Maximum Wait for MinWin and Windows 7.0

Sabayon is a very good example of how different choices for one job can fit in under 5Gb. Tons of apps on it - including eye candy, and still three times as small as Vista Notepad+IE.

Notepad was one of the few things I liked about Windows (apart from defrag screen). Sad to see it's screwed to over 5 Gb. Or is Notepad morphing to Emacs.NET but we just don't know yet?

Here's an analysis from the NYTIMES on this

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?_r=...

Quote: As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation." UnQuote

Hmmm I'm not sure I buy this since Linux is highly backwardly compatible and not bloated to anywhere the same degree.

My (simplistic) guess: Incompetent long term coding not brought to account because of monopolistic factors.

> My (simplistic) guess: Incompetent long term coding not brought to account because of monopolistic factors.

Exactly.

Somewhere I saw a chart, comparing the system calls of IIS serving one static webpage, and Apache serving one static web page.

Unlike F/OSS with the "release early, release often" mantra, when MS releases a version of Windows they're stuck with that for years. So are the 3rd party coders, who build applications which work around or even utilize the flaws found in Windows.

Everyone knows what happens when "flaws" are fixed in Windows, we have things like XP-SP2, which broke the bank in terms of rewriting applications.

So not only does MS have to maintain backward compatibility with features, they have to maintain many of the bugs as well (such as the well known patch to give correct dates prior to 1901).

Microsoft cannot follow my, and now TC's, advice to create a compatibility layer that runs on BSD or Linux. That would mean admitting they were wrong. As a publicly traded company, I think the top management would open themselves to prosecution if they were to admit that they were wrong, since they as individuals have wedded themselves so intimately with the decision making process for the products.

14 GB. Astounding. Could VISTA be simply loading absolutely everything, for absolutely every bit of hardware that it has, just in case? I can't think of any other possibility. Even I don't write code _that_ bad.

Quoting:Hmmm I'm not sure I buy this since Linux is highly backwardly compatible and not bloated to anywhere the same degree.

Not 100% true. Having access to the source means that we can break backwards compatibility Much easier than Windows can. It's a distinct advantage over non-free software. Just read stable-api-nonsense in the kernel sources: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html

95% of backwards compatibility problems simply don't exist in FOSS land because we have the source. The only backwards compatibility we have to deal with is open standards, file formats, public source API's, etcetera.

True sander. I guess the point being that if you insist absolutely 100% on backward compatibility you get tied up in stupid knots.

windows vs. linux system calls for apache execution link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=311

Thanks, 6. Yes, that is exactly what I was (imperfectly) remembering.

Frightening, isn't it?

Quoting:Frightening, isn't it?

Only if you use IIS :-D

I believe my boss said that when you install Vista, it installs EVERYTHING for all versions of Vista, so you can use the happy upgrade tool later to upgrade to a "better" version. That could be a reason for some of the bloat (though still...14GB!?).

On a related subject of bloat, I just put together a new portable hard disk (750GB mmmmm) and installed almost everything from portableapps.com on it (including the XAMPP stack) for when I'm stuck on a windows box (I skipped a few things like thunderbird and macos and whatnot). All that, plus the installers for OO.o, VLC, and a few other utils all comes out to about 600MB. MS Office 2007 Enterprise installs to @1.2GB. Mind blowing isn't it?

Screenies of the my launcher for those interested to see what all is installed on mine. :) https://techiem2.no-ip.com/PortAppsPage1.jpg https://techiem2.no-ip.com/PortAppsPage2.jpg

I also have a 5GB partition that boots up the Gentoo LiveDVD/Installer.

Quoting:I just put together a new portable hard disk (750GB mmmmm) and installed almost everything from portableapps.com on it (including the XAMPP stack) for when I'm stuck on a windows box (I skipped a few things like thunderbird and macos and whatnot). All that, plus the installers for OO.o, VLC, and a few other utils all comes out to about 600MB.

Fits nicely onto one CD. Maybe you should build an ISO and release it. Or submit it to the guys that make "The Open CD" so they can use it for "The Portable Open CD".

The problem with a CD is that the portableapps stuff is made to run fully from the portable disk, so some of the progs (like firefox...) would probably have issues running from a read-only medium. :) Of course, packaging it all into a zip file or some such for easy extraction to a portable device without having to install each component might be a good idea... A good commercial option would be for someone to sell 2GB flash drives with everything preloaded. That would be cool.

I'm thinking that even when Vista dumps everything to the hard drive, it wouldn't take up 14 GB of space. I can also give another suggestion as to what is causing it to take up so much space: backing up of your files....... Yes, all editions do that, but only in certain editions do you have access to those backups. I'm assuming it is reserving that much space for the sole purpose of file backups. That, and the DRM garbage probably causing execuables being larger than they need to be.

Quoting:I can also give another suggestion as to what is causing it to take up so much space:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=C:/Wow!.exe count=2000000 dd if=/dev/urandom of=C:/better_than_XP.bat count=2000000

That's 14 gigs on a fresh installation. No Office, no nuthin'. There is a 6.5 gig recovery partition, too. On a warm day it smells a bit like old Crisco.

> That's 14 gigs on a fresh installation. No Office, no nuthin'. There is a 6.5 gig recovery partition, too.

I'm recommending a minimum hard drive size of 160GB to those asking me what to get for Vista. By the time you add in Office (which most people insist on, even though I recommend they try OpenOffice first) and the preinstalled apps most vendors include, you're looking at something like 40 GB being used before you even start.

Quoting:...you're looking at something like 40 GB being used before you even start.

That means I have to throw away 3 out 5 fully functioning Linux computers I have at home. No way Jose.

Can't use philesight on a Windows Vista partition to see where it is?

> you're looking at something like 40 GB being used before you even start.

Hardware manufacturers _love_ Microsoft.

B_R That is true, very true. And I guess the machine makers love the lock-in to Redmond.

That has been conspiracy theory for a while. New computers come with Vista, and in exchange Vista needs new computers. Some of these 'Vista-ready' computers are not capable of running whole Vista, so they need hardware upgrades. After the hardware upgrades come the service packs. I noticed in the past XP SP2 doesn't run fine on 256Mb RAM while XP without SP's did, which might mean Vista SP1 needs more resources.