XP Blather

An oft-heard lament.

Get It Try It

XP should be a welcome milestone for us. It's a shame that the events of the past few years have cast a shadow over it all. Microsoft did help give us the PC, and without the PC it's doubtful whether microcomputing would have spread the way it did, given only Apple in the arena up until then. Surely IBM was the driving force back then, but Microsoft was in on it. And yes, Microsoft has done almost everything wrong from the get-go, consistently behaving in an unethical way, but still and all - with all of Billg's billions we could finally have had a unified and relatively satisfactory 32-bit platform for this Intel-based box. If only...

But there are so many things which break the bubble. Product activation is one. Seemingly Billg doesn't have enough money yet. Doesn't own every last Swiss bank and valuable photograph in existence. Doesn't own Sun Microsystems and Larry Ellison. And doesn't own the US government. So starting now, as if past performances weren't bad enough, home PC users have to contact Microsoft to make their Windows XP work, and after that they have to be very careful what they do with their machines or it will suddenly stop working again. This is of course an unnecessary bother, and reason enough to look elsewhere for a new operating system, if one indeed be in the market for one.

Then there are the nearly coincidental releases of other operating systems which have a relevance people would not have even considered a few years earlier. Red Hat has recently released version 7.2 of their operating system, and Apple has recently come out with a speedier update of their watershed OS X. And everything in between, recently released or not, is some variation on Unix. Only Billg stands alone with something not even remotely related.

Windows XP will never match the performance of Windows 2K, just as Windows 2K could never hope to match the performance of Windows NT. The farther the mediocre programmers in Redmond get from the Cutler code the farther they fall. There's really no two ways about this. If we are to have faith in Microsoft as a vendor of quality when it comes to operating systems, then we need to be able to look back into their corporate history and cite examples of great products they've released, and unfortunately we cannot come up with anything. MS-DOS was nothing to even sneeze at, but what's worse, it wasn't a Microsoft product. Tim Paterson's company sued Microsoft over the latter's use of Tim's QADOS and won. And NT wasn't a Microsoft product either. Based explicitly on David Cutler's research work on Prism for Digital Equipment Corporation in Seattle (and even using the same source tree) it was so obviously a 'steal' that DEC sued Microsoft again - and won. And Microsoft's involvement in the stillborn OS/2 project was characterised by the only releases of that system that were too bugged to run, while ironically OS/2 did gain a semblance of quality and stability first when Microsoft left the arena. So no, we can't look to the past to see anything to instill confidence in Microsoft as a system vendor.

Microsoft does have the sales and marketing machine to fight Linux and other systems all the way. The Valentine Documents show just how much effort (and money) Microsoft is pouring into their fight against their competitors - even competitors which don't have sales forces to seduce clients world-wide.

Microsoft has of course published minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP, and these are as usual dramatically under-dimensioned. Microsoft would have it that XP runs fine on a 300Mhz processor with 1.5GB disk space and 128MB RAM, where the quadruple is more like the reality of the situation. Microsoft loves to put bells and whistles in things, and as their way of coding is to patch 'hacks' into code bases rather than unify and synthesize said code bases, you can count on sluggishness throughout.

Apple's OS X was reported to be sluggish too, yet I can understand this better and forgive it more. This new NeXTSTEP implementation may need a few revisions to get up to speed. It's FreeBSD and it uses a MACH kernel to boot, and although the MACH will make OS X more stable, it will also make it slower. Remember that although NT/2K/XP started as microkernel too, this approach was abandoned when the Windows 95 nerds created their new shell. David Cutler had to go back on one of his fundamental tenets of system design and migrate this potentially volatile code back into the kernel where it could bring the whole house of cards crashing down. If OS X and XP both appear equally sluggish, then that is something in Apple's favour, for on paper at least OS X has to be the more stable operating system.

Linux wasn't a big issue back in 1995 either, the last time Microsoft had something they thought was significant to show us. But now Linux has established a beachhead it will never relinquish. Linux is here to stay. And whether you use Linux or not you still benefit by it. Linux opened the way to Unix, and today Microsoft is the only major OS vendor not offering a variant on that operating system.

The news links that follow in this roundup should give you a good all-round picture of what Windows XP is and also what your choices are if you are in the market for a new PC and a new operating system. Personally I would never go with XP - the thought is pure anathema - if all I had was a single box to play with. I think I would go with OS X, as this operating system, despite the obvious fact that it is not free either, seems to me to be the wave of the future. It's built in the right way with the right tools, and after ten years of development misery assailing the programming community, finally offers the grunts a way out of their present predicament.

I hope you find our roundup useful.

All the best,

Rick