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Microsoft's Vision For Future Operating Systems
Bender writes: "The Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research has a fascinating article that details what sorts of things they believe may be important in Operating Systems of the 21st century."
"The Network Is The Computer"?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
the most important thing will be that the OS isn't allowed to be used to bash micrsoft or any of its products.
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
Sorry, I can't keep that off my mind.
Yes and no. I am hoping that MS will finaly relized that they sell to TWO markets, the technologicaly literate, and the unwashed masses. If they do realize that I think we'll see a two teired OS, one which is idiot proof, and then a deeper set of functions and controls which allow the more adept to exercise a greater degree of control.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Worldwide scalability - Every town has a garbage dump and it gets bigger everytime you dump on it
Fault-tolerance - We've tolerated enough faults
Self-tuning - Everyone needs an MTU of 1500 on dialup
Self-configuration - Icons for every desktop
Security [sic] - we'll try it just once
Resource controls - we've reduced the number of easter eggs in this one
figure out how much money the customer is going to make in their lifetime and have them send it to us. . . annually.
KFG
The article actually says that one of the goals is "Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated."
Translated: "Microsoft will take over every machine you put your filthy little hands on. Nyah!"
And it gets worse... "The administrator inserts a Millennium installation DVD disk into one of the machines and the system propagates across the network. After evaluating the network topology and hardware resources, Millennium might suggest that one of the more powerful machines (a "server") be moved to a different network location for best performance."
Translated: "Windows Millenium will infest your entire network whether you like it or not. Then, it will hunt out the Linux machines and demand that it be installed on those as well."
Now if those aren't goals of a company that plans on taking over the universe, I don't know what are....
This is quite an old article. It originally appeared in the "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VI)".3 40106abs.htm
RE: http://www.computer.org/proceedings/hotos/7834/78
If you would like to find out more articles related to this one check out this page at ResearchIndex:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/21325.html
Cheers,
-ben
That article is so old the project is over already. Still interesting to think about, though.
... so that individual computers, file systems, and networks become unimportant to most computations in the same way that processor registers, disk sectors, and physical pages are today.
... MS must get sick and tired of "borg" references, but this appears a tad too close to the mark.
... (simple if everyone was using a microsoft computer and held a microsoft job).
so they want to turn their entire user-base into an application? (bear with me)
it seems the only way you could have this level of hands-off "use-ability" would be to have complete control of all aspects of the hardware and enviroments your software is running under
this seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. if we move to a level of abstraction devoid of details, how can we possibly innovate and improve?
_f
Anyone taken a close look at that address, in light of recent behavior by MS?
Microsoft [Unit]
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA
("My way or the highway"-reminiscent)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
There are some sound ideas here for future directions in Linux development - and they've already been thought up for you here.
One big problem Linux development will face is the notion that devs are playing catch-up with MS with projects like Mono. (We blast Microsoft for its claim that it is an innovator, but has there been much innovation in Linux kernel devlelopment lately?) Instead of trying to build a Windows clone, we should build up a system that addresses computing in a way that MS system's dont.
There are some good ideas here, but they seem to disregard the problem of latency. The speed of light, unfortunately, isn't likely to be overcome any time soon, and people notice when there is a 50ms delay every time they press a key, move their mouse, etc.
Some applications can be distributed, sure, but there will always be a need for interactive applications to run locally, on local data.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Self configuring computers, self tuning, etc.? I won't allow that to happen. Me and Belinda (my sweet computer) have a very close relationship and won't let anything get between us, especially an OS. Together we enjoyed the good times and lived through the bad times. We're united and communication is an important part of our relationship.
This new generation of OS's have no idea what love means, they should be ashamed of themselves.
Let me guess. Microsoft OS running Microsoft software, that interacts with the Microsoft Network, and gets you news from MSNBC, and is wireless, so they can monitor everything you're doing (anonymously, of course, oh of course, yes, indeedy). Oooh, that was tricky.
AC's cheerfully ignored
We are microsoft.
Encryption is useless.
Your intelectual property will added to our own.
Prepare to be assimilated.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
It seems odd that they haven't noticed the trend for computing devices to change size, shape, and function. Postulating a single universal "Millenium" system seems exactly backward to me. I'd rather see the research done more on the Jini model, where many disparate devices intercommunicate. Surely that is more open to scaling and fault tolerance than the idea of one monolithic OS to meet all needs.
Microsoft appears to be becoming like the old Soviet union, where everyone has to buy in to the official ideology rather than venture out in new directions.
OS research has been pursueing these goals for years. There's nothing there that's really very interesting or new. It sounds like they've just browsed the web for a little while and summarized what the various projects are striving for.
One project that's come pretty far is Mosix (I think they're planning to integrate bits into Linux 2.5, but I'm not sure). Then of course there's Plan 9 and Inferno from the fine folks who brought you Unix. And lets not forget Tanenbaum's Amoeba.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Manage memory
Manage CPU time (schedule processes)
Manage access to hardware
And that's what an operating system *kernel* does.
Operating systems do not need to:
provide compilers, web browsers, colossal text editors (MS Word and emacs included)
inform users of the *really* important reasons they need to upgrade *now*
do GUI shit.
If you use a computer, you want it to do what you want. Most of the time, you want it to help you manage information. Most users don't even know that their computer *has* an operating system. Most users know that it's a really useful typewriter with an 'undo' facility.
What OS does your fridge run? your car? your microwave oven? your alarm system?
Those are all von Neumann machines, running operating systems.
A computer in a home/business environment should be useful, usable and reliable.
Get this. It's important. The people who buy computers couldn't give a flying fuck about the OS. Some want 'applications'. Those people are called 'IT managers'. Most want information. They are called 'people'.
I do *not* want my dishwasher to stop with a message of "Oops in module handle_detergent. Please run ksymoops and report to lkml". I don't want my television to go blue with advice to 'set CRASHDEBUG' for some purpose.
If you know that you are running an operating system, you are either an OS hacker, or the OS hackers have failed to protect you from their work.
From the "what would such a system be like" section:
Web Service
A little-known web site suddenly achieves popularity, perhaps with a link from Cool Site of the DaySM or a mention in a prominent news story. Word of mouth spreads, and soon the web site?s servers are overwhelmed. Or rather, would have been overwhelmed except that heuristics in the Millennium system had noticed the new link and already started replicating the site for increased availability. Monitored traffic increases confirm the situation and soon the site?s data has been "pre-cached" across the Internet. As the site?s usage drops over the following weeks, Millennium reallocates resources to meet new demands.
I just can't seem to understand WHY they didn't mention the slashdot effect in this paper!! I can remember CSOTD back in 94-95, but I must admit that I haven't looked at it in years - do they still get a lot of traffic?
Logically there should be only one system,
I wonder if this phrase will have a different meaning if the MS monopoly continues for the next few years?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know a fellow who used to work in MS Research, and he keeps in touch with his old buddies. He has been talking about this project for some time now, and assures me that the intent is not to have a single monolithic system, but rather to have many disparate devices appear as a monolithic system.
Differences of hardware cease to matter to the user. Need more power? Buy another box and plug it into the network; you're done. Hire another employee? Plug a relatively wampy box in; if they need to do anything heavy, their code can snag some cycles from the guy who's at lunch, or the big box o' processors in the basement. No problem.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Somehow I think that some of the nerds over at Microsoft's R&D have been watching Serial Experiements: Lain a bit too much. ;-)
Lain: Navi, connect to the Wired.
(scratch that...)
Joe User: PC, connect to the MS.
Why bother.
Software automatically propagates across the network, installing itself on new machines as neccesary. Nice idea for making sure patches and updates are applied.
But can we say "designed from the ground up to propagate malicious worms", kids? I knew we could. You think NIMBA was bad, this system'll make that look like a walk in the park on a sunny day.
And sort of hint on an idea that I mention in this post regarding P2P not too long ago.
Does Microsoft possess even a single creative/original soul in their entire organization?
Why bother.
I really do hope that people read the entire paper before posting their thoughts about it. I hate Microsoft with a passion -- my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there." -- but the points they've raised here are valid ones and deserve analysis. The topic is an important one and I hope people will not malign it because of the source, namely, Microsoft.
That said, I'll comment on the paper itself. They have a point, somewhat understated, which is basically, "Yeah, this may be crazy, but it's worth looking into, isn't it?" One obvious response is that it sure seems to be What Microsoft Wants in terms of a homogenized global system that Microsoft controls. Though such a thing is never specifically said, it is called the "Millennium" system, and the ME in Windows ME stands for "Millennium Edition" (side note, it just occurred to me that "Windows ME" could be said with the same tone, inflection, and connotation as "Fuck me!" as an expression of dismay -- "Go Windows yourself!").
Well, who knows, but their idea of a transparent large-scale network that is self-managing as they've described is an interesting one, and there are some things that would be appropriate in such a system. That said, here's several reasons why I think such a system will not happen in the near future:
1. Too much resistance. This *is* a crazy idea, and even if it could be made to work, most people are used to the idea of "my" computer, "my" data, and everything happening physically *here*, inside this little box under my desk. This will take a long time to get over. Perhaps a gentle transition would help, with more and more things gradually shifting to the Big Network.
2. Games. Games require zero latency - nobody enjoys playing Quake with network lag, let alone system lag. All computations for games and other time-sensitive applications would have to be done pretty much within the physical computer you are using, otherwise the latencies are too great and the game would be unplayable and chunky. Imagine if your 50ms ping time also figured into the video processing!
3. Security. It seems silly to assume people would *want* to walk up to a random machine somewhere and have all their documents streamed to it over the Big Network. For one thing, who knows whether the terminal is secure, or if it's got secret programs installed in it to capture your keystrokes? Using a publicly accessible terminal to get to your private data is a bad idea. Also, critical machines (computers that run public infrastructure, banking systems, military systems, etc.) should obviously not be any part of this kind of transparent system, for the obvious security reasons.
4. Where we work. Telecommuting is, for all the cheerleading, not very common at all. When people do regular business-like work (i.e. office workers writing reports, having meetings, doing whatever) they will want to have everything in the same place, and do it in big chunks at a time. Face-to-face communication with people is also very important to the way business is usually done, though this may change as people get more used to the idea of telecommunicating for business. Being able to "walk up to a computer anywhere" and do work is pointless, because the vast majority of people are not going to WANT to be walking through the mall, window shopping, and decide they need to do some work, so go sit down at a public terminal and start doing work. (Nevermind the security issues, mentioned above.)
5. Monoculture. If we think a Windows monoculture is bad now (and we do -- at least, I do), imagine what happens when every computer in the world is now running this system! On the other hand, if such a system was designed so that anyone could implement their own version of it, then you avoid some monoculture issues, but because you have to have interoperability between the systems, you essentially end up with what we have now -- the Internet, made of multiple differing systems that can still communicate using a common protocol, except the protocol would extend beyond data transfer and into things like distributed processing.
If you've managed to read this far, congratulations! I can recommend a decent novel that incidentally covers this topic (it is not the main focus of the plot, but does figure into it): Permutation City, by Greg Egan. A very good novel with lots of interesting ideas, but it does feature a worldwide network in which you can basically bid on processing power to draw from the global network, so your programs might be running anywhere in the world, but are running securely so that a computer doesn't really know what it's doing, it just executes commands. It doesn't go into much technical detail (like how they manage to have computers execute encrypted code without decrypting it), but it's relevant nonetheless.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Well, they did the same thing with Smalltalk. It took M$FT at least 20 years to come up with a somewhat stable version. How long do you think it would take them to rip-off ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H develop a Plan 9-like OS?
(BTW, the do give credit to Inferno, an embedded little brother of Plan 9.)
- Seamless distribution. The system should determine where computations execute or data resides, moving them dynamically as necessary.
- Worldwide scalability. Logically there should be only one system, although at any one time it may be partitioned into many pieces.
- Fault-tolerance. The system should transparently handle failures or removal of machines, network links, and other resources without loss of data or functionality.
- Self-tuning. The system should be able to reason about its computations and resources, allocating, replicating, and moving computations and data to optimize its own performance, resource usage, and fault-tolerance.
- Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated.
- Security. Although a single system image is presented, data and computations may be in many different trust domains, with different rights and capabilities available to different security principals.
- Resource controls. Both providers and consumers may explicitly manage the use of resources belonging to different trust domains. For instance, while some people might be content to allow their data and computations to use any resources available anywhere, some companies might choose, for instance, not to store or compute their year-end financial statement on their competitor?s machines.
Yep, this'll be fun. Where do I buy the popcorn?What!? You thought I could come up with a witty way to make fun of that statement?! I'm not a magician!
Leave it to gorillas to invent a super-gorilla, when what nature (the client) wanted was a human.
Emulation of the past in bigger and better methods is not the shining future I had hoped, for, folks. After all, I don't really want a computer, I want machinery that does my work and makes my life more comfortable, preferably without my having to train or tell it. I don't want robot slaves that act like human, I want a thermostat. I want an operating ystem that helps my computers be devices that help me in my life, not the other way around.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Yes, it's truly, truly fascinating, because it's very interesting from a theorical point of view, and yet so characteristic of the somewhat unrealistic way Microsoft seems to think when they design things.
/. editors, it's really thought-provoking.
- They seem to completely overlook practical problems such driver issues, concentrating on application development. While driver issues are a good chunk of what made NT (and other Windows flavours) so crashy.
- They also completely overlook interoperability problems. The article is placed in an imaginary world where every computer on the Net runs MS Millenium. That's just so, so typical. And the worst is, I'm about certain those guys didn't think wrong when writing that. It's just the way they seem to think (we get to do whatever we see fit, and fsck the competitors).
- More interestingly, they also overlook the problem of revenue sources. I mean, if the OS is 'everywhere', how does MS earns money off it? The underlying assumption that computer users owe money to Microsoft no matter how, kind of disturbs me. Though I admit it could be me overreacting, too, with them being the Microsoft we all know and love and everything.
- And, of course, they once again assume that there are exactly two types of developpers and nothing else: Microsoft developpers, who get to write system-level things, and the rest of the world, who get to write applications using the tools provided by MS (note how the 'high-level' languages they mention are all available as MS products -- completely overlooking such wonderful abstraction tools as the Python programming language, among others).
Yes, this is truly fascinating, because, on a theorical point of view, they got it right, and yet their vision is certainly not something anyone is their right mind would like to see becoming real. Thanks for posting that article,
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Now that's what I would call a monopoly!
While I realize they never say one OS, I am sure
that is what they mean. Could this be used in
court?
JUDGE: How would you justify that M$ soul reason
for operation is to drive your business
out of operation.
plaintiff: Well there website says: "there should
be only one system." and I am pretty sure they do not mean mine.
JUDGE: And what is your goal?
plaintiff: To drive M$ out of business
JUDGE: So its ok for you but not for them?
plaintiff: Yea, but I have no chance in hell.
M$: What makes the PLANTIF so sure we can?
BALIF: Your honor your shipment of MS WORLD
DOMINATION boxs have been delivered.
I am a republican not by choice, but rather by lack there of.
A little-known web site suddenly achieves popularity, perhaps with a link from Cool Site of the DaySM
Hello Microsoft. Welcome to the year 2001. Those type of sites died back in 1997. CSotD was the first and best, but the copy cats ruined the genre. I even had a web site selected back in 1995 for CSotD. Really ticked off my ISP (tyrell.net - gone now).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Its quite rare for the people at Microsoft Research to come up with insightful papers such as this. The authors do address a number of issues on what challenges next generation OSs have to face.
The authors however have conveniently omitted the question of whether the future OSs should be cross-compatible. Since so much fuss is being made about having a distributed OS across heterogeneous networks and heterogeneous machines, wouldn't it be worth an effort to also try incorporating some kind of support for other OSs. For instance, Millennium could implement support for ext2fs by itself to make Linux partitions visible either on the same machine, or across a network. The linux kernel team has already done its bit about compatibility with co-existing operating systems.
What is of need is to have some set of common services that all operating system developers, irrespective of what gods they worship, can pledge to provide.
Is this too much to ask from the M$ guys?
The main linux innovation is that it lets me work the way I want to work, not the way someone else thinks I should work. Ok, so that's really a UNIX thing, but it is by far the feature I value most in Linux. And I have my computer set up to do quite a bit of the stuff I want to do, although I still would like to SNMP manage my apartment's lights and appliances...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let's see
the most important thing when it comes to new OS's will be ease of use. for all the idiots out there. thats for it to be succesful anyways, not neccesarily good.
;-) is to make more web-services and make them with better web standards. That way everyone has access to them regardless of OS. Also, they should be spread out over many companies.
In response to a lengthy descrption of a drastically different computing paradigm, jimarndt responds that it should be 'easy to use'.
I'll bet jimarndt didn't read the article at all.
What Microsoft Research is sugesting is a network computing model unlike anything I've previously heard of.
Read this (from the article):
A user purchases and installs a new personal computer or workstation. The hardware vendor has done a good job with the cables and connectors, so plugging the system together is easy. The user plugs the power and network cables into the wall and flips the power switch. From the moment that a boot ROM, or perhaps a boot loader on disk, downloads code from the network, the new machine joins the Millennium system. The user has full access to Millennium with no human-managed configuration activities required. Millennium evaluates the hardware resources of the new computing device that it has acquired and starts to shift computations and data in response.
Wow! I'm all for a web-services model. I like the idea of having the line between an application and a really usefull website be blurred. But this is sugesting something much much more! Who controls the "Millennium" system? Obviously, they've got a certain company in mind.
Think about privacy on a system like this!
Think about the potential security risk (sure, security is on their list of goals, but that doesn't really make the problem go away!) on a system like this! In the "A new network" example, the reseachers say "The administrator inserts a Millennium installation DVD disk into one of the machines and the system propagates across the network." Imagine that I insert that dvd, only I'm not the administrator and the dvd isn't the system update. Think it won't happen? As we saw during CodeRed the windows update servers aren't even properly protected! Hackers would have a field day if the Milenium system were ever made a reality.
I think a much better paradigm for the "new millenium" (how long does it stay new?
Microsoft wants the end-users of the world to put all their eggs in one basket and I don't think thats a good idea.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
I've seen it Blue-Screen.
I've seen it blue-screen straight out of the box from Dell and Gateway.
I've seen Windows 2000 not only blue-screen, but I've seen them reboot themselves when Windows Media Player or Quicktime start to play video clips.
I've seen Windows 2000 blue-screen when a USB keyboard is plugged into them.
It's better than NT or 9x, but it still sucks.
A little-known web site suddenly achieves popularity, perhaps with a link from Cool Site of the DaySM or a mention in a prominent news story. Word of mouth spreads, and soon the web site's servers are overwhelmed. Or rather, would have been overwhelmed except that heuristics in the Millennium system had noticed the new link and already started replicating the site for increased availability. Monitored traffic increases confirm the situation and soon the site's data has been "pre-cached" across the Internet. As the site's usage drops over the following weeks, Millennium reallocates resources to meet new demands.
It's a trick! They're out to undermine the very /. effect on which we thrive!
-- MarkusQ
Unfortunately coming from Microsoft most /.'ers will prefer to scream and whine about it, attempt to twist it to demonstrate their own particular MS issue or make more jokes that are usually weak at best.
Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting. Instead most are just blinded by the name MS and have once again congregated for the ritual stoning.
Anyway, /.-correctness aside there are a couple of points that the paper glosses over (amongst many) that I find particularly interesting:
The first is the concept of stateless storage - files are there as long as you need them then eventually wither away when no longer referenced or required. This seems to me a particularly utopian view as I'm regularly realizing that I'm either missing a note I want from long ago (too aggressive purging) or that I've got so much material on something that it's becoming burdensome. I entirely fail to imagine how this sort of winnowing could be automated. Agents to help me organize, tag, and prioritize yes, but without my interaction it strikes me as likely reliable as a computer consistently recognizing pr0n images from others.
The next is the internal intelligence of a system. This has been an area of much research for many years. The current-state information should be almost all available from within the system and with a few supplied metrics (costs, resources, constraints, priorities) "intelligent" decisions should be possible to make. Surprisingly there seems to be little of this actually available on the market already, at least not much available for general server/desktop management (that I've heard of.)
Finally the lack of references to directory services and the role PKI/encryption would play in this future scenario is interesting. Clearly these will be key elements in the ubiquitous seamless environment the authors are talking about yet their mention is notably absent. Is this a reflection of MS's appreciation of these as areas of strategic importance in which is hasn't yet a firm foundation and doesn't wish to draw attention to or is it something that the authors think will be so established by the time they're envisioning explicit reference isn't necessary? Either way it's an interesting omission.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
No they just want to make sure New York is correct. Seeing there is no WTC there is no need to put the WTC is the game. I guess they could but it would not be 100% correct.
Qua
Come on guys, you've all seen Star Trek. Do you think the Enterprises computer system is much different? You don't see anyone in there with a PC.
These guys were really looking forward to the future. And I don't think the standard MS bashing applies. Not everyone who works in Redmond behaves like MS's business unit.
I'm sure for the most part, the coders are great people. Its the business men upstairs who we should really have beef with.
Seriously folks, can't you see that indicriminate MS hatred is d no different from other forms of bigotry like racism and homophobia? MS does put out some quality products. I'm told their games group is very good (Age of Empires) and their input devices are top notch.
Captain_Frisk... wishing everyone would think before flaming.
First, let me say that it's disappointing to see so many people nitpick and try to come up with reasons that this won't work. I'll try to point out some reasonable goals that do not have to be dependant on one proprietary software vendor - but would benefit from open protocols.
The abstraction of data and computational location is cool. They're not saying that we should blindly start distributing our data across network devices without any attention to latency, reliability of links, security, etc. Ever heard of 'quality of service'? Or authentication? Or authorization? Or resource limits? In the case of computation, sometimes you can break a program up into blocks that take a long time to execute; if it takes much longer to execute the code than it does to move the code across the network to a faster/less loaded CPU, then it makes sense to do it. On the other hand, if the computation will take only a little time, or if the result is required ASAP, you wouldn't want to move it. If it's unknown, let the user pick a default or let the system make a good guess based on what the code looks like. And, they're not saying that we should send our data to MS to be worked on, or even someone down the block - maybe you have some of your own computers laying around that don't get used much. The goal here is to turn your private LAN into a cluster, that only acts as a cluster when it makes sense to do so. In the case of storage distribution, they're not saying that others on the net should be able to use your storage space without your permission or that you should have to store anything on anyone elses storage space. Let's first consider three cases; a swap file, a master thesis document, and an mp3 file. You would want to keep your swap file on your local drive; the swap manager would request this type of low latency storage from the file system. You'd want your thesis document copied to every available storage device that you could (maybe encrypted and signed to ensure that it's secure); you'd tell your word processor to save it with this quality of service. You wouldn't likely care to encrypt your mp3 files, but you don't need to keep them on your drive when there's lots of space available elsewhere on the network (think next generation storage area network). You wouldn't want to store the mp3 too far from your network, but as long as it came back at more than the bit rate that the song plays at, you likely wouldn't care too much (unless your friends often download mp3s from you). If some device on the network runs out of space, it could shuffle stuff around. It might make sense to elect a storage manager system on your network, replicate your file allocation table/inode table/whatever around to each box on the network, so that if the distributed file system server (really just something that keeps track of locations) goes down, something else could come up in it's place. I mean, I havn't really thought about this for too long - I'm sure that there'd be some problems but nothing that can't be fixed during the design stage.
Self tuning is also cool. It'd be great for all of those sites that get slashdotted. It makes sense to do expensive things on a website (server side) to provide more features when there's light load; when there's heavy load, it makes better sense to hold off on those expensive features and concentrate on the content instead. This might mean auto-tuning apache's caching and stuff, or automatically re-indexing a database to better serve the kind of requests that are popular. Some of this means lots of application programmer work - like what features to sacrifice under heavy load, but others like automatically indexing can be done with varying degrees of administration.
It's not all evil, and some of it is really cool. The idea is that we should be ABLE to make the most use of the resources available, and not be limited by things like physical location.
Funny... I think we can use anti borg tactics against this thing. Think TNG: data hacked into the collective and started handing out orders. think Voyager, endgame, janeway poisened herself and let herself be assimilated. Why not do that??? and finally, this simple app deployed @ multiple places will destroy a lot of shit. main(){ fork(); }
Sig you!
Just today I noticed an old Byte magazine. I've thrown most of them out, but I especially try to keep technical magazines that attempt to predict the future.
This one has articles on Cairo and Copeland, so I'm glad I kept it.
But it's at work now, and I'm not. I didn't realize when I noticed the magazine today under my box of microwave popcorn that re-reading the article would be timely until seeing this thread.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
..why Microsoft's Acquisitions department is making technical decisions about the future of Operating Systems?
Actually, I think that's a pretty impressive statement coming out of Microsoft.
Don't forget the BSD sockets, they are pretty much airtight...
There is absolutely nothing being said in this paper that hasn't already been discussed countless times in universities and research labs around the country. This paper is little more than a vision statement along the lines of the phrase that Microsoft has used for much of its lifespan: "a computer on every desk and in every home". It doesn't say anything that people haven't already thought of.
What's more relevant and interesting about this paper is that there are probably no organizations on the planet capable of developing a system like this on their own. It's going to have to be collaborative. Despite the me-tooism of Microsoft researchers in acknowledging the directions being taken by others, the Microsoft coders in the trenches won't be capable of developing something like this to be stable, reliable, and secure.
This may mean it won't happen in the way envisioned in this paper. Microsoft will have to wait until someone comes along and figures out how to actually do something new, and viable - not just talk about it - just as Tim Berners Lee et al created the web. Then they'll try to embrace and extend it, if they can.
The most complete realization of the goals of the MS white paper, currently in existence, is Mozart.
Seastead this.
You're right there is a great deal of similarity. When I read their goals I immideately thought of Plan9. Many of the things they mention exist in Unix today. Plan9 takes them to another level. (But I guess it's true what they say: it's not invented until Microsoft invents it).
We haven't had any news about Plan9 in quite a while. Could someone in the know shed some light as to what's happening with it now?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I think you miss my point. There are basically OS-less systems - WebTV, MS Bob. Why haven't people flocked to them?
you get a washing machine. They are both von Neumann architecure machines.
A von Neumann architecture is a CPU connected up to memory and IO, IIRC. (There are non-von Neumann computers.) A washing machine isn't a von Neumann architecture machine.
They don't want a prolonged diatribe about how "It wouldn't have broken if the QuuxBar 9.3.4 patch had been installed..."
And I don't want a prolonged diatribe about how I should have checked the oil in my car and replaced it. That does not negate my responsibility to do so, nor does it suddenly create a solution that doesn't need me to check my oil.
I hate Microsoft with a passion -- my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there."
Umm... ya, you got psychological problems. Wishing physical harm on someone just because he's ruthless and successful in his business practice? I think you should follow this link.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
.technomancer
.technomancer
Abstraction is great. For me to poop on.
Has anyone been following the trends of viruses over the past decade? As computers become more user-friendly, we allow more dumb people onto the internet. Each new, more abstract version of windows brings teeming waves of imbeciles onto the internet's sandy shore. Beached, they lay idle in the bile-soaked sand, stinking up the coast. We can clean up the mess by requiring that people take a simple test before they are allowed to use thier computers. It could be part of the liscense agreement. We could call it the Garbage Prohibited Liscense.
The dumb people can have a seperate dumb internet using a proprietary protocol developed by Micrsoft.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
So the evil goons at the evil company are trying to extend their evil methods to innocent computers.
But wait--are they? The question that comes to mind for me is WHY are they experimenting here? On the one hand, there's the standard MS approach--anything to make a buck, and gain market share. The Borg approach, in other words: Rewrite the definition of the OS or the internet, until you own it all.
But then you see this statement:
"We do not harbor the conceit that it will be possible to be fully successful in such an endeavor, but we do feel that the time is right for radical experimentation."
The first part sounds like honest programmers, and the second part sounds like geeks. Could it be that (gasp!) MS has some good people working for them? Some people who really _do_ want to push the envelope a bit, regardless of the corporation's intent?
At any rate, I find it interesting and slightly ironic that this is coming from the company who first made >90% of the population aware of (or care about) what their OS actually was.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
In many ways, this is Yet Another Thin Client Model (YATCM). Five years from now, we'll move away from it again, and then five years after that we'll be back to the thin client du jour/.
I can see it now: "Microsoft: The fattest thin client ever created!"
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Shouldn't your main goals be security and stablity, especially with stuff like they are proposing here? Security is next to last and stability is not even listed. Instead the first goal is easy distribution.
This reminds me of MS Press' book Code Complete. All the way through it they harp about stability and design and useablity, then they go off and release some of the buggiest code this side of my first ZX81 programs.
MS is doomed folks.
Distributed computing? Automatically deciding if a program should run locally or on a remote machine? Fault-tolerance? Dynamic load-balancing? Resource controls? Near-infinite scalability?
Sorry Microsoft, but you're the one playing catch-up here. Linux already has, working, today, 98% of your vision.
It's called MOSIX.
Frankly it's the most jaw-dropping bit of Linux development I've ever seen. On a local network, create your own supercomputer out of idle workstations. Across the internet - well, .NET should go hang its head in shame. As a programmer, all you have to do is write ordinary, threaded applications, and magically benefit from the processing power of tens, hundreds, even thousands of machines. MOSIX does all the hard stuff.
Truly an amazing piece of work.
my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there."
good freaking god... you are such a god damned loser for even saying that in jest.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
As for the automated network administration thing, AppleTalk networks did that from day one. That approach didn't scale (too much broadcasting), and the security was lousy (a more fundamental problem with plug-in and go).
I think it's unlikely that Microsoft will do better with Millenium than an open source operating system that already exists: Plan9 from Bell Labs. Plan9 already supports location independence, aggressive abstraction, introspection, and all the other stuff that is in Microsoft's vision (Inferno, which the paper cites, is somewhat based on Plan9). The limitations Plan9 has (and it has many) are, I think, intrinsic to this vision, and I doubt traditional operating system designers are equipped to deal with it--otherwise, they would have already done so over the last few decades. And nothing in Microsoft's paper suggests that Microsoft is straying outside this well-grazed field.
Altogether, it looks like Microsoft is going to do what they always do: they are 10-20 years behind the curve, and they are working on another unimaginative, outdated operating system.
So if the computer crashes, taking everything you had open with it, it's okay as long as it reboots itself instead of making you do it yourself?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Does Microsoft possess even a single creative/original soul in their entire organization?
There's Dave Cutler, who wrote WNT and later disciplined his wayward child back into Win2k. There's also Charles Simonyi who has some really interesting ideas. The fact that Bill "BASIC" Gates now has Simonyi's job title is, however, not encouraging. (and the "hot news" on that page used to mention something about IP going into a production mode, now it does not, that is also not encouraging).
So they do have some real innovators, but rest assured, they do deal with them as soon as they find them.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If you look at what has been happening in distributed systems and OS research over the last few decades, I think you'll agree that there isn't really innovation in any of Windows, Linux, C#, or Java. But what Linux and Java have going for them is that the implement tried-and-true approaches quite well. Windows, on the other hand, is much more of a mess, and C# isn't really here yet.
Treat the enitirety of the WWW and computing at large as a single database. Then, normalize it.
There, you have the future of computing.
How long will it take? Depends on how many glasses of wine the engineers the world over drink between now and then.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Wishing physical harm on someone just because he's ruthless and successful in his business practice?"
He is not just ruthless he is also a criminal. His organization is criminal, he has perjured himself, his underlings have perjured themselves and tampered with evidence. He and his cohorts have also intimidated witnesses in a federal trial. All of these acts are criminal and by all rights he should be jail right now.
Please do not try to minimize the criminal acts commited by MS and their top brass bringing their success up. Of course they are successful they resorted to crimes when everybody else was playing within the bounds of the law. It's an unfair advantage and one that our legal system ought to rectify.
BTW. Although it's not a crime I have not read one interview or statement from any MS executive which did not contain at least one lie. These people are pathological liars.
Is it right to with criminals death? Well maybe not but I do wish they would serve their time in jail.
War is necrophilia.
- Seamless distribution. The entire application server itself, as well as applications written within it, can be distributed automatically. Very cool.
- Worldwide scalability. Leveraging Java application servers' focus on scalability, this thing scales to the biggest hardware and to clusters
- Fault-tolerance. The clustering abilities provide high availability to JBoss (something JBoss lacked in pre-v3.0 releases).
- Self-tuning. Hmmm....no quick answer here. It can all be configured by way of JMX (Java Management eXtensions). I assume that, in the future, people will add self-tuning features.
- Self-configuration. Same as self-tuning.
- Security. Java has a very nicely developed security model already. JBoss uses this pervasively, as does any Java application server.
- Resource controls. Gee, this sounds to me like declaritive security. That, again, is offered by J2EE.
This sounds to me like MS is actually playing catch-up with open source software.For those of you unfamiliar with JBoss, check it out. It's really nice. For those of you who doubt Java as a platform for application development, go talk to IBM or BEA. They both have tremendous businesses built upon Java application server technology. It's fast, stable, robust, flexible, scalable, and is buzzword-compliant with about anything else I can think of. Besides, I can write applications far quicker with Java than I can with other platforms.
--Be human.
Yes, I agree: Linda is a great system for distributed computation. I'm not so sure about JavaSpaces and Jini--more isn't necessarily better.
So should we expect these features to be incorporated no sooner than Windows 3000 Professional?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"enfoncer des portes ouvertes"
First.. these are not all 'microsofts' ideas.. they are very common things that, if most of us think about it, make sense.
As for the distributed web-site thing... sounds a lot like freenet, actually.. information is cached near where it is requested, so others in the area can obtain the information faster, and it becomes more widespread.
How is Mac OS X in anyway "two-tiered"? Apple has hidden a majority of the "expert" functions so deep in the directory tree it's almost impossible to find them from the GUI. At least Windows XP has a couple of different ways to do different tasks: the hand-holding "idiot" way (click on the taskpane to delete a file), and the faster way (delete the file from the command line using tab completion).
Apparently you work in a part of the world I don't. I haven't seen Plan 9 on a single development system, server, or even when I was in college.
I suspect the guys who wrote this paper might actually have a sense of humor. "automatically assimilated" indeed.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Moderation Totals: Thoughtless=2, Tasteless=3, Total=-5.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
>most people are used to the idea of "my" computer, "my" data, and everything happening physically
;-)
>*here*, inside this little box under my desk. This will take a long time to get over.
Well, get over it. Now!
Where I work we run Unix of various flavours. We run as dataless clients over NFS. This means that my home directory is on the server, and Unix is on the machines local disk. Latency is a non issue- ping times of about 1ms; throughput isn't quite so high though, as we only use a 10 megabit lan, so if we load across the network it isn't as fast as loading off a local disk, but there's not a lot in it. (Extra 2 minutes on a 150 megabyte link that takes 6 minutes is the worst case; we often use local diskspace for that, but everything else there's no point).
It works pretty well. And if I have a problem with my workstation I get up, sit down at a different workstation, and log in there, same account, same files.
It also means that my home directory is backed up each and every night by the backup fairy. (We have only 1 system admin for 80-100 people!)
As to security, it's not a real issue. You either access your account from a company machine, which is as secure as anything, or from home, where you keep your system safe (hopefully) there.
Games? Games don't require zero latency! If they did, noone would be able to play them because zero latency doesn't exist.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"This sounds alot like JINI. There are some differences, but for the most part, it's JINI from a Microsoft angle. Interesting to read but largely irrelevant until they can make money on it.
No kidding. I've been saying that ever since I got a PC. Ever used an Amiga? The pointer *never* froze in place or even jumped unless the machine locked hard.
I live 4 blocks from the trade center and knew people who died there. After personally witnessing this horrific tragedy, I would like it if you would not make fun of situation or attribute to MS flight simulator. It was terrible for the fire fighters and the people I saw jumping out of the buildings. Thanks
http://saveie6.com/
Looks like you're a prophet--Windows XP Collectible Watch
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I agree with everything you say - but I still don't wish the man harm. Especially the kind of harm that would be suffered by victims of the WTC attack.
I do wish he would be brought to justice, and kept in a nice secure cell where he can't harm society anymore.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Under the psycho marketroid bable there are some interesting ideas, but all of them have mature and functional counterparts in the Linux/Unix world. DEC had many of the work sharing concepts built into their clusters back in the late 80s. X and Kerberos have all of the app sharing and security goodies without all of the privacy invasion. Any boob could have picked all of the interesting promises from these projects and put together that strange article.
Instead of trying to build a Windows clone, we should build up a system that addresses computing in a way that MS system's dont. I'm sorry, that's already been done. MS dont do much more than prommise to deliver what others already do and then treat their users like mushrooms.
MS will never be able to deliver on these ideas using their current market model. The "assimilation" of new machines would be a nightmare. Imagine not being able to tell the BSA thugs what computers had the new OS, or relying on their print out to know. "Got a cert for that copy of Solitare? Oh, I'm sorry, but your global network is now in default."
Someone complained that the article was old. They obviously overlooked the copyright 2001 notice at the bottom of the article. I wonder if MS considers linking a violation of their IP.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You leave out one very important point that is missed. Computers that attempt to manage themselves generally fuck it up VERY badly. Hell, I can't even get PlugNPray to work most of the time. All it takes is one error condition that the designer didn't account for to kill the whole house of cards. Error conditions are finite in a design spec, but infinite in real life.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It takes a big man to admit that he can't hold his booze. Too bad the moderators didn't catch it!