 upgrade from a Best Buy shelf doesn't mean Microsoft isn't going to sell any. They have a captive audience. For the majority of the world, Microsoft Windows is inseparable from the computer. (I realise this sentiment is not true on Slashdot, but the people who read this site are of a slightly different breed.) Telling people they can buy a computer without an operating system, and that they can install their own, is like telling people they can go buy a car without an engine, and then download a free one from the internet. Even if it's technically possible, it doesn't even occur to them. And as for MacOSX: most people who buy Dells are looking for the equivalent of a Honda Civic. A Mac is like buying a BMW.
And keep in mind that we (of the Slashdot kind) have been beating into people for years the need to keep their Windows machines all patched and updated. Well, isn't Vista just an update? Of course they will upgrade; their data needs to be protected from the evil identity thieves and hackers lurking in the intarweb!
In short, Vista will be everywhere as soon as Microsoft releases it, whether it's better than XP or not. And they're going to make a bundle.
paging Dr. Brooks (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:2, Insightful)
Once again, we have the Slashdot spin to deal with
How is this Slashdot spin? When I click through to the article, the quote is the FIRST LINE of the article and the 60% figure is even in the title!
Why wouldn't it be a scramble? If Vista really is 50 million lines of code, that's a rewrite of 30 million lines. How long did it take to write that 50 million to begin with? You do the math: how long would it take to rewrite 30 million? Remember, though, Vista is to ship to corporate customers later THIS year. Yeah, I'd say "scrambling" would be accurate!
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, you'll notice the submitter and/or editors did exactly that - they took the "up to 60%" in the article, and changed it to "60%" in the headline.
In fact, "up to" means any number equal to or smaller than. So the actual amount of code rewritten could be 0%. It would also be accurate to say that the code is being rewritten entirely "up to 9 times", because that "up to" would include scenarios where the code was not re-written at all.
It's spin, plain as day.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who's been through this situation, I can tell you that it rarely turns out as rosey as is first planned. My experience mirrors Netscape's.
When Netscape 4.x was opensourced, the developers said "this works, but it is crap. We need to rewrite this.", and they did. Four years later, they released a marginally good browser that was still behind IE and went from 95% of the market to 5%. If it wasn't for Firefox (which was an incremental change of the Mozilla code base), Netscape would be history in the Windows world. If Netscape took the incremental route of rewriting criticial portions in each release, it might have taken a bit longer, but they would have kept most of their market share.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
But then further reading of the article notes that it is so they can improve their home entertainment functionality.
So as much as I agree with you that it would be in their interest to "get it right before releasing" it, according to that article, that's really not what this extra effort is about.
Of course if I were MS and I needed to rewrite a ton of security-related code that very likely exists in XP as well, I might just FUD the re-write as an "entertainment patch" too, seeing as I already claimed, months and years ago that this was an OS with a code base rewritten from scratch for improved reliability...
Re:Cairo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree that technically linux is far superior. In theory, linux is great. But in the real world what matters is applications. Linux may have potential over Windows, but the reality is the mess of standards on linux makes it hard to develop for, and it diverts efforts into factions. Linux is a niche market with it's own niches. Imagine how much less support the Mac would get if its paltry market share were further split between two competing desktop APIs.
Anyway, good luck with your zealotry and all that. I'll keep using what works *best*, and if that becomes linux, I'll happily join you in ridding my drive of its windows partition.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
After that point, the only way netscape could float was bundling with other products. Obviously, all attempts to keep share fell over and here we are today. There's a small market share of (mostly technical) people using firefox due to its advanced features and 'security' (No non-trivial browsers are there yet). Microsoft doesn't want to compete fairly if it doesn't have to. It'll continue throwing more and more into core products until anti-trust regulators finally put their feet down and say break them up or pay up the a$$. IE will always have a high market share as long as they're the 'default' browser. Anything that touches Windows & Office are the 'default' product.
MS is just stalling - to avoid the DOJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is a maximum profits kind of company and Windows is one of their Cash Cows. If it wasn't due to the fact that until Nov 2007 they have to somewhat play by "fair" rules, there would have already been at least 1 newer version of windows, I mean it has been over 4 YEARS !
Microsoft is just playing the stall game to keep itself in the media, trying to keep the public view on Windows and not GNU/Linux or whatever. Mark my words, the next version of Windows (Vista) will be released mid-Nov 2007, just in time for Christmas 2007. And yes it will probably include their own media player, web browser, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Photo Editor, Desktop Search, Kitchen Sink, etc.
Re:Please Don't Interpret this Incorrectly (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that was badly spoken on my part if I implied that. I should've said anybody who insists linux ALWAYS beats windows must be a zealot. As I said, I use both regularly. Generally, I only prefer linux for programming, but I'm willing to acknowledge other uses for it. :-)
Seriously, who needs "better" than Photoshop or Illustrator? I'll happily grant that the GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop, but it's adequate for my needs (and I do quite a lot with it). You must do a lot of graphics work to justify buying Photoshop -- wait... you *did* pay for it, right?
Our lab has a site license, and I use it (mostly Illustrator, actually) for papers. If you're touching up family photos, I can see good enough and free being perfect. But why not use the best available if your professional output is involved?
Nope. I have tried it with Word, though, and that's one of the less pleasant episodes of my life.
Oh, I never said it would be pleasant! But in my experience it will still be far better than using OpenOffice (if what you want is even possible) which essentially tries to emulate Word in terms of miserable interface, but falls short in all other regards.
I notice you didn't say what Windows software you would recommend for the task.
I'd either go with Word + the upgraded equation editor from MathType, or LaTeX + Illustrator for figures. LyX is great, too. One of the nice things about Windows is that a ton of software that's available on linux is ported over, but the vice versa isn't generally true.
I don't know about MATLAB, but I've used Mathematica on Linux quite a bit, and I haven't seen any of the problems you claim.
Based on my experience, and the experience of our cluster sysadmin last week, you're lucky. I'm supposing this is a jab against the KDE/GNOME issue. It's a dumb one, though, because developers don't have to support both.
No, that's *exactly* my point. In fact, developers generally DON'T support both. That's what I meant about a niche market being further fractioned. The small market share of linux is effectively further diminished by the KDE/GNOME split. And that's just the desktop. Have you ever seen the download page for a commercial linux app? (Obviously, that's rhetorical.) It's ridiculous, with about 10 different versions for the various kernel revs and distros.
Now, you probably don't care to modify or script your applications. That's fine. Windows works for you.
You're right, I have better things to do in most cases. And unless you're paid minumum wage, my guess is you do, too. Anyway, that's not really my point. You're not going to script GIMP into PhotoShop, or app x into whatever your favorite app y is. Given that Windows has a huge market share advantage, I think often times the best app for a given job is on windows. I don't think that's a very radical statement, though around here maybe it is.
Re:What is it, Bash Microsoft Day at the press cor (Score:3, Insightful)
Not too bad a day for them all in all.