I don't think I'll ever proceed to Vista. Aside from the loss of performance (I'll talk a little about this later), the sincerity with which Microsoft pursued DRM protection for content providers in writing it makes it far, far too scary for me to even consider. There are, as I understand it, software "tilt" sensors (like a pinball machine) that accumulate the number of times the OS imagines you have tried to violate some perceived commercial right and adjusts behavior. I can't say, haven't investigated that enough to know the intimate details, but I've read some rather detailed articles about it and I'm just not interested in opening myself to software that may start counting false positives against me. I've a life to live and don't need a software big brother making more of a pain of my life than it already is. As I understand it, Vista will even shut down outputs it believes do not conform to the encryption guidelines and which _might_ have access to digital audio or video, for example, while running some valid commercial content, simply because they worry that there MIGHT be some copying going on in some remote device. No, if that's the case, I'm not interested in fighting with an OS that doesn't really know what I'm doing and is sitting there 2nd guessing me at every point. Find someone else for that.
Another issue for me is that I like to keep each project I work on, on separate disks. I develop embedded applications a lot and, if the tools work under Win98SE, I tend to use that. I do it because it's a no-brainer to set up a separate Win98SE hard disk that I can slap into the removable disk bay and boot. When I'm developing, there is no way that an errant problem when I'm working on some project can demolish another project, this way. It can't, because the hard disk for that other project is safely on a shelf and cannot be touched. Disks are cheap, so setting aside one per project is reasonable. Also, it makes it easy to immediately return to the EXACT configuration I was last using, when a customer asks me to go back to their project after some years. Win98SE doesn't ask me for licensing stuff and the Microsoft license for it permits me to operate this way without even violating it (yes, I've gotten a formal, personal letter from Microsoft stating that for me under my situation and that itself took me a while to manage to get.)
On our non-business project systems (personal workstations for fun) I like Win2000 well enough, though I am also using WinXP, too. But I will NOT attempt to ever upgrade these to Vista.
In terms of performance, I've had some fun. I developed some C code for testing out various aspects of a particular system I use here. Same exact hardware, where I set up separate hard disks with different Windows software as well as Linux and FreeBSD, but sequentially so that the hard disk was even the same exact one. There was NO difference in the hardware used. I then compiled the software using the more popular c compiler tools under each (Microsoft Visual C++ for Windows, gnu c/c++ under Linux, etc.) And then I sat and ran the benchmarks and logged the results. Windows always came in last.
One of the benchmarks was a pure hard-disk I/O thing. It spent its time working with the standard, high level file I/O available (using stdio.h) on each. 16-bit vs 32-bit wasn't so much of an issue for the file I/O, so I also built a DOS-only version, using DOS 5.0 and a separate bootable DOS session using the newer Windows editions, where I asked them to boot to DOS-only. And I ran the tests under each of these, including Linux. Running under Linux, I tested with both fs2 as well as using the ability to mount Microsoft FAT drives under Linux. What struck me funny was that Linux, emulating FAT file access, was more than twice as fast on the same hardware as any of the tests I ran with Microsoft software accessing the same FAT drive. Same machine, same drive, same formatting of drive (yes, I had to boot linux in that case from a different drive and mount the FAT drive.) And after looking at that FAT code under Linux, I was NOT impressed -- the coders had patched in multiple copies of the same code with only minor adjustments here and there to handle different circumstances, so I was pretty certain this was a fast kludge job to get it up and working. And it still ran a lot faster, with what I imagine wasn't all that much attention to performance.
In terms of the design from an operating system programmers stand-point, I like FreeBSD best from what I've seen. (I write my own operating systems, but much much smaller in scope that these. I also was involved, working for Intel, in chipset testing and have been trained about the internals of the newer x86 processors, their front side and back side bus, inbound and outbound queues, reorder buffers, registration stations, etc., so I have some opinions about this area.) Their use of the task state segment is sweet and uses well the x86 coroutine setup in hardware. Better than anyone else, I think. It does NOT get the attention that Linux does, though. Linux's internals, by comparison, are a rat's nest. But also, well-vetted by experience and testing. So a working rat's nest. I have examined NONE of the Windows source code, so I can't say much about it.
Vista is not something I'd pay money for, though. And if I had it, I'd probably see what I could do about getting rid of it.
Jon
04 Jan 2008, 4:43 am
