Save up to $300/year on phone bills
- Related Stories
-
Piecing together Windows Vista
November 8, 2006 -
Windows in view
May 26, 2006 -
Microsoft bug-checking tools promise fewer crashes
May 26, 2006 -
Microsoft to refine Vista's PC-rating tool
May 25, 2006 -
Tool helps programs befriend Vista
May 24, 2006 -
Allchin still worries about Vista
May 24, 2006 -
Microsoft unveils new betas for Office, Vista
May 23, 2006
There is no doubt that people will find glitches in Beta 2 of the oft-delayed operating system. The question is whether there are any show-stoppers.
Microsoft has time to squish some bugs, but it needs to avoid any significant headaches if it is to make its revised goal of finishing the code by November and launching the product in January.
Already, there have been discussions of installation issues and assorted issues related to battery life, performance and application compatibility. But analysts say it's too soon to size up where Microsoft is at.
"At this point, I don't think we know enough about the bugs," Gartner analyst Michael Silver said.
But over the coming weeks, there is likely to be a lot more discussion of what works and what doesn't in the test version that Microsoft released last week. It should become particularly active as the company expands the number of testers into the millions of users.
The company already knows of some problems and expects others. Only about 40 percent of Windows XP applications can run without any modification, for example. A good chunk of the remainder require only very slight tweaks. Many of those incompatibilities have already been fixed, either through workarounds put in place by Microsoft or in collaboration with the application's maker.
There are still a number of hardware products that don't have drivers. Also, there are plenty of areas where Microsoft hopes to increase the system's performance, notably in the new built-in desktop search capabilities.
Microsoft executives in recent days have expressed optimism that they have made enough progress with Beta 2 to meet a tight deadline. However, CEO Steve Ballmer appeared to hedge his bets in a speech in Japan. Others have been even less optimistic. Research firm Gartner, for example, said it doesn't expect a release until the second quarter of next year, at the earliest.
The company has enough time to fix the bugs it expects, Chris Jones, the Microsoft corporate vice president who heads up the Windows Client development effort, said in an interview. The key issue, though, is whether there are features that require any significant reworking.
"Then we would make a very hard decision," Jones said. At that point, the company would have to quickly ascertain whether the issue could be resolved in the remaining time. If not, it would likely have to either scrap the feature or delay Vista further.
That said, Jones said he believes that with all the testing Microsoft has done, the company would probably know if there were major clouds on the horizon. "I find it quite unlikely that we've missed one of those cases," he said.
Rough spots
The gray area comes if a certain feature works, but the experience isn't meeting users' expectations.
One of the potentially challenging new features is something called User Account Control. Basically, the security feature is designed to reduce the amount of time that Vista runs with full administrative privileges. Instead, the system runs with standard privileges and queries users for their password or OK when significant changes are being made.
Currently, though, such boxes are popping up rather frequently. Microsoft is working to tweak the rules and create workarounds. For example, many programs are set to check for updates whenever they run. So far, that check has required an administrative OK, but Microsoft is changing it so that existing applications will be able to update themselves in standard user mode.
See more CNET content tagged:
Chris Jones,
bug,
Microsoft Windows Vista,
Gartner Inc.,
Microsoft Corp.
Beta software may contain bugs.
There is a tight deadline to fix them.
Beta 2 > Beta 1.
Wow. Great. must be slow this morning.
Beta software may comtain bugs.
There is a tight deadline to fix bugs.
Old progrmans may break.
Beta 2 > Beta 1
wow what a concept!! news must be slow this morning.
one shot.
I'll be waiting until SP1, at least.
Play around with front row, keynote, pages, and iPhoto. You'll wonder why you stuck with XP for such a long time, and you'll have something to compare Vista to. I'm certain Vista won't be as nice, and Apple will have a NEW OS by then.
Something confuses me though.
Bill Gates + Billions of dollers = No product
Hackers + A few bucks = Linux, Openoffice ect...
You do the math.
btw: I love open office but office 2007 is not bad either.
- Mike
That's just crazy.
"Shims" they say. "Workarounds" they say. Now that's quality programming like using code line numbers and GOTO statements. How could it possibly go wrong.
At a time when the programming ideal is clean consise code, a "professional" development team is limited to jurry rigging patches?
What? The bolt that holds your left crutch together is missing? Here, wrap this scotch tape around it; it should stay together long enough to get a block or two away before it calapses under you. (and hey, as long as your out of our store when it breaks, it's all good.)
So to review:
- Opensource "hobbiest" programming = clean efficient code from the ground up
- Vistadows "proffesional" programming = code that aproximately works with the addition of arbitrary "fixes"
It's been said before by other's but I'll say it again. MICROSOFT stop pilling more bad code on that backwards compatible pile of maneur you call the sum of Dos wrapped in Win3.11 wrapped in Win95 wrapped in WinNT rebranded as WinXP. It's nothing more than the sum total of every bug you've missed in the program since CGA was the pinical of display technology.
The issue here is not problems with Vista, it's problems with the applications themselves.
AppCompat issues boil down to two major things:
1) Apps are hardcoded to only run on WinXP/2k3 and they actually block execution if the OS MajorVersion != 5. That's bad practice from the application developers. The fix for this is simple and requires no code change, you simply run the program in compatability mode. It will be up to the software devs to fix their programs to run on Vista.
2) Apps expect to have admin priviledges where there's no reason for them to have it. If a dev is dumb enough to write their code in a way that a Limited user account can't run the client, then it's bad code. They've been able to get away with this for a very long time since the vast majority of users are admins on their own machines. The problem is that running as admin all the time is a huge security risk (in fact, many of the biggest offenders in terms of viruses and spyware don't even work if you're a limited user). Under Vista, you have to actually opt in to running a less secure environment, and it's causing problems in these badly coded apps. This is again something that those app devs will have to fix.
And before you mindlessly bash MS, to be XP logo software (and most MS products are) you have to be runnable under a restricted user.
pieces every week until it launches. The idea is to build up
mindshare. The subtle spin on this article is "Vista will be more
bug free than any other Windows release."
have fewer bugs.
While that would be great, it's also highly
unlikely. It really hasn't anything to do with
Microsoft, it's just common sense. Their
development has a certain defect rate. For so
many lines of code, there will be so many
defects. As a product ages, the existing code
base has bugs fixed, but the defect rate stays
the same, so new bugs will also be introduced by
the fixes. Bug-fix defect rates are typically
lower than the de novo code defect rate, so
bug-fixes remove more bugs than they introduce.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that new code
will have a predictable defect rate (you don't
know where all the bugs are, but you've got a
good guess at how many are hiding in there).
Microsoft has already been using tools to help
detect defects in previous versions of Windows,
so the de novo rate is probably unchanged. This,
combined with the larger code base most
certainly means that Vista will both have more
bugs and a higher density of bugs than XP.
Namely, it's the result of the code being less
mature. You can test an analyze all you want,
but the fact is that you can depress the rate
only by so much (logical errors are very
difficult to detect a priori, for example).
Microsoft certainly needs this product to be an
grand improvement in order for it to sell at
all. But what they're aiming for isn't so much
to squash bugs, but to introduce design concepts
that reduce the risk associated with a bug --
that is to say, they aren't looking for less
bugs, only to make the severity of running into
one more tolerable/recoverable. I suspect that
they will have achieved that, and that their
"shims" (which distort the underlying logic of
the design) will undermine that to some extent.
"...too soon to size up where Microsoft is at."
Anyone else see a problem with this? Holy crap, get some writers, CNet! It's rather disconcerting to see where the current state of journalism "is at"!
In terms of Windows breaking other software, a huge number of these "breaks" are more neglect of those who created the software than they are necessarily the fault of a change in Windows code. Obviously, there are at least a few exceptions to that rule, but you'd be amazed how many things break simply because the devs put in code that blocks it from running on anything other than a few current versions of Windows (which, by the way, is not compliant with logo requirements).
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/28/65-more-windows-vista-
mistakes/
So, this is a bug? No, this is the ranting of someone who wished to complain about anything, including the default size of the icons.
After all, all those 50 folks I mentioned basically produce and interchange content among themselves. We can, pretty easily (if someone very technical/smart heads it), change camps.
But I wouldn't worry too much, because MS knows all this and won't wanna see us all go away. They'll play the marketing game and screw those idiots who cannot do some basic research on buying software cheap. You CAN buy second hand software (regardless of what the license says). You CAN get academic pricing (through your kid/cousin/whatever). You CAN buy software through a group at dirt cheap prices. So no, I most likely won't be switching to the Mac/Linux camp in the next 5 years after all...unless Microsoft really tries hard to screw me with unfair prices.
I'd pay not a cent more than $100 for Vista Ultimate and same price for Office 2007 Ultimate.
- Big potential security hole
-
by ddesy
May 31, 2006 10:37 AM PDT
- From the article:
-
Reply to this comment
-
-
- It is not just you
-
by qwerty75
June 3, 2006 9:30 AM PDT
- Isn't it funny how they are adding exploitable code and marketing it as a security feature?
-
-
See all 53 Comments >>"For example, many programs are set to check for updates whenever they run. So far, that check has required an administrative OK, but Microsoft is changing it so that existing applications will be able to update themselves in standard user mode."
Okay, is it just me or does allowing applications to be updated without an administrative OK seem like a potential entry point for unwanted code, such as viruses?
The administrative OK should be left in place.