Vista Shutdown

As the proud and fascinated owner of a new Dell Vista Laptop I can honestly say that Vista is "interesting."

Here's a story about the shutdown button that makes Vista more interesting.

My favorite part of the article is the notes at the bottom about edits made to the article:

edits: fixed link, removed some strong language, fixed math

It would be an interesting project to improve the build system for a project the size of Vista. I suspect a little Web 2.0 mashup action with a database and some heavily linked HTML and comments interleaved with the code would probably make things a lot better.

Cross disciplinary management is always tricky. In games, the disciplines range from sound effects, music, art, animation, effects, programming, level design, story and some kind of "big picture" control. It's possible Microsoft doesn't see the Vista shutdown button as cross-disciplinary - after all, it's all code. But I would say that Kernel programmers are totally different from UI programmers and Tablet PC UI programmers are going to have some fairly specialized concerns as well, and that techniques used in games to get such disparate functions as level design and sound effects working together could probably be used to make the Vista build process a lot better.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.