Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

I feel like a heel for mentioning it in passing in previous posts, and not elucidating. You probably hear a lot about Windows Vista, after all, and most of it is negative in that familiar “David versus Goliath” style of logic that many people seem to adore. After all, Microsoft is a big corporation and we’re little guys, so we should hate them. Never mind that the same socio-political system that sustains us created them. This blogpost attemps to clear the air.

Before we even talk about Vista we should mention a truism of technology. It is unwise to be an earlier adopter of any new hardware or software. The first year a car is on the market, it will have problems. The early versions of a new DVD player are going to need firmware upgrades and possibly hardware swaps. Any version of software ending in “.0″ will be followed by a .1,.2 and .3 which might actually work for everyday tasks without crashing. It’s nearly impossible to predict all of the situations a complex piece of technology will encounter, so expect early adopters to crash test it and some months later to have something you can use (I say nearly impossible, because it is possible to get very close, and I’ve done it, and intend to do it again because the gratitude of your users is priceless).

For this reason, I’m not even going to think about installing Vista for 2 years, and will probably only do so when I have a need to upgrade hardware. I like keeping the mound of landfill generated by my life low, and so I’m not prone to buying things I don’t need. A well-built desktop computer will last ten years, although you’ll want to replace hard drives every four years. At the ten year point, it might still be running, but it will be so hard to find parts it is wisest to move on. I anticipate that at some point two years from now, I’ll pop out the motherboard on one of my clones and put in a new one, possibly used equipment. It’s why I like PC clones: you can fix parts instead of buying an overpriced, decorated, physically unreliable piece of technology. Before you consider pre-fab, realize that the best green computing you’ll get is something that doesn’t require you to buy a whole ensemble every three years.

Two years from now Vista will have undergone some changes. First they’ll fix the bugs. Then they’re going to try to eliminate all the duplicate code they can, and trim down its estimated 50 million lines of code. You do this by finding parallels in function between bits of code, and inserting abstraction layers so they can be shared. Do too much of this, and all of your processing power goes to unhelpful abstractions. Do just enough and the system balances faster execution with less variance, so is far more stable. One reason UNIX is so stable is that it has grown organically from very few functions and so is heavy on the sharing of building blocks, which can then be made stable over two-year cycles.

At that point, you will be able to see what Vista really offers. As with many things, to understand what it does well you must understand what it is not doing, and to do that, it helps to have a refresher on operating systems. Because they’re software, operating systems are dependent on hardware, and the evolution of hardware has driven the development of new operating systems. A computer that saves data to punchcards, has 2K of RAM and runs at .5 mhz does not need an operating system other than the ability to send data to its cardpuncher. A computer running at 20mhz with 2MB of RAM can take advantage of multi-tasking, protected spaces, optimized disk use and so on. We’re a few stages past that now.

The operating systems currently on the market are based on the hardware of the 1970s and 1980s. This hardware is a relatively fast processor, a bunch of cards thrown in for interfacing to peripherals, and a CRT monitor. There is little collaboration between coprocessors, and no consideration of multi-tasking. The graphics cards are primitive devices that receive instructions about where to place pixels and then keep track of those pixels. The disk drive was often treated as a random-access punchcard with large capacity.

Since that time, computer hardware has improved in every way, but no one has quite managed to stitch it all together with a new theory of how it works. Oddly, this will probably happen after Vista becomes commonplace and drives the next round of upgrades. In my experience, history oscillates between concepts (shades of Hegel, without the illusion of forward motion) in order to advance itself like a ladder toward higher degrees of complexity. Thinking back to the days of mainframe computing and its descendents on the desktop, including the Amiga and NeXT, I think the future is going to be a time where the main processor spends its time managing resources as much as computing. It will be aided by coprocessors for graphics, I/O and specialty calculations, and will with the rise of the hyperthreaded processor become more like the “cell” computing paradigm.

In cell computing, each computer is made of up many processors, each of which is like a complete networked computer. The advantage is that complex tasks can be tackled in parallel. For simple uses, there is no advantage. This bypasses the older model, in which a single powerful processor was king and was surrounded by subservient but brick-stupid helpers who handled the rote chores of graphics, I/O, sound and so on. Vista addresses that need as well.

Speaking of history, there’s a second need Vista addresses, which is backward compatibility. PCs at this point can run just about any program written since 1983. This is an awesome advantage when retrieving old data from proprietary formats, or playing retro video games, but it is also a liability. There are thousands of obsolete instruction pathways the operating system must support, and it must limit itself to older paradigms. My guess is that Vista will include a virtualization engine so that when you need to run 1983-2008 software, it will do so in a “virtual PC” running a small version of Windows XP. That way everything old will work flawlessly, but so will the new.

Now that you’ve got all of that crammed into your head, you can look at the advantages of Windows Vista:

Threading. It takes advantage of the new processors’ ability to tear a task into parallel silos, run through them at high speed, and generate a result. It’s not the same as multitasking, but it’s like multitasking by dividing a program into six parallel functions that run at the same time. As you might guess, a big requirement is that the parallel pieces can communicate in real-time without getting hacked or lost. Vista’s threading model makes a number of positive changes. For more information, read Inside the Vista Kernel.

Graphics. In the old days, you stored data in pixel form, like you’d draw it on the screen. Now that screens come in a variety of sizes and shapes, and our graphics cards contain processors nearly as powerful as the computer itself, we don’t need that literal model. Vista uses an abstraction layer to store graphics as vectors, or abstract shapes, and then translates into pixels at the hardware level. For more information, read Vista is a hardware beast.

Interface, functional. Vista acknowledges that the old operating system was file-based as a way to manage that newfangled thing called a “hard disk.” People now want a file system to be an information manager that actively keeps track of their contacts, junk, links, files, IMs, and so forth. Vista is based around the idea of indexing and searching data. For more information, read Vista Beta 1 versus Tiger.

Interface, visual. Windows XP was a visual update to the same basic interface we’ve been using since Windows 95. It’s time for a change, especially one that takes advantage of the on-card effects offered by newer video cards.

Programming interface. Years of compatibility, work-arounds for hardware and software, and shortcuts have gone into the Windows 32 Application Programming Interface (API), which is how programmers make their programs cooperate with the operating system. They put in some new stuff, and for a change, the names are consistent to make them easy to remember. For more information, read Changes to the API in Windows Vista.

Meta data. Filenames and file extensions don’t tell the whole story. If it’s an MP3, who is the composer? If it’s a drawing, what is needed to view it, and is it vector or bitmap? Meta-data is how search engines will sort files in the future as well, and is one of the great promises of XML as a data categorization and storage mechanism. For more information, read Windows Vista Beta1 Vs OS X Tiger.

Speed improvements. Better caching, better prioritization of multitasking, and a brand new driver setup to improve performance, eventually. This won’t hit for awhile as there’s still too much code in Windows Vista for it to be fast. Expect improvements from MS on this front over the next 18 months. For more information, read Bit-Tech MS Vista Review and Windows Vista Speed Tweaks.

GUI improvements. There’s a “Welcome Center” that groups common functions, and makes much more sense than the procession of icons previously used, and a NeXT-style sidebar, and an improved desktop and more readable fonts. Of these, the improved Welcome Center is what will benefit users the most. For more information, read What Windows Vista Does for Me.

Better built-in applications. Long ago, computer makers tried to throw as much software at the new user as possible, so the user had an expectation of having a working machine when they got it home. By working I mean “can do something real-world useful with it.” Then we got into the mentality of shipping white boxes with an OS, and hope the users know someone down the block who can burn them some CDs. New DVD, CD, video and audio authoring software come with Vista and it’s a good thing for the end users like Mom and Dad who just want to make some vacation videos. For more information, read What Vista Gets Right.

Increasing reliability. It has nowhere to go but up, although I think the problems with Vista are overstated while problems with other operating systems are understated, simply because the public loves an underdog. 50 million lines of code means at least 500,000 bugfixes. For more information, read Vista Developers Blog.

Important Note

Today’s conventional wisdom, based on more than a year’s worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same. ^{^}

There are other details, but these are the major reasons Windows Vista is important (check the Windows Vista Team Blog). I’m not going to delve into the Linux-vs-Microsoft-vs-Macintosh thing here except to say that when Vista is stable, it will be a more advanced model than either one (Windows NT, as a descendent of DEC’s VMS, was already more advanced in theory than Linux, but it was hard to see past all the bloatware).

I’m not really pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft. They hire some brilliant people and they make their mistakes like any large corporation does, and corporations are the basis of modern capitalism, so Microsoft hatin’ is really another topic. I give them credit for doing what the market wasn’t able to do before them, which was produce a unified standard for which programmers can write software with the expectation that just about anyone can use it, and for making Windows XP an operating system that runs on almost any hardware and is very stable. Beyond that, I’ve got no investment in this issue.

I do think that, as much as corporations unleash Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) against each other’s products, the computer industry has a lot of bitter people who will unleash FUD against any product from a company that’s making it, or making it more than they are. This was particularly bad after the dot-com bust, when people refused to use Google or other success stories because of their own lack of success. Vista is here, and like everything in life, it’s a mixed bag, but I wanted to tell the side of the story that shows some things to look forward to, regardless of what FUD from any “side” of the story tells you to think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under Information Technology, Web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.