Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever

codinghorror.com

23 pointstwampss29 comments

In the comments, Jeff writes:

I'm saying you should avoid using the rusted screwdriver which is liable to burst into fragments and cause a crippling hand wound at any time!

This is why friends don't let friends Comment While Defensive. XP is old technology but this analogy is absurd. It's not as if the code becomes brittle and starts to break down over time.

Incidentally, Vista is what finally decided me to get off my ass and switch to Ubuntu. Now that I've invested a fair bit of energy familiarizing myself with it and customizing my system, there's no chance I'll switch back to Microsoft even if Windows 7 is a huge improvement.

Code may not break down over time, but maintaining it into the future can become burdensome with changes in hardware and peripherals.

I don't think the analogy is that absurd. It's true that code doesn't rust, but as time advances and other code is developed and improved, old code can become relatively less reliable. IE6 is "rusty" compared to modern browsers.

You know, when IE6 was new (edit: and after Firefox was released), it still sucked, and we pined for the day everyone would abandon IE for standards-compliant browsers. Now that IE7 and IE8 are more standards-compliant, that exact same complaint has just been indexed to IE6 in particular. It's not a matter of it being out of date at all.

What are you talking about? IE5 and IE6 for Windows were awesome when they were released. They were way faster, more reliable, and more standards-based than the browsers of the day when released (like the NN4.7 shitpile). The last release of IE5 for OS X had one of the first usable CSS implementations, and some awesome UI innovations.

The problem with IE is not that it sucked, but that it was abandoned before hundreds of millions of users started banging on it.

IE5 maybe, but it was long before IE7 (i.e. during the IE6 era) when IE came under fire for poor standards compliance.

Again, that's because in the huge interim between IE6 and IE7, the other browsers caught up to IE and then pulled way ahead.

I have been using Windows 7 as my primary OS for about 8 months now. It is very good and stable. The best improvement is of course the new taskbar which does make the process of managing your applications and open windows a lot more streamlined.

That said, in the article Jeff sounds like Windows 7 is really just a slight improvement over Vista. It is just plain wrong. If you have been following the windows 7 development blog, you can see that they have put a lot of effort in the R&D of this new OS. You have to use the OS for some time to understand this. (5 minutes is not enough to form an opinion and write a lengthy blog post)

I remember an article by Raymond Chen [1] where he tells the story of how they changed the inner workings of windows calculator and people never noticed it. Then they just changed the skin a little bit and praises came in pouring, about how much better the new calculator is. The original article also feels like committing the same mistake. The fact that they have polished the UI does not mean that that is the only thing they did.

As an aside, I also wanted to try out Ubuntu in the past few years, but did not get time for that. The one thing I understood is that (especially for web workers) the OS you are using to develop applications never really matters. If I switched to Linux (or a mac for that matter), I'd just be wasting a lot of my time to get familiarized with the working of the new OS, with no significant upsides for switching.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253....

I installed W7 yesterday and get a BSOD on a lot of video sites (hulu, adultswim.com) Any recommendations?

Sounds like bad video drivers. Download from manufacturer and reinstall - if on notebook stop using the vendor's and use NVidia/AMD's instead (as the case may apply).

Video drivers is practically the only reason Windows ever BSODs anymore.

I get them from a RAID something-or-other too. But agreed, it's typically Nvidia's fault.

I have a Vista on my laptop, and it isn't horrible but it also isn't an improvement over XP. When I recently purchased a new computer, I built it for XP.

I fully disagree with Atwoods comment: A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem

I'm really very fine with that. There's been an over-emphasis on the operating system for far too long. It should just shut up and get out of the way. As long as it continues to be updated and has plenty of drivers, we don't need to be changing operating systems very 3 years. XP has ushered in a period of relative stability to our industry that's been very good thing and, unsurprisingly, people are reluctant to move away from that.

Unfortunately, XP is really at the end of it's life due to the move to 64bit. I'm confident that Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista, but I'm not yet convinced that it's the next 9 year operating system.

Does anyone contradict him or herself more often than Jeff Atwood? It's like I'm reading an article written by two people wrestling for the keyboard.

He is very good at analogies though. Read this: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/why-cant-you-have-just...

Even if what he tries to prove is correct, his reasoning for that is almost always wrong. Not wrong, but funny.

I am sad that Hacker News never really loved CodingHorror articles. But I understand why - Some reasoning != Good Reasoning

A gentle reminder: There is no point in discussing about Jeff every other week. Jeff Atwood is not writing for the HN crowd. Leave him alone.

I first started reading Coding Horror about a year ago, as someone who is new to the development and programming world, he really opened my eyes to a lot of misconceptions I had held, and I can say without a doubt he led me on a path to greatly improving my standards and code.

He also was instrumental in introducing me to not only a slew of great blogs and information, but eventually led me to find hacker news.

I'd say the good he does for new and upcoming developers far outweighs all of the criticism I've read about his articles.

"finish up by confirming that the previous 5 or so minutes were a complete waste of your readers time."

http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/nothing-to-say/

I might get W7 for my PC gaming habbit. I'd never own Windows for anything else though.

Basically, I just really wish they'd finally add mouse and keyboard support to the 360.

Windows 7 is still missing a unix terminal, last I checked.

Does it really need one? It really doesn't. If there were one, the average user of this operating system wouldn't probably even know its existence.

The average user may not need one, but I, and many others, find them very useful.

Then it's not fair to say it's missing as though it is something you expect it to have. That's kind of like saying you expect your Ford to have a customisable semi-auto transmission or heated seats.

As people have mentioned, there are substitutes that meet most of the same functionality, but if you truly text driven rather than visually driven you should pick a text focused operating system.

They have the powershell. I hear good things about it.

Powershell is more like Applescript than it is like a bourne shell.

Are you comparing powershell with Unix terminal ? :O

Nah, like all windows versions, you just load cygwin.

When I was more of a window user, I used 'virtualisation' rather than loading cygwin. Now when I'm mature enough I still use virtualisation to run some window programs which are not happy on fedora/OSX :)

Virtualization doesn't let me manage all my windows servers as if they were Linux servers. I boot up a virtual Ubuntu now and then as well, but cygwin makes Windows unixy in a way virtualization doesn't.

Well, it's all about needs. I just needed to run some applications and games, code a bit on visual studio to complete college assignments and run internet through a data-card whose modem(china-made) never got recognized on both fedora/OSX. However for managing servers, I never tried it so I agree with you. Your statement is a special case IMHO. Like me, most of the linux/OSX based user go for virtualisation if they need windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

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