Autor: Chad Turek (turek_at_aa.washington.edu)
Data: Tue 28 Mar 1995 - 03:59:09 MET DST
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Chad Turek
turek_at_aa.washington.edu
University of Washington
dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Seattle, WA
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 27 MAR 95 20:17:56 GMT
From: NB-DEN <newsbytes_at_clarinet.com>
Newgroups: clari.nb.windows, clari.nb.top
Subject: ****Magazine Calls Windows 95 "Flawed" 03/27/95
SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1995 MAR 27 (NB) -- A weekly
computer publication says it has found Windows 95, Microsoft
Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) next generation combination user interface
and operating system, "flawed" to the point it will be of use only
to home users.
According to Nicholas Petreley, executive editor of
reviews at InfoWorld, the long-awaited and several-times-delayed
Windows 95 has such severe problems that its functionality is
limited for business use. The InfoWorld editor said the problem is
that Windows 95 runs out of system resources when running
multi-threaded 32-bit applications.
If the magazine is correct, that could be a serious
obstacle to widespread corporate adoption of the program, which is
now scheduled to launch in August 1995, since the ability to run
32-bit applications is touted as one of its major advantages.
In an interview with Newsbytes Petreley called Windows 95 "a
disaster" if it ships in its current form. "I fear that unless
Microsoft goes back to the drawing board on this operating system,
only light home users will get anything out of it," writes Petreley
in this week's issue of the publication.
The problem, according to the editor, is that Windows 95 is a
32-bit wraparound on top of Windows 3.1., so Microsoft is running
into a lot of the limitations of Windows 3.1 due to the company's
desire to make Windows 95 backwards-compatible. "They managed to
move some of the information out of the (graphics) GDI heap into the
32-bit address base but they haven't really done it successfully
with the user heap, so they are keeping this thing called the
Windows class, which is really the basic building block of all
Windows objects and windows. That information is still being kept
in the 64K user heap in conventional memory."
Petreley told Newsbytes the result of that architecture is that
when you place a folder-oriented multi-threaded desktop on top of
it and want to open a number of different folders, you fill up that
relatively small user heap very rapidly. "I ran out of resources
just running Microsoft Word and the Microsoft Network at the same
time," he told Newsbytes. Petreley said he was running Windows 95 on
a Pentium-based PC with 32 megabytes (MB) of memory.
Petreley said Microsoft hand-delivered a fix to InfoWorld that moved
the Windows class out of the user heap and into the 32-bit address
space. "But it breaks things left and right, including 32-bit
applications. Microsoft Network crashes and Word for Windows
crashes," he said.
The Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary Second Edition defines the
heap as "a portion of memory reserved for a program to use for the
temporary storage of data structures whose existence or size cannot
be determined until the program is running. The program can request
free memory from the heap to hold such elements, use it as
necessary, and later free the memory."
A call to Microsoft in an attempt get that company's comment on this
story had not been returned by press deadline.
(Jim Mallory/19950327/Press contact: Microsoft, 206-882-8080;
Infoworld, 415-572-7341)
To archiwum zostało wygenerowane przez hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed 19 May 2004 - 15:50:22 MET DST