With Windows 7 released and currently making its way to shelves in time for the holiday season, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade our copy of the official Windows System Recovery Discs for compatibility with Windows 7.

If you’re like most PC users, you probably got Windows 7 with a new PC or laptop. And if you’re like 99% of the population, you get your new machines from one of the major manufacturers. Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo; who all have one thing in common: they don’t give you a real Windows 7 installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a “recovery disc” (that’s if you’re lucky – otherwise you’ll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that.

It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.

Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows 7 DVD’s “recovery center,” as we’ve come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows 7, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it’s damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows’ users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own. You can make your own copy from Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, but now you have an easier alternative.

NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of the Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a 143 MiB download (165 MiB for the 64-bit version), and in the standard ISO format, ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. Don’t wait until your PC crashes to download a copy! Download and burn your recovery disc today, so that when the time comes, you’ll be ready!

What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

Download Links

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-Bit (x86) Edition

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-Bit (x64) Edition

Please note that the above links point to .torrent files. Torrent files are like a shortcut, they tell a download manager on your PC where to download the actual files from. Downloading large & important system files with torrents is highly recommended since torrents are protected against corrupt downloads and tend to be faster when well-shared.

(All torrents are currently being seeded by 100mpbs servers, they should be blazing fast).

You can download the Windows Vista recovery discs from here.

Instructions

1. Download the appropriate .torrent file from above that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you have installed.
2. Download and run µTorrent.
3. Open the .torrent file you downloaded with µTorrent. (File -> Add Torrent)
4. Select where you want µTorrent to save the 7 Recovery Disc.
5. Wait for it to download.
6. Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
7. When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.

Support

Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.

To open JavaApplicationStub, you need to install Rosetta. Would you like to install it now?

Personally, I try my best to avoid legacy Mac OS apps and haven’t found the need to install Rosetta on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as of yet. Whether you have need of Rosetta for your other applications or not, there’s no reason you should be running your Java-based applications through the Rosetta environment — they’ll run just fine on native Intel Java on OS X… with just a little bit of a prod in the right direction.

Java applications are CPU agnostic (hence the “write once, run everywhere” Java motto). The Java applets you download and use can theoretically be run on any PC machine that supports Java; be it Intel, PPC, ARM, SPARC, or more. The native Java virtual machine will translate the “Java bytecode” into the equivalent machine assembly that your PC uses and understands, and therefore, Java code written for legacy Mac OS should run just fine on Snow Leopard

If there’s no problem with running older Java applications on Snow Leopard, why am I seeing this dialog? you ask. Well, the problem isn’t with the Java application itself, rather it’s an issue with the Java loader, which as a tiny native Mac OS application that simply launches the Java virtual machine and points it to the JAR file that contains the Java applet in question. If you have an old Mac OS application, chances are, it’s shipping with a PPC version of the Java Stub Loader, and that’s what’s triggering Rosetta. The good news is, it’s easy to fix, since the latest Intel-based Java stub loader on Snow Leopard can run any of your old JAR files easy as pie.

1. Open Finder, and browse (command+shift+G) to

   /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/

2. Copy the file “JavaApplicationStub” to the clipboard (command+C)
3. Now browse to the folder that contains the Java application in question.
4. Right-click the Java application, and select “Show Package Contents” to view the actual app files in the OS X app bundle.
5. Open the “Contents” subfolder, and then the “MacOS” folder.
6. Paste the “JavaStubLoader” file from the keyboard to here, and accept the overwrite prompt. You may need to enter your password when prompted as necessary.
7. You’re done!

The reply turned out to be longer than I’d originally intended, so here it is as its own post.

I’ll try to be as objective as possible in this reply:

The most important thing for frustrated end users to keep in mind is that Mozilla/Firefox cannot be held responsible for cases where incorrectly written plugins and/or extensions cause Firefox to abuse system memory – that’s the trade-off between empowering developers and keeping the code squeaky clean.

Most of the cases reported are indeed caused by one or more extensions or plugins gone awry, doing something they shouldn’t be doing, or something they don’t know how to do properly. Some of the most popular plugins for Firefox are notorious for their memory leaks; but few users realize just how dangerous they can be, and that the Firefox devs cannot really do anything about it.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that Firefox has some memory leaks in the codebase itself. They’re clearly not easily reproducible and they don’t happen very readily nor often enough because the developers have clearly spared no effort in their attempts to address this problem for once and for all. But they’re there, nevertheless.

No matter how you look at it, the fact remains that under certain circumstances, doing certain stuff on certain machines in certain ways for certain people, Firefox still leaks memory. A lot. On Mac, Windows, and Linux. Yes, on clean installs too.

Now as a systems developer (Mac, Windows, and Linux w/ their respective native APIs; embedded systems; .NET and more with years of experience), I must say that of all the bugs and problems I’ve ever encountered, there is nothing that “cannot be fixed.” To say that this behavior is out of Firefox’s hands because it’s not their code that’s causing the problem is simply not true.

I’ve experienced memory leaks like this (and worse) in my own code in the past, largely due to stupid mistakes and silly oversights. It takes extreme persistency to make memory leaks go away – a willingness to spend 24 hours on-end & non-stop crawling through code, memory dumps, and stack traces to try and find out where things are going wrong. It requires remote debugging on allegedly-affected machines. It requires reading through dozens to hundreds of sometimes clueless users describing in the most general of terms what they were doing when things went wrong. In short, it requires a lot of effort and very little recognition and a hell of a lot of hair-pulling.

But it can be done.

C++ is an incredibly powerful language. If you know the code you’re developing and the systems you’re writing it for, there’s nothing you cannot fix. Dynamic memory allocation is the biggest gift/curse in the world, but in C and C++ if you can allocate something that means you can free it. Even if you don’t have a mechanism to find out where it is and how it got there. But you just have to be cunning enough to figure out how to track them down and set them free, taking care to know when and where to do so safely…. and you have to be familiar with every single routine and how they work; which is obviously extremely difficult with codebases as large and complicated as Firefox’s.

There are even workarounds for the memory leaks (assuming they can be isolated) if the developers aren’t willing or capable of doing the aforementioned. If you’re dealing with leaky libraries that you can’t fix, in the very worst-case scenarios you can hook into them at runtime, access the functions you need, reserve the memory required, get the job done, copy only what you need, then free it right back. All of it. You can have helper threads or processes handle this stuff then wipe them and their memory spaces clean when they’re done to complete the memory insulation.

There’s a lot of stuff that can be done, and none of them are easy. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and developers and evangelists denying a problem exists isn’t the way to go about addressing the matter at hand.

At the end of the day, Firefox is a great browser and any complaints about its performance and its shortcomings are only out of a sense that it can do better – that it has to in order to remain at the top of its game in a cutthroat market of only the most intense of competition.

In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states

[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.

But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.

The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?

Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ’spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).

With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.

Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?

Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:

ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.

Now for the good stuff: the number one request we’ve had was to eliminate the Microsoft .NET Framework as a requirement for using ToolTipFixer. As a matter of productivity and preference, Microsoft’s .NET Framework has a special place in our hearts, but we realize that many people would prefer something a bit… lighter and as such ToolTipFixer 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch in C++ with no dependencies – not even the MSVC++ runtime libraries.

The second oft-made request was improvements to ToolTipFixer’s memory usage. This particular component is tightly-tied to the development platform of choice, and with the switch over to unmanaged C++, it’s become possible to further-tune the amount of memory that TTF uses and bring it down as much as possible, something that’s not in the developers’ hands when using the .NET Framework – which, with its automated garbage cleanup, makes memory usage highly variable at best.

TTF 2 has drastically improved memory management – it’ll take so little memory, you won’t even know it’s there (from 0.3 to 1.5 MiB in our extended testing, depending on OS and platform).

Then there are those 64-bit Windows users, and more of them than ever before. Just because you have 4+ GiB of RAM in that machine of yours doesn’t mean you can’t get rid of this bug too – ToolTipFixer 2.0 has full support for Windows XP/Vista x64!

And to save the best for last, ToolTipFixer can now be run in what we call “standalone mode.” During setup, you’ll have the option of either installing TTF the traditional way – as a system application sitting silently and invisibly in the background – or as a standalone module that you run only when you need it. Some people experience the tooltip corruption problem less often than others, and if it doesn’t bother you incessantly then you can choose to only run TTF when you need it!

Download: ToolTipFixer 2.0

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.

A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…

If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!

But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?

The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.

-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment

Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."

Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.

It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.

But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.

The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.

But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).

Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.

Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).

And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.

For a device that’s supposed to do Firefox, Skype and not much more, an underpowered PC with a touchscreen isn’t going to accomplish much. For one thing, Firefox is a huge performance drain and a memory hog to boot that underpowered hardware (even on-par with an Eee) simply won’t support and for another, there’s no way to get PC hardware down to the sub-$200 price range.

What TechCrunch wants – whether they know it or not – is an oversized PDA, not an underpowered PC. And it’s not just a question of semantics, it’s a question of foundations and principles – and it makes a huge difference in terms of end-user experience and the bottom line.

For the functionality that TechCrunch is trying to pack into this opensource, mass-market web gadget, there’s nothing that wouldn’t work better, faster, and cheaper on specialized hardware rather than on generic PC components.

While the world is now in the midst of a touch-screen craze, it’s important to keep in mind when and where that works. For a web browser and a VoIP client, a touchscreen doesn’t provide much added value, but it does add quite a hefty amount to the bottom line. A couple of buttons at the top/side of the device that provide basic functionality (Go/Dial, Stop/End) would certainly suffice for most purposes. A thin slide-out keyboard is far-cheaper and more user-friendly than an onscreen keyboard, and would make things like entering site addresses and using email clients and Google Docs quite enjoyable.

A PDA-style ARM processor, running software compiled for the ARM platform could provide a more satisfactory end-user experience with regards to performance and can come in smaller form-factors and/or as embedded systems.

It’s important to bear in mind the difference between consumer electronics and a computer. Whereas Asus had to keep their Eee x86 so that it can run whatever a a PC user could demand from it, a web browsing tablet only needs to run what the manufacturer intends it to. In hardware design, there’s a constant compromise between flexibility and complexity which is directly tied to price, size, and ease-of-use.

A tablet designed to surf the web and run Skype doesn’t need to do anything else; but it shouldn’t do anything else if price and size are of any concern. It’s easy to get caught up imagining a device that can do anything and everything; but you can only go so far before things begin to spiral out of control.

With this update the installation process has been simplified somewhat, in particular the need modify HTTPD.INI to set the server variables has been eliminated – you just need to install ISAPI_Rewrite 3, configure php.ini to load up request_uri.inc, and you’re set.

Request_URI for Windows 1.1 retains backwards compatibility with ISAPI_Rewrite 2.x for those of you who’d rather not switch to the new (and much-improved) version 3.x.

Download Request_URI for IIS 1.1

The full instructions for installing and configuring Request_URI for Windows can be found at the original posting. Please post any support questions in the forums.

NeoSmart Technologies is not affiliated with Helicon software in any way.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

Obviously not all of Windows Sentinel’s (only) three thousand subscribers are included in the numbers above (it’s highly unlikely that even 80% of the 3000 subscribers are using hardware that only comes from the OEM with Windows Vista installed). And of the percentage that are using late-model hardware, a hefty percentage dual-boot.

We don’t have any numbers as far as the number of dual-booters out there, but they’re certainly not few enough to be discounted. Keeping that in mind, it’s rather unprofessional of InfoWorld to claim that 35% of all Vista users will downgrade to Windows XP. Obviously big numbers make for better headlines, but this is the kind of stuff that can damage stocks and ruin jobs – you don’t want that on your conscious, at least, not without good reason.

Not that we’re suffering from any delusions or hallucinations with regards to Windows Vista’s relatively shoddy performance and stability, but you’ll agree that it’s a rather far cry to go from “a lot of people have reservations about upgrading to Windows Vista” to “a lot of people will take the time and effort to remove Vista from a PC and put Windows XP in its stead;” especially keeping in mind that Vista’s been out for two years now and there’s an (unfortunately) increasingly-large number of Vista-only products out there on the market.

More data from InfoWorld and the Windows Sentinel service would certainly be most-welcome in giving a clearer picture of what the actual numbers are and where end-users stand in this OS mess.

Richard Stallman: legendary founder of the Free Software Foundation, purveyor of the GPL, defender of open source. And – as of today – expert FUD manipulator.

Obviously someone was seriously pissed off at the abundance of (largely positive) press coverage Bill Gates has been receiving as he stepped down from his final roles at Microsoft.. and it appears Mr. Stallman just couldn’t bear to let the man he hates more than any other step down without getting that last word in.

In an article by Richard Stallman published on BBC today, Stallman pulled back no punches bashing not only Bill Gates, Microsoft, and makers of proprietary software everywhere but also took the incredibly cheap shot of accusing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of working to ruin the very countries they’re trying to help:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Never mind the fact that those are unsubstantiated rumors following money trails several-hundred pockets deep – what does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have to do with Free Software? Is Stallman so desperate to make Mr. Gates out to be the bad guy that he’d sink this low?

Stallman, one of first people to accuse people of spreading FUD to further their opinions, doesn’t stop there:

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, "If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!"

Here Stallman is referring to Gates’ now-famous letter asking people illegally copying, distributing, and using Altair Basic to stop. Stallman somehow neglects to mention that – regardless of whether morally acceptable or not – Microsoft had the legal right to demand payment in exchange for their software. Ignore for a second whether or not Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the right or in the wrong to ask for payment in exchange for their work – is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?

It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying. Gates chose to ask for money, users (as Richard Stallman himself has advocated on many occasions in the past) should be looking for an alternative if they don’t want to front the cash.

Who Richard Stallman thinks he’s kidding, we don’t know. But he’s obviously crossed that line that shouldn’t be crossed; apparently desperate enough to stop Microsoft the minute he senses an opening… even if it means spreading FUD, making pointless accusations, and generally talking nonsense to get his point across. This isn’t any way for a respected figure in the open source community to act, especially not when it comes to someone who has – whether Stallman likes it or not – contributed as much to the tech community as Bill Gates has.

Ever since Steve Jobs first unveiled the next version of OS X, dubbed “Snow Leopard,” the internet has been abuzz with excitement and wondering about the supposed “evolutionary” qualities of OS X 10.6. One of the most-hyped improvements is the promised revamp of the SMP capabilities of OS X, with a “breakthrough” in SMP performance.

The codename for the technology behind the SMP improvements in OS X Snow Leopard has been named “Grand Central,” which Apple describes best:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Our guess is that these SMP “breakthroughs” are going to be delivered in two blows:

1. Improvements to the OS X kernel intended to boost multi-threading & multi-tasking performance and better-distribute the loads across multiple CPU cores more intelligently.
2. Provide an SDK (perhaps as improvements to XCode) that allows developers to more-easily write multi-threaded code, handle forking, and provide load-balancing features on a per-core basis.

The first feature is what’s exciting – we believe there’s a good chance Apple will be using some form of FreeBSD’s ULE scheduler or the other in OS X.

There isn’t much info available on what scheduler(s) OS X is currently using as of 10.5 (the only question we could find on the topic remains unanswered). But OS X has its roots firmly planted in the *nix world, and it’s possible to make some educated guesses on the topic. The XNU Kernel that OS X uses is a mesh of the Mach Kernel and large portions of the FreeBSD project, and OS X uses the Mach kernel’s scheduler – or at least it did back when OS X was first launched.

The FreeBSD project has long been working on alternative scheduler intended to replace the default and aging 4BSD scheduler: the ULE scheduler. ULE is now scheduled to become the default scheduler in the upcoming FreeBSD 7.1 release. ULE has shown significant improvements in multi-core environments, and was designed from the ground up to provide increased SMP scalability. Most importantly is ULE’s overhauled support for per-processor queuing of tasks and the ability to set CPU affinity per-processor-per-thread.

If Apple were to implement a form of the ULE scheduler in OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard would be a formidable OS indeed. Using ULE guarantees huge performance benefits for multi-threaded applications, and would help address the second point listed above: the SMT affinity options provided in ULE would make creating an SDK intended to allow developers to use multiple cores efficiently and evenly quite easy. OS X has always been close to the FreeBSD project, and something like this is a natural fit for an OS looking for improvements to SMP/SMT performance.

Of course any time Apple offers a feature, it has a twist of its own. In this case, it’s OpenCL – a technology Apple says will allow developers to use the GPU as a number-crunching processor right from the usual code without much effort. This lies squarely in ULE’s playing field, since the ULE scheduler was designed with full support for load-balancing and threading across processors of varying performance, clock speeds, and fortés – which isn’t something that other schedulers can do, and would make OpenCL simply a matter of interfacing with the ULE scheduler and add the GPU to the list of CPU cores available for the ULE thread scheduler to take advantage of.

The bottom line is, the history of OS X and the XNU Kernel, the features promised in Snow Leopard, and the design and architecture of the ULE scheduler all point to a high likelihood of Apple using a redesigned thread scheduler that is either an implementation of the ULE scheduler or at least based around it in OS X 10.6. And if this is the case, OS X 10.6 will be one heck of a powerhorse.

Further Reading

• The ULE Thread Scheduer
• Introduction to ULE
• Early benchmarks of the ULE scheduler
• Architecture of the XNU kernel
• Advanced Synchronization in OS X

Whether or not MinWin is the very same kernel that went into Vista or not is officially unknown at the moment; but what we do know is that Shipping Seven is either one huge fake, or else that the Windows core programmers at Microsoft are so stupid that they don’t know the first thing about coding, kernels, operating systems and compilers.

The post at Shipping Seven is littered from beginning to end with fallacies, lies, and incorrect deductions that anyone with even the most basic coding skills would know better than to ever post, especially not when attempting to pass it off as the work of some of the more talented coders out there.

Here are some of the more-glaring factual errors in the post that completely strip Shipping Seven of any authenticity or authority it may have on the topic of Windows 7:

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

Correction: OS X is powered by a rewrite of the XNU kernel which is a modified version of the Mach kernel which, in turn, is a complete rewrite of the original BSD kernel. And, of course, Ubuntu isn’t an OS in and of itself, rather it’s just a distribution of Linux.

While it can be argued that not every developer at Microsoft is expected to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of other operating systems, no one in their right mind would believe that the Windows kernel programmers don’t even know what kernels their strongest competitors are currently using.

We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything ‘componentizable’ – So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008).

….

You already have MinWin – It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose – you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don’t know what the hell you’d do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.

Assuming you can get past the way that the post was written (with references like “using the command line” which indicate a general lack of knowledge about computers in general; treating the command line as if it were a “god mode” that can be used to do just about anything), there’s still the matter of factual inaccuracies – and inconsistencies in the article itself.

You can’t change/modify/revert pre-build settings by running commands in the command line. Components that are integrated at compile time simply cannot be removed by running a bunch of commands afterwards – especially not from within the resulting OS itself.

Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it. As a matter of fact, anyone who’s built anything at all should know this – the same rules apply to any other program as well. For example, you can’t remove PHP support from Apache if you’ve compiled mod_php directly into the binaries.

Shipping Seven is a big, fat fraud. It’s written by someone with only the most basic knowledge of computers, zero knowledge of coding concepts, and absolutely no experience with kernels and operating systems. Shipping Seven is most likely written by the equivalent of script kiddy, eagerly awaiting the first leaked builds of Windows 7 to appease an inner itch – most likely all the while lamenting his lack of involvement in the Longhorn beta. It isn’t worth the time it takes to read, and definitely doesn’t deserve even the questionable authority it now has on the topic.

The entire 8.x line has been of sub-par quality to date (8.3 and 8.4 in particular, which seem to crash randomly on a large percentage of Vista machines), hopefully the 8.5 release can provide a much-needed boost in terms of quality and stability.

It’s obviously too early to tell if the 8.5 releases addresses these issues, which are not listed in the release notes, but it’s possible that some of the causes of the problem have been resolved as a result of one or more of the bugfixes in this version.

The problem with Express Gate isn’t that it’s Linux nor that it’s there – it’s the rather more-mysterious question of why it’s there in the first place. If ASUS had thought to make use of this Linux distribution to provide data recovery & diagnostics services, offer advanced BIOS configuration and updating options, or one of the infinite other creative ideas that one can manage with a light and fully-configurable OS that ships embedded with the motherboard, perhaps then we could see a use for it.

Instead, ASUS has opted to ship Express Gate with a Firefox-based web-browser and Skype (out of all things). Again, it’s not a matter of having something against either Firefox or Skype; but just the general lack of context for their being there. These days, a web browser is a means to an end. You don’t use it to browse the web, you use it to interact with the web. A web browser on a Live CD-like Linux installation isn’t as useful nor as productive as the web browser sitting on the desktop of your main OS, be it Windows or Linux.

ASUS’s major selling point is that Splashtop takes 5-seconds to load at most. If you stop and think about, it’s only impressive because it’s being taken out of context. 5 seconds is fast, but just how often do you need quick access to Skype and your computer isn’t already on? Most of us turn our PCs on and off once a day at most – and there are many that prefer to hibernate, standby, or just leave it on indefinitely.

While a “5-second desktop environment” is a highly-desirable feature, a “5-second basic desktop environment without the programs, applications and documents you need” isn’t.

At the end of the day, ASUS has an idea that has a lot of potential but isn’t being directed correctly. That spare desktop has a lot of room for usefulness and productivity, but a primitive web-surfing environment just isn’t one of them. Until Express Gate features a more-compelling feature set, it’s just another one of those PR initiatives. By “more-compelling” we mean “more exclusive” with applications and products that just won’t work as well on your usual OS (like the BIOS management and system recovery options we listed above), otherwise there isn’t any incentive to forgo the extra 10 seconds it takes to get into your real OS.

Express Gate was originally used as a way to get people to spend the extra cash for the higher-level motherboards costing a couple of hundred bucks extra, and now it’s being used to get people to choose ASUS over similarly-featured contenders. That wouldn’t normally be a problem – after all, extra features is always a great reason to choose one board over another – except in this case, it’s just fluff.

All that being said, it certainly is great to see that Linux has finally reached a level of prevalence where major motherboard manufacturers will consider making it a part and parcel of every board they sell – a kind of perverse play on all the anti-trust violations Microsoft has been accused of by convincing OEMs to ship all PCs with Windows from the get-go. And it’s important not to forget the role ASUS has played in bringing Linux to the masses in the past year – from the brilliantly-viral Eee to Express Gate, Asus has definitely done a lion’s share of work in making Linux as common-place as the PC itself. Hopefully future revisions of Express Gate can find a better use for Splashtop Linux and warrant a kinder review.