A Clouded Vision

A couple of days ago a friend of mine asked me, how it's possible that his installation of Windows Vista feels so smooth, while the system requirements are so much higher. At the time I didn't know a good answer but then I stumbled upon a preview of the Microsoft TechNet Magazine. This preview explains quite a few interesting details about the Vista Kernel and it's improvements compared to XP.

A brief summary of things:

• Much better thread Scheduling. In XP in some situations (multi-tasking) it was common for threads to be cut off before their actual time was up. When a thread was given a certain amount of cpu cycles, it couldn't even use all the cycles because of other threads interrupting it. Vista takes care of this problem by simply excluding interrupt time from the current thread's runtime. In other words; fair scheduling.
• Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. This service makes sure that applications using it's API get the necessary cpu time they need to do their things. It was created to help multimedia applications like Windows Media Player get enough cycles to continue playing media without clitches. This could happen for example when your virusscanner goes scanning in the middle of a webcast.
• I/O Priority. This is about the same thing as thread priority only applied to I/O. Before this, every application that accessed your harddrive for example was given the same priority. You probably know the situation when you're viewing a movie and your virusscanner (again!) goes scanning. With both applications getting the same priority accessing the harddrive this is bound to cause lag in your video playback. Vista now introduces priorities for I/O to make sure your virusscanner can't interrupt your media playback and stuff.

This was only a short summary, you can read the rest here.

On security?!?

Yes it sounds weird doesn't it. All things considered, when you think security, the first word to come to you won't really be Microsoft. We all know the bashing on either Internet Explorer or their operating systems.

What most people do not know, and that's their right, is that Microsoft makes much more software than just that. Apart from their development tools, which quite frankly are really good, they make server software too. We know Windows Server and such are more secure than the standard operating systems. Now next to that, there is SQL Server. Recent studies have revealed that Microsoft SQL Server, as of version 7 (before 2000!) has always been more secure than it's greatest competitor Oracle.

I'm into server software and more specifically SQL Server software, and this amazed me. I always thought of Oracle as the Fort Knox of SQL, although obviously I and many others have been wrong. Now I know what database server I'll continue to use in the future

Good literature.