Microsoft Windows Officially Broken
From Schoolforge-UK
Richard Rothwell writes:
Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal:
My reading of this is that Vista/Longhorn will have to have the whole of XP lobbed in at the last minute to make it work! MS clearly don't know how Windows works - and even the Wine project can't really crack it, so they will not be able to reverse engineer it in reasonable time.
Dvorak's article on spaghetti code makes interesting reading:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1640914,00.asp
This provides serious leverage for schools worried about their legacy (Win 95 etc) apps - especially as most of these will run under Wine...
Mamading Ceesay adds
The Longhorn-reset happened quite a while ago according to Microsoft insiders posting at Mini-Microsoft.
This posting claims that MS threw away the Longhorn code and started again using Windows Server 2003 + XP Sp2 as a base:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/09/mini-is-that-you.html#c112769905620438601
Three+ years of 4000+ engineers coding in the bin! A conservative estimate of the sunk costs involved would easily be over a billion dollars.
A commenter correctly remarks that this sort of disaster has never happened in the open source arena, so much for the capabilities of the industry leader!
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/09/mini-is-that-you.html#c112770820912388078
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