Windows XP SP3: Give Microsft a break!
I ran into this article today over at TechSpot, and became immediately annoyed at the way they are nitpicking at the decisions Microsoft made on the release of SP3.
I put SP3 on my laptop last week, it installed much the same way that XP SP1 and SP2 did, it took around 25 minutes to install, and everything feels the same as before the update. I have had problems in the past updating computers to SP2 and getting a blue-screen due to unexpected winlogon.exe termination. Perhaps it’s just that I do like Microsoft, and I cut them slack and don’t expect everything to be perfect, or perhaps it’s because I work in the industry and know how complicated it can be to push an update of this magnitude.
Windows is really complicated. It’s not as simple as it looks from a user perspective, there are very complex systems in Windows (this does apply to any operating system–OSX and Linux are just as complex), pushing an update can have an adverse affect on any one of those systems.
The Microsoft Windows operating system supports thousands of devices. More than 30,000 [as of October 2006] drivers have been released; more are introduced daily.
It is not a secret that the success of Windows in the recent years has been largely due to the massive hardware and software that are compatible with Windows, and only Windows. Microsoft has certainly put a substantial amount of effort into ensuring that more software and more hardware works with Windows than any other platform. When Apple releases an update to OSX, things break. Users expect software to break. Many applications weren’t compatible with 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard. Apple sees this as acceptable, and perhaps necessary to build a rock solid OS over time. I’m quite sure that the API for OSX has changed and evolved over the years, and is far cleaner and simple to use than Windows win32 API. This backwards compatibility–something that Microsoft often gets flack for, is one of their strongest selling points, and the track record of compatibility is one that businesses can depend on. Something written for Windows XP will still likely work on Windows 95, unless it is using advanced graphics, or has a dependency on the .NET CLR.
For these reaons, a service pack–or even an update can and eventually will break something. It’s a delicate system, if you want massive hardware and software support, you will need to deal with some of the shortcomings.
The aforementioned article also mentions how SP3 won’t be installed on any computer with IE8 Beta–and that if you install on a computer with IE7, it will no longer be able to roll back to IE6. This is because the components in IE (mainly the Trident Layout engine) are used in other parts of Windows. If the service pack allowed IE8b installed, or to roll back to a time before the service pack, file version inconsistencies would be created. There are many ways that this could happen, and it would have had to have been extensively tested. This costs more, and benefits very very few users. Most would not complain about the limitation.
Imagine RIT – Innovation + Creativity Festival
Today was the first annual Imagine RIT Festival, hosted at the RIT campus in Rochester, New York. RIT was expecting a maximum of 30,000 people to attend, and although the weather wasn’t favorable for the event, drizzling without much sun, more than 10,000 people came to the campus. There were more than 400 exhibits around the campus–not only in the academic buildings–but also in the quads and Field House. The Xerox ‘WOW’ center was setup much the same way our career fairs are setup. Some of the memorable exhibits included RIT EyeTracking, and Calling Earth to Second Life. I spent a few hours walking around the campus checking everything out, there was some seriously cool stuff. Digsby was also present, and I scored a t-shirt from Steve.
The purpose of Imagine RIT, aside from kicking off the Rochester Festival season is to promote the university as not only a steller teaching university, but also as one that is is an innovation university, with an emphasis on research and creativity. RIT is ranked highly for undergraduate education, and having one of the oldest co-op programs has earned it a reputation which attracts many of the best employers in the USA.