60% of Windows Vista to be Rewritten
 

This, after an announcement to delay Vista until "January 2007". Now, I'm just a meager Computer Science student, but with the (limited) experience I've had with huge coding projects (and none of them NEARLY as large as Windows), the idea of trying to rewrite 60% of Windows' codebase in a mere 9 months (It's almost April) does NOT seem like a good idea. Even assuming you threw a giant fleet of programmers at it, it's highly unlikely that you could get it coded, properly tested, and finalized for launch before then. I anticipate either a longer delay or some major security and/or stability flaws.

Either that or some employee is thoroughly confused and really shouldn't be talking to the press about stuff he doesn't know. It'll be interesting.

Does sound scary, but as long as the parts being recoded aren't essential to the stability of the operating system, it might not be a big deal. I hope this is modular stuff they're working on.

That number just doesn't make sense. There's no way that sixty percent of the code can all be bad. You just wouldn't have a program if that was the case.

I'd love to believe that, but with Microsoft's motto of "If it's not integrated in as tightly as possible it's EVIL", a flaw anywhere could turn into a major security issue.

Damn, 60%? What the hell did they do all these years? With the way Vista is going, I might not opt to spend extra on a 64bit processor when I upgrade my PC. Hopefully Vista will have some improvement over XP, I'm tired of using a five year old OS that has glaring security holes. Since I don't even use most media features built into Vista, I really don't care about any multimedia enchancements, I just want a more stable and secure OS.

Now it's even more evident that Vista will be a slap and pack job, with 60% of code to be rewritten and out by January 2007...we could see Windows Update swamped once again which happened during XP's release date.

Lollin. I'll be running Leopard before Vista hits shelves at this rate.

Operating systems are a pain the ass. Try coding one. It's fun as hell.

Windows XP (2002) was about 40 million [source] lines of code. 60% would be about 24 millions lines. I wanna say Vista is more...

...Holy fucking shit.

When did you try to code an operating system?

I wouldn't even attempt that. Then again, I only know Java and C# (and lately, a little Ruby.)

Maybe someguys after using the leaked beta version told them"Hey Micro, your new Windows is shitsack".

I took the operating systems course offered at my school back in fall of 2004, a requirement for computer engineers. It's the most notorious course the school has to offer for computer science/engineering. I would be up for days doing the projects for that class. I practically lived in a Linux lab that semester (as with the other students) and we just ordered food and drinksto the lab everyday. Fun times.

Now I do some less stressful stuff and work on embedded operating systems for some independent research credit. Without time constraints, I haven't done much, but as the semester ends, there'll be hell to pay.

Now this sounds like fun ... both, the news about Vista and nazpyro's OS course experiences. ;)
I mean, what does MS think Mac enthusiasts and Linux zealots - like me - are going to do until January? Of course, we're going to try to get as many people converted as possible. And the odds aren't bad, with Apple adopting the Intel architecture and Linux becoming more user friendly with every iteration of certain distros (think SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora Core).
Has anyone here messed with the XGL (read: OpenGL based) desktop they're developing for *ix based OSs? It's only alpha status right now but it looks as sweet as OS X and performs well on my aging Athlon XP system (check out the live CD, it's really neat). I won't need a new PC for that when it becomes stable.

Way to go Microsoft, you're doing nerds like me a favor.

That 60% is the Media Vomit Center, so they are essentially rewriting all the bloat in the OS. Either to make it less bloat and annoying or for it to be less annoying and easier to remove/ignore.

On a related note, I heard somewhere IE7 will be a seperate component of Windows and not embedded into the OS anymore. Thats including the XP version of it too.

They probably have to after the European Union went after them over the integration stuff a couple years back.

Um how was the beta version considered leaked when Microsoft themselves mailed discs out?

Man, Vista is just sounding better and better every time a press release or new article comes out about it. At this rate, I had better get myself more familiar with some Linux before XP support dies.

But then you can't play Halo 2!!!

Speaking of gaming on Vista, Microsoft wants everyone to know that the minimum requirements for gaming on the new OS will call for 2gb of RAM.
TWO GIGABYTES.

Is that a problem? I've had 2 gig of RAM on my freaking laptop that I've had for a year.

Russ, I have a grand total of 2GB of RAM spread across the 4 desktops in my house.

I upgraded from 512 MB to one gig half a year ago and looking back it was pretty much a placebo purchase... my Linux box just doesen't go there in everyday use.

I've got 2GB myself, but then I thought that was actually something a year ago >_<. NExt time I need to build a 3D workstation i'll just go for a gaming rig, as they seem to have higher specs. I wonder how many people will expect their software to run on a computer with more than 2GB, without patches? You can be pretty sure that unless Vista has some clever way of dealing with it, that a lot of software people are used to won't run.

I don't see a problem with the minimum resourcements. This is for an OS intended to be released a year from now on, and also intended to be the standard OS for 5-6 years ahead.

1 GB of RAM was ridiculous in 2001 too yet XP needs that much to run fluidly with games.

171 users plus russ. LOL.

I really don't care about Vista, sometimes I'm very cranky when it comes to upgrade. It took me a while to switch to XP (when Adobe released Photoshop CS, that's it) and I think it will be the same with Vista. That media center concept doesn't appeal to me, especially when Microsoft is behind it.

There are tiers to the RAM and Windows experience:

Minimal (128MB RAM on XP, 512MB on Vista)- You can run everything fine, after waiting 10 minutes for the hard drive to cache all the excess RAM to the page file.

Minimum Recommendation (256MB on XP, 1GB on Vista)- Same as above, just not nearly as bad as with the Minimal RAM

Recommended (512MB on XP, 2GB on Vista)- Every thing runs smooth and fast, great for multitasking and the latest games

Power User (1GB+ on XP, 4GB+ on Vista)- Programs load extremely fast, possibly more RAM than you'll need to use for a perfect experience. Only with the highest end, most demanding programs could you ever experience any slowdown.

That doesnt mean jack. Vista uses a completely different GUI so for all we know it may run fine with 256mb even, if you set it to use classic no-show gui. If anything, the needed videocards are much higher classes. Then again, this will finally make Pixel Shader based cards the absolute standard.

According to Gamespot who did a 4 part Vista preview thing a while ago ( http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/index.html ) the person the interviewed about Vista said that its recommended to be run on a system with 512MB RAM in order to get that new "Aero" look. Anything less than that might only get Vista without the looks and this is all course assuming you havea DX9.0 compatible card, and if you want to watch movies on Vista with its max resolution you will also need a HDCP compatible monitor and video card (and you'll probably need the card to be DX10 ready).

That was part of my senior year in college. You don't do the whole thing because you couldn't fit all the concepts needed to do an entire OS into one course, but you do major parts of it and plug it in with code the teacher prepares.

Yeah, we had a very basic kernel, and the projects involved implementing such things as paging & virtual memory, file systems, messaging, scheduling, etc. Specifically, the first 2 mentioned were hell. Easy concepts to understand, pain in the ass to implement.

2GB is crap. 512 is completely understandable. If my starkingdoms would be up, I'd post the requirements from there that were posted.

Basically recommended I believe was:

512 RAM
3.0 GHz
DX 9.0 video card

I'd suggest having 2GB though, for running a few "high-end" apps and having smooth performance.

Oh, and I just got XP recently (screw you Battlefield 2) and it was hard to go from 2000 to XP. :(

(Yes I'm in Classic Mode)

This sounds all too familiar to me. Now you also have to consider the fact that you were using Linux which is relatively easy to work with. Take a look at API for the NT kernel and you will cry your eyes out with tears of blood. Things tend to be a bit bloated looking and overcomplicated in my opinion. Process control isn't as simple as just using fork() in Windows. Nope... it's gotta be like 15 lines of code to do that one simple task.


Am I correct in assuming that Vista will be coming bundled with DX10? That's a feature that might be something worth looking forward to. I'm also being hopeful like Eleo and wishing that their main problems are modular and not the core of the OS... but yeah, that's probably just wishful thinking.

I remember hearing that DX10 won't be compatible with DX9 and lower hardware/software APIs, so that means your shiny 7800GTX won't be able to run DX10 games (though I assume you'll be able to install DX9 alongside DX10).

Last I heard was that Vista is to come with DX9 and DX10, the things that use DX10 will make use of it, but it doesn't support DX9 applications (games), so when you run Half Life 2 or whatever, it'll use DX9. When you use Halo 2 or something like that, it'll use DX10. The issue I see that could come up here is if they have a weird implementation on DX9, or it's emulated in some way, that your 'legacy' software won't all run right. Again.

Also, that DX10 will only be available on Vista, so in time you DirectX requirements will get you to switch platforms.

So the average users of Steam (HL2 is still considered a relatively high end game?) use 256-512MB of RAM. So they'll only have to have 4-7 times that number to get about the same performance if they upgrade to Vista. Sounds a bit stiff as an estimate. I expect it'll be a resource hog, but I really hope that is overstating things.

This is what the guy posted:

Aero Glass

Aero Glass is built on the new Desktop Compositing Engine, adding support for 3D graphics, translucency, animation and other visual effects.
Intended for mainstream and high-end graphics cards.
64 MB of graphics memory recommended for 1024x768, 128 MB for 1600x1200+.
At least 32 bits per pixel.
3D hardware acceleration with capabilities equal to DirectX 9.0c.
A memory bandwidth of 2 GB/s, and as much 8 GB/s can be supported.
Capable of drawing ~1.5 M triangles / second, one window being ~150 triangles.
A graphics card that uses AGP 8X or PCI Express x16 bus.
Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WVDDM) Drivers.

It is likely that such a configuration will be an average configuration by Vista's release in 2007. During Vista's early alpha testing stages, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 were the only cards compatible with Aero Glass. Since then, support has been extended to most DirectX 9 Graphics cards. At this point, the nVidia FX family and up, and ATI Radeon 9500 and up are supported.

What was M$ thinking when they deemed an Xbox1 game Vista-exclusive?
[slightly exagerated] Some emulator might be running it earlier on PCs and then on W2k, XP or maybe even a non-Windows OS... [/slightly exagerated]

They must've wanted to gain some sort of support for Vista this way. With Halo 2 being as popular as it is, it's easy to assume that some might buy Vista just to play it on PC. (At the very least, this seems to be Microsoft's reasoning.)

I will actually install a copy of Vista just to play Halo 2, and if it doesn't suck I may even use it as my primary OS. The Aero skin is sexy, admit it.

Pretty much the only thing bothering me is Vista being over DRMed to hell, and being so "user friendly" that you cannot actually configure anything right because its hidden behind too much bloat.

On top of what XP uses, what sevices will Vista add to the pile? I'd be surprised to see what they add to Vista.

If I ever do use Vista (I might install it just to try the OS, like I did with XP back in late 2001), I'm going to dual-boot (so I don't have to worry about breaking programs that work in XP). Is anyone else going to do this? I'll just download a copy of Win98SE and run it in tandem with the 64bit version of Vista. I might as well, I have too many DOS games aching to be given another try.