Windows 7 Memory Usage Critic Outed As Fraud 451
A few days ago, we ran word of a report alleging that Windows 7 consumed more memory than it should, based on a report from Devil Mountain Software; a followup post linked to Ars Technica's robust deconstruction of that claim. Now the story gets weird: Fred Flowers writes The original story quoted the company's CTO, Craig Barth on the issue. Now, InfoWorld editor in chief Eric Knorr has still more to add. From Knorr's blog at InfoWorld.com: 'On Friday, Feb. 19, we discovered that one of our contributors, Randall C. Kennedy, had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network), in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics. ... There is no Craig Barth.' Knorr's post goes on to say that Kennedy has been fired from his blogging gig at InfoWorld over this 'serious breach of trust,' and that his blog will be removed."
Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
>And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it.
I doubt that. MS's Vista sales were hurt badly by its reputation. Most shops skipped over Vista completely. Apple got a little sales boost too.
>Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
Christ, what ever happened to basic responsibility? Or buy beware? How about reading reviews before buying something or returning the product if you dont like it? Is lawsuit now the default action?
The fraud was not in the claims about Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
from what it looks like. Rather, it was about the identity of the blogger. It looks like he was a paid blogger for InfoWorld and a Windows performance analyst at the same time, and wrote the Windows memory consumption post under a pseudonym without disclosing the relationship to InfoWorld. It doesn't mean the memory consumption article's contents are faked or wrong. Its conclusions are disputed, but that's a a separate issue. The issue is disclosure of its authorship.
Re:Reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'm sure Apple is a little worried considering Windows 7 is actually good. Now, it's still Windows but let's be honest, it's pretty good. Consider UNIX has been around for getting on 40 years meanwhile Windows is what, 15 years old? Given that I would say yeah it's starting to getting pretty decent.
Re:The fraud was not in the claims about Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The fraud was not in the claims about Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The fraud was not in the claims about Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he lied about his identity. He was just plain wrong about Win7. He's a liar and an idiot, but they're separate issues.
Fortunately, my user CSS puts a big red [IDIOT WARNING] after any link to InfoWorld, so I didn't make the mistake of clicking on it and giving them some ad revenue.
Re:Reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
Nope, it was how they did it.
Features that linux zealots always yell about, like proper admin/multiple user control, securing files and directories and so on.
Yep, not only did they rip off sudo (which would've been fine), they managed to screw it up.
It's a lot better than Linux's su and sudo alternatives.
I'm sure you'll tell me how...
With su you give full control over the root account,
Yep, just like UAC.
with sudo you need to write it every time you require root account.
WTF do you mean by "write it"? Did you mean, edit the sudoers file? Yeah, you could do it that way, I suppose. Or did you mean, enter your password? Nope, sudo will cache it for a certain length of time.
UAC is actually a lot better than what there is available for linux, in desktop use...
Yet you haven't explained how it's different than the above.
Win7 is more popular now because people have got used to these features.
Nope, it's because Microsoft finally got it to work, and polished performance to where Win7 is faster than XP, whereas Vista was slower than XP.
I never claimed, and I don't think anyone claimed, that all the design decisions in Vista were bad. No, the issue is that the Vista release, like most Microsoft products, was at best beta quality, more like alpha quality. So Vista was Microsoft's way of, yet again, using their consumers as beta-testers, while collecting some revenue to justify finishing the product and releasing it as Win7.
Re:The fraud was not in the claims about Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:4, Insightful)
What in the world are you doing wrong that you get UAC prompts when opening Word? I'd like to see example steps on how to make that happen.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
fact is linux fanbois have (rightly) bagged windows for a lack of user security for a long time, and when MS implemented it they bagged it like a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
vista was no where near a flop and not at all a bad OS. i've had much much much worse experiences with linux distros.
I think your just having to eat your words about win7, because it's a fucking good OS. it runs faster then vista or winxp, they've dropped the candy land fucked up theme and given it a slick interface.
Looks like karma (Score:2, Insightful)
And what about Ballmer/MS saying don't use linux because they violate 200 patents? All sorts of people have asked which patents, a simple question to answer, so if they are valid it can be fixed, yet from MS..crickets. One blog post versus the head guy of Microsoft spreading stories? How much have all the various Linux companies and Linux professionals all over the planet been hurt by his statements, and by MS actions over the years?
I'm not defending this blogger at all, far from it, that was a shitty thing to do, but let's put this whole thing into some perspective. MS has been the big bully for years and years and years, they got to where they are now by some pretty questionable behavior, behavior that has not ever stopped, despite even governments getting on their case about it.
We wouldn't even be reading about this blogger if these governments had done what needed doing years ago, bust that company up, shake them up hard so they stop being so "ethically challenged".
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
This was one of the issues, yes, but not the only one and not even the most important one for many users. Vista's key problem was lack of drivers for a lot of hardware and some of the drivers available for common parts were not all that stable initially even though they passed relevant certififcation. Second came performance especially on "vista capable" (or "vista ready", which ever was the lower designation) machines (many reported significant issues on better kit too, though this situation improved greatly with service pack 1). UAC was thrid on the average user's list of hates though it sounded worse as it was usually the straw that started the major rant "it asked me for confirmation X times before very slowly failing to work because of driver problems!".
UAC is not a bad idea, though it is not IMO particularly well implemented. They tried to so sudo but for the traditional Windows way of working (i.e. admin by default and adding blockers, where the sudo way starts unprivelaged). The result didn't fit as well as intended with Windows users processes and was sometimes overly naggy (three prompts for some file operations where sudo would need one escalation request) and just ended up being more OK buttons for clueless users to click, and to top it off it worked badly for people expecting a more linux/bsd/other way of doing thing - so essentually they failed to please either major group (i.e. neither those the feature was intended to protect nor those most likely to make a noise about such things were happy with it).
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously we have Mac fanboy's with mod points.
Using terms like "Mac fanboy's[sic]" is enough to be off topic. And it's not a joke when you next say, essentially, "but it's probably true".
Your mom's a whore. I'm joking, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. You're a PC wanker, and if you mod me down, I'll just blame it on other PC wankers.
See what I'm getting at?
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista was mostly looked badly because they introduced new security features.
I think a much bigger factor was that it was so long between XP and Vista, people had forgotten what XP was like at the start. When XP launched, it received many of the same complaints Vista received. It wasn't until a couple of service packs that people started to like XP. After a couple of service packs, Vista too was fine.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
sudo and the UAC are vastly different beasts.
You may want to read up on winlogon, credential providers and user tokens, particularly relative to the UAC.
The Vista and Windows 7 security model is vastly more sophisticated than out-of-the-box Linux implementations, and the UAC is related to that. Unlike su/sudo, the user does *not* transition to the administrative user, they switch between their administrative token, and the default neutered token, but in both cases other security policies can still be applied, but most importantly (especially where network security is concerned) *they still are themselves*. The network provider may or may not allow transparent use of the token across the network using the administrative token, depending on policies, but it *can*.
The knee-jerk anti-Microsoft crowd on here tends to discount the sophistication of the Windows security model, but the reality is that its two decades more modern and more capable, particularly in networked environments, than the typical Linux system.
That crowd could learn something by learning, in more detail, about the things they (incorrectly) discredit.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, not only did they rip off sudo (which would've been fine), they managed to screw it up.
First of all, Windows has had "sudo"-equivalent features for a long time-- since Windows 2000, I believe.
Secondly, how did they screw it up? It works fine for me.
No, the issue is that the Vista release, like most Microsoft products, was at best beta quality, more like alpha quality.
The problem was that the OS was release-quality, but the drivers from various third-parties was beta-quality for a good year after the OS was released. (And this despite over a year of technical preview releases... fucking lazy driver writers!)
Did Vista have bugs? Yah, it had a bug that slowed down file copies. But they were all fixed, and if you used Vista about a year after it came out it would be fine.
(With one disclaimer: Vista was never designed to run on Netbooks, which was a market Microsoft didn't anticipate while they were developing it.)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft decided to sue people for spreading false information about their products, slashdot would be really in trouble!
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
SELinux [nsa.gov] is enabled by default on Fedora. I wouldn't call UAC "vastly more sophisticated".
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More information (Score:2, Insightful)
He probably meant to post on a *site* where contributors know the difference between words like "sight" and "site".
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you know people that are getting UAC prompts all the time, you need to get with them and figure out exactly why. That shouldn't happen.
Re:Slashdot get trolled, news at 11 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
those who haven't turned off UAC get the prompts several times a day - and I'm talking just for basic things like web browsing with IE.
I have my UAC settings at maximum under Windows 7 and I don't see any UAC prompts for IE. I have also disabled downloading of ActiveX controls (signed and unsigned), so maybe that is the difference. The UACs might be when websites are trying to install controls.
The only time that I get UAC prompts are when I am installing software, changing settings (like allowing a program through my firewall), and running some games (mostly older ones - and even then you can often say "No" and they will still run).
The part that really annoys me is when I clean up my start menu. The multiple prompts for each file is a real pain. Oh, and the command line program "RunAs" no longer works properly. You run something as administrator but still get the "this program requires elevation" message - with no UAC to allow it to work. Running an entire cmd.exe window as administrator solves this.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, Windows has had "sudo"-equivalent features for a long time-- since Windows 2000, I believe.
Vista forced everyone to actually use them, or something similar.
Secondly, how did they screw it up? It works fine for me.
It's possible it's been fixed by now, both from Microsoft's side and from the developers' side.
I definitely remember getting five or six separate UAC prompts during the installation of a single piece of software.
The problem was that the OS was release-quality, but the drivers from various third-parties was beta-quality for a good year after the OS was released.
If you can do that, I can claim that Linux has excellent video and wireless support, it's just those lazy driver writers. If Linux gets blamed for these things, Windows does, too.
But it's also not the drivers that made it take far longer to boot than XP, while Win7 took less time than XP. Little, measurable performance hits like that is a big part of why I didn't upgrade.
Vista was never designed to run on Netbooks, which was a market Microsoft didn't anticipate while they were developing it.
Linux was never "designed" to run on Netbooks either, it's just flexible enough that it doesn't matter.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a real difference between Gutmann's early Vista analysis [auckland.ac.nz] and this smear campaign. Gutmann was trying to peer behind a veil of secrecy to find what Vistas content protection looked like and sure he missed the mark but it was an honest attempt to evaluate what the future held based on MS, ATI and other presentations, press releases and patents.
Whereas this guy is clearly a shill out to smear MS based on blatant fabrication.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:1, Insightful)
To be fair, that's because the early versions of OS X weren't really ready. They were dog slow, ugly, and rife with incompatibilities. Based on observations, Apple likes to release stuff when it's at about 85% readiness, so they can look like saviors when they make improvements to it later.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:1, Insightful)
Languages evolve, sorry.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
I definitely remember getting five or six separate UAC prompts during the installation of a single piece of software.
First of all, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's the fault of that installer. I'm not sure exactly what would cause that, but I'd wager that it could happen if the installer runs a bunch of different programs to take care of sub-tasks-- usually Windows handles this seamlessly, though, which means that it must be doing it in a funky way.
But it's also not the drivers that made it take far longer to boot than XP, while Win7 took less time than XP.
Who reboots their OS? My desktop is always on, and my laptop is always sleeping. I've always thought boot time was a stupid measure of... anything.
Linux was never "designed" to run on Netbooks either, it's just flexible enough that it doesn't matter.
So is Windows, what's your point?
Re:Yup... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's the fault of that installer. I'm not sure exactly what would cause that,
So you don't know, but you're sure it's not Microsoft? What kind of argument is that?
I'd wager that it could happen if the installer runs a bunch of different programs to take care of sub-tasks-- usually Windows handles this seamlessly, though, which means that it must be doing it in a funky way.
And how, exactly, could it be doing this in a way which would escape Windows' notice?
Now, this doesn't happen much anymore, but I'd bet Microsoft was the one patching it -- even if they had to resort to the same kind of brutal hacks they have in the past to ensure backwards compatibility.
Who reboots their OS?
I do, every kernel upgrade. I'm sure you do when Windows Update tells you to.
My desktop is always on, and my laptop is always sleeping.
The fact that my laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds means I will actually shut it down at night, rather than sleeping it. It's also useful when I dual-boot -- I boot Linux most of the time, so the fact that I can reboot into Windows to play some games in maybe one minute instead of ten is a definite plus.
Netbooks are also worth considering, here. If you've got a minimalistic UI which can save state easily -- like a web browser saving tabs (hint: Chrome OS) -- and you've got an OS that boots in seven seconds (and they're working on reducing that), why would you care about sleep? Hibernate is nice, but that kind of quick booting is going to be faster and lighter on disk usage.
I've always thought boot time was a stupid measure of... anything.
Boot time is the most obvious measure, because it's the one where I get a new Vista machine to work on, and it takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes to reboot, thus stretching maybe 20 minutes of Windows Updates and driver installs into an hour or more.
I suppose I could talk instead about how much it was thrashing the disk, but that experience (plus the UAC irritations, which wasn't constrained to that one program) is why I stayed away.
Contrast to Win7 -- boot time is fast, UAC is unobtrusive. I don't know what they changed, but it worked.
So is Windows, what's your point?
XP, apparently, not Vista.
Window 7/Vista Memory Managment Rots! (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, what a POS!
At some point, I am going to have to "upgrade" from XP to 7, and I am not looking forward to it. Superfetch is just not practical for coexistence heavy hitter video,/graphics/sound applications.
If it weren't for Rhino3d, and a handful of games, I'd dump Windows entirely.
Linux never uses a bit of VM unless you need it.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be foolish. Microsoft does NOT need to create more reasons for people to think of them as big bad bullies, whilst meanwhile transforming the discredited kook who criticized them into a victim and/or martyr in the eyes of (many of) the public and simultaneously directing more attention to his claims and lending them some apparent credibility that they don't otherwise have.
Even if you win the case quickly, you still lose.
The marketing department can handle this one just fine. I mean, the guy's already discredited, and they haven't even done anything yet. It's under control. No need to involve the legal department.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
They might work and look kind of like UAC, but they are not in the same league in terms of security. When you allow SUDO to cache credentials, any process running under your credentials can elevate itself to root the next time you use SUDO. This vulnerability does not exist with UAC.
Which is why you turn off caching of credentials if that bothers you. It's a security vs convenience issue, and for once Windows is on the "annoying but secure" side and common Linux configurations are on the "less annoying but less secure" side.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
What I forgot to say is that the difference is that "Sudo's behavior on that spectrum is configurable, while UAC's isn't." UAC forces you to the "ask every time end", which can be very annoying. The only times I've almost turned off UAC was when I was trying a bunch of configuration options which involved repeatedly elevating myself. A security system that makes users annoyed and persuades them to turn it off isn't so secure either.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:2, Insightful)
And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it. Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
And yet, this being Slashdot, if this was reversed and it was anti-Apple we would have been flooded with comments of telling Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer to stop making this stuff up... Fun the differences that the company makes.
Re:Window 7/Vista Memory Managment Rots! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 does use too much ram. (Score:5, Insightful)
As has been explained countless times, yes Windows 7 uses more memory BUT it uses most of it as disk cache. It's more like Linux now compared to older versions of Windows. Using otherwise unused memory for disk cache is a good thing and does not affect application performance or available memory negatively.
Re:Good for them.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am somewhat mystified how Mr. Kennedy thought that spreading FUD would actually help his career. Interesting tact..
It did, until those pesky things called "facts" got in the way.
Re:Not quite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of running specific processes as a more privileged user, it allows an Administrator to run processes as a LESS privileged user, with varying privilege levels.
That's not significantly different. On a Unix system, init is run as root, and it then spawns other processes as varying users, with varying privilege levels. The "sudo" part is remarkably similar on both systems -- you're at a lower privilege than the process that started you, and now you want a higher privilege, so you have to get permission from the user in some way, and a higher-privileged program (like sudo or the UAC window) is going to do that for you.
UAC also allows programs such as IE and Chrome to run at below-standard privilege levels ("protected mode" or "sandbox" mode),
Sudo (or just setuid programs) also allows this, albeit in a somewhat kludgier fashion -- Chrome does sandbox processes on Unix. As far as I can tell, it does so at least with chroot, then drop permissions. There's talk of SELinux support, also.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:3, Insightful)
funny that is exactly what happened between OS X releases 10.2, 10.3 10.4, and 10.5 though the amount of speed increase was slightly less.
The difference being that OS X's performance was so dismally bad even on blazingly fast hardware it didn't have anywhere to go but up.
The same was not true of Vista. On the day it was released, you could buy a machine for under a grand that would run it well - something you could most certainly not say about OS X.
Re:Eh wouldn't surprise me... (Score:5, Insightful)