Is Vista messy?


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If you look at Vista, it's just Windows Server 2003 with a whole heap of cluttered junk piled on top of it like a house of cards (as usual since Windows NT4, the last "clean" operating system out of Redmond). They always cite "compatibility issues" as to why they must have crap like "Coffee Bean.bmp" (go take a look) in the /WINDOWS directory.

Just try and get someone from Redmond to explain why in XP64, System32 contains 64-bit files and SysWow64 contains 32-bit files. Gee, I think the original creator of "System32" (NT4 devs) expected 64-bit files to be placed into "System64"... This is the kind of junk that Redmond is inexplicably proud of. Even the book "Windows Internals" (written by Windows guru Russonovitch of SysInternals fame, and is actually used by Redmond as a reference INTO THEIR OWN OPERATING SYSTEM) is cautiously critical of how MS bungles major architectural decisions about the operating system. Ever since Cutler moved on from designing OS's at Redmond, it's been a colossal disaster driven by marketing and sales rather than by people with a true respect for well-designed operating systems.

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It smells like linux fanboy in here :sleep:

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Nothing can beat the simple Drag And Drop installation or removal of applications with Mac OSX.  And it's like magic.  As soon as a new app is in the "Applications" folder, all file assosiation are done like magic.

No registry...

I wish Microsoft would do something like that.  How cool it would be to simply drag and drop Office 12 folder on your hard drive and VOILA, it works!

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Ever cared to look under /Library And ~/Library ?

Depending on the application, it will drop its settings, user profiles etc in there. So drag & drop is not as clean on OSX as it is thought to be ;)

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They could do with more clearly labelled default folders for one. I think "Program Files" should "Programs" and they should have a "Games" folder, which is the default install for your games (Duh). There should also be restrictions so the software has to go in the right folder "Programs"/"Games", and set these restrictions on as default or something. I  think that would help a bit.

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Wouldn't that force you to have one large partition?

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Wouldn't that force you to have one large partition?

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I think he means the default would make things constrained to a single (logically named) folder. Then I would expect the location/choice of that folder would be changeable at install. Like it is now.

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It smells like linux fanboy in here  :sleep:

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not really, he has it dead on the money, windows is broken and poorly managed when it comes to its internals, thats why windows after a while of use becomes slower and slower. stuff builds up and stuff becomes broken that is left over and it just becomes one big mess. thats why its recommended to format your drive ever so often to clean that out. vista has a pretty gui, but its internals, its framework isnt nearly as nice. its the inside that counts heh

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Ever cared to look under /Library And ~/Library ?

Depending on the application, it will drop its settings, user profiles etc in there. So drag & drop is not as clean on OSX as it is thought to be?;))

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On Mac OS X you can find all the files left behind by an application in the /Library or ~/Library folder with ease by simply searching for the application's name with Spotlight. If you delete those preference files the application is 100% gone. Even if you leave those files in the Preferences folder the system won't slow down because of them, since they're nothing more than text files with a different extension.

Something that's also really great about Mac OS X is that the System folder itself is being locked after the completion of the installation. That way applications don't have acces to it and the system can't become unstable because of a malfunctioning piece of software (not counting in tweaking software). The only thing that changes the contents of the System folder are system updates.

On Windows on the other hand it's almost undoable to locate all the files left behind throughout C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, C:\Documents and Settings\~ and the registry. Plus your system will slow down when more and more registry values are behing left behind in the system's registry.

Edited by Neowave
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On Mac OS X you can find all the files left behind by an application in the /Library or ~/Library folder with ease by simply searching for the application's name with Spotlight. If you delete those preference files the application is 100% gone. Even if you leave those files in the Preferences folder the system won't slow down because of them, since they're nothing more than text files with a different extension.

....

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yea yea :sleep: I know all that (posting this from my iBook). Just making a point that its not as clean as it should be. And the implementation is somewhat short in terms of file associations. At least I don't know any way to control which application is allowed to open a file type.

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right it isnt as clean as it should but it sure beats the uninstall process you endure in most cases on a pc. the drag and drop method is pretty sound and the fact that any files left over dont slow down or interfere witht he os operation just makes it even better. those are easily removed as explained but it really doesnt matter since there is no performance drop.

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What they really need is default folders for /Viruses /Spyware /Adware - That'd make it real easy :D

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Now that would be a great addition to Vista (Y)

/emailing Microsoft this suggestion :pc:

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Something that's also really great about Mac OS X is that the System folder itself is being locked after the completion of the installation. That way applications don't have acces to it and the system can't become unstable because of a malfunctioning piece of software (not counting in tweaking software). The only thing that changes the contents of the System folder are system updates.

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Vista does this.

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I totally agree, im obsessivly compulsive about having a clean drive, clean start menu, clean system folders, etc... :pinch: lol

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:) Hillarious. By accident or by necessity I'm not sure. I'm so use to it that it scares me. I can't imagine not cleaning my rig daily including the registry. updating spybot, ad-aware, spywareblaster. We certainly arren't the norm here. I went over to my brothers a couple months ago because his PC was running slow. Holy crap I loaded window washer up for him and I swear it ran for over an hour cleaning up over 2 gigs of crap files. I think there are millions of people all over the world with more dirty, junky pc's then can be imagined. I also knew a guy who got rid of his PC because it got running so slow becasue it was so full fo junk files that he got ****ed off and got rid of it. Yea, I'd love a self cleaning rig, except I wouldn't trust any program. I want to manually do it that way I know exactly what I'm cleaning.

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yea yea?:sleep:: I know all that (posting this from my iBook). Just making a point that its not as clean as it should be.

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It's cleaner than it is on Windows by a long shot.

And the implementation is somewhat short in terms of file associations. At least I don't know any way to control which application is allowed to open a file type.

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Have you ever tried selecting a file, then press cmd+I, go to the "Open with" section of the Info window that just popped open, select the application you want and press "Change All..."?

That you don't know how to change this on Mac OS X isn't the fault of the OS.;))

Vista does this.

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That's great!:))

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right it isnt as clean as it should but it sure beats the uninstall process you endure in most cases on a pc.? the drag and drop method is pretty sound and the fact that any files left over dont slow down or interfere witht he os operation just makes it even better.? those are easily removed as explained but it really doesnt matter since there is no performance drop.

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Exactly. There is always room for improvement (otherwise there wouldn't be a Mac OS X 10.5 in development), but it sure beats the hell out of the Windows-way of doing things:cool:l:

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in order for them to remvoe the registry at this point, they will probably have to rewrite EVERYTHING since just about every API, application, DLL, whatever that is in Vista relies on the registry to be run.

Then expect delays til the cows come home.

or XP SP12 or something...

but yeah I'm using Vista CTP Build, and for a beta release, this is quite impressive. While I still think at this point it is still nothing but 2003 with ice cream on top, I think the final edition will change this perception.

Plus remember that this is Allchin's "Swan Song," so that has to mean something.

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QUOTE: Vista does this.

REPLY: As far as CTP, it hasn't done this yet. Installation process is still the same as it has always been.

You know, they had every opportunity to make this a clean release. But that would have taken them a much longer time to implement than they plan. I think they just stack things on top of each other just to keep up with competition, which, in short term works, but in the long term will lead them to their demise (amongst other things).

But hey, they got XP Starter! Foreign relations boost!

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If you look at Vista, it's just Windows Server 2003 with a whole heap of cluttered junk piled on top of it like a house of cards (as usual since Windows NT4, the last "clean" operating system out of Redmond). They always cite "compatibility issues" as to why they must have crap like "Coffee Bean.bmp" (go take a look) in the /WINDOWS directory.

Just try and get someone from Redmond to explain why in XP64, System32 contains 64-bit files and SysWow64 contains 32-bit files. Gee, I think the original creator of "System32" (NT4 devs) expected 64-bit files to be placed into "System64"... This is the kind of junk that Redmond is inexplicably proud of. Even the book "Windows Internals" (written by Windows guru Russonovitch of SysInternals fame, and is actually used by Redmond as a reference INTO THEIR OWN OPERATING SYSTEM) is cautiously critical of how MS bungles major architectural decisions about the operating system. Ever since Cutler moved on from designing OS's at Redmond, it's been a colossal disaster driven by marketing and sales rather than by people with a true respect for well-designed operating systems.

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Ah, the voice of "experts"

"system32" goes much farther back than NT4 - try NT3.1

The "System32" directory is preserved for software compatability with older applications. SysWow64 contains files for "Windows on Windows" compatability, bringing us back to the "thunking" process we all experienced with the 16-to-32 bit compatability for NT, but this time giving us the 32-to-64 bit thunk.

Russonovitch's work is used, primarily, to introduce new programmers at Microsoft to the ins-and-outs of Windows Internals. Explain how someone is both cautious and critical, especially in Russonovitch's work? Even in books produced by Microsoft staff (namely, "Code Complete"), criticism of Microsoft's internal programming processes is turned on it's ear - and have made huge changes in how Microsoft gets things done. Yes, Dave Cutler has moved on to other things, but the foundation he laid with the original NT team (of which I was a contractor to on the Kernel, API & Test Group) still lives in WS2k3 and Vista.

To say that Vista is just a re-packaged version of WS2k3 shows stgeorge's complete misunderstanding of Vista and specifically Vista Server. Vista Server has been a total re-write into making the the entire OS more modular, with the "Server Core" at - where else - the core. Services, functions and additional key components are now all modules that work directly with the Server Core. Only modules needed for particular functions for a given servers role are installed on the machine - providing a near-zero bloat.

More info on Vista & Longhorn Server can be found at Paul Thurrott's SuperSite

I guess we can just wrap this one up...

--ScottKin

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Ever cared to look under /Library And ~/Library ?

Depending on the application, it will drop its settings, user profiles etc in there. So drag & drop is not as clean on OSX as it is thought to be  ;)

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Yeah of course, to bad that the things placed in the libraries folders are most of the times just few kb of preferences files, that doesn't clutter your OS at every bootup, and that you can easily remove just typing a search for the program you want to remove in the finder. (And most important, you can leave them here, 'cos you won't notice any improvement in doing so, except a really clean OS... ) ;)

Edit: Just read neowave respsonse, my answer now is completly useless... :D, sorry!

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Edit: Just read neowave respsonse, my answer now is completly useless... :D, sorry!

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It's always nice to have someone backing up your story, don't worry about it. ;)

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Well i think they should firstly shift all of their code away from using one bit of the registry, but leave it there for legacy applications. I don't exactly know how they could shift developers from still using it in newly designed apps, but i think they shouldn't provide it under the new API set, they are providing, however i'm sure there are still are still functions in the old API (Win32), for developers to access, but definitely by eliminating it from the new set is a first step.

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From a programming POV... The Win32 API calls like GetProfileString etc to manipulate the registry are all abstract enough so that a developer doesn't really know that he's accessing the registry. I think all programming languages build on those in the end, and no one really access the registry directly. That would be a pretty bad thing to do anyway. Note how the function called is about profiles, not even "registry", so it seems MS did this to make it really abstract, which would be a good idea if they ever want to switch. Actually IIRC, the similar calls previously instead stored and read from INI files.

And just because these calls take identifiers like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE doesn't mean that can't translate to reading from / writing to some sort of special Settings subfolder in the application directories, with HKCU ones in the user profiles (%AppData%) directory. Yes, that means you need the access rights for that, but you need elevated rights to manipulate the local machine branch anyway.

Maybe the registry reading routines could run in a compatibility mode by default (for backwards compatibility), and always try read from a legacy registry first, then try in whatever new way of doing it. And the registry writing always storing in only the new way. Should make the registry less used over time. :)

Oh, and one more thing... .NET applications can use XML .config files in their directories for general application setting storage (as in it's supported built-in by the .NET Framework), so that's an interesting strategy from Microsoft to avoid the registry, and at least hints they don't really like it either. :laugh:

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