Article: take a peek into MS Windows development

[jgpaiva]

Here's an interesting article, written in 2006 by a guy who activelly worked in windows Vista.
It's interesting to see the whole process involved in making such a giant product, and how things sometimes don't come out the way they were expected.

http://moishelettvin...utdown-crapfest.html

To be honest, I actually like the feature mentioned in the article (it's Vista's shutdown button), except for the fact that it comes predifined to "sleep", which makes no sense. After changing it to "shutdown", I think it's a giant step better than XP's dialog.

[mouser]

great read. 

[tomos]

To be honest, I actually like the feature mentioned in the article (it's Vista's shutdown button), except for the fact that it comes predifined to "sleep", which makes no sense. After changing it to "shutdown", I think it's a giant step better than XP's dialog.

-jgpaiva (July 21, 2008, 08:24 AM)

wonder does it do this...?

Joel was talking about how sleep and hibernate can be merged. The Mac does this nicely. There is only one choice, "Sleep." At least with laptops, it hibertates the machine (writes RAM to disk) but then actually sleeps. That way, in case the power goes away by the battery wearing down, you just wake up as if you had been hibernating all along. (You can test this by sleeping a Macbook and then removing the battery. I don't feel like unplugging my iMac to see if it works the same way.) And if you never run out of power, you get the advantage of a fast wake-up time.

(from the comments there)

[edit] OOOUPs

Actually, that's not true. Mac's by default to the equivalent of Stand By in Windows, which is that it doesn't write the RAM to disk. If you take out the battery your data goes down the drain. However, if you put it to sleep, and it's sleeping drains the battery, it will go into a "Deep Sleep" that writes RAM to disk before the battery goes completely dead. When you wake it up it'll do a little progress bar and you're back.

(the comment following the previous somment ) [/edit]

good read allright, sounds like Dilbert land

[jgpaiva]

That's the stupid part, Tom.. It doesn't. The "sleep" is a synonym for "standby" in winXP, that's why I say it doesn't make much sense.
Also, when you change from "sleep" to "shutdown", you can't choose "hibernate".. lol

I wouldn't choose "hibernate" anyways, everytime I tried it in XP, something went wrong Oh, and writing 2GB of used RAM to disk also would take a while, I suppose

[f0dder]

Hm, my disks can do at least 60MB/s sustained (probably more) if there isn't file fragmentation to take into account... but even that, (8*1024)/(60*60) = ~2.28 minutes...

[jgpaiva]

f0dder: I don't think hibernation writes the whole mem, only the occupied part (is MS smart enough to do that?).
For me, it'd be even worse, I'm on a laptop with 4GB of ram.. (4*1024)/25 = 2,73. Waiting 3+ minutes for the laptop to shutdown should be fun
Oh, wait, and then it'd have to copy it back on startup! Definitelly, as interesting as hibernation might sound, it sure isn't feasable.

[f0dder]

Hm, with previous versions it definitely wrote out all physical RAM, dunno if they've changed that for Vista. It's a pretty nontrivial thing to only write out used RAM, especially when hibernation is retrofitted to an existing OS (I think it was added in Win2000/NT5, thus retrofitted to NT4).

Anyway, back on topic: that development story sounds pretty horrible. Especially how long it took for commits to be pushed up the tree... I certainly hope the teams swapped code in other ways than that, having to wait 1-3 months before another involved team can comment on your changes? UGH!