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Declawing Windows: Impossible?
hyrdra writes: "This story on CNN seems to indicate the intentions of the nine remaining states in the ongoing anti-trust case against Microsoft: to produce a stripped down version of Windows that will allow 3rd party vendors to insert components such as browsers, media players, and IM clients. While this may not be news, Microsoft's defense is. Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player. Removing them would result in a slower, much-less user friendly Windows that would be a support nightmare."
Guys,
We understand that you do not like Microsoft or any of their products. You do not have to keep filling the daily "Anti Microsoft Story" quota to prove this to us.
Stop embrassasing yourselves and start reporting on ideas and events that would actually be considered news by the most of us. We all know Windows in modular and Microsoft is full of it (just look at embedded Windows XP) - but it would be a support nightmare.
Thanks,
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
I doubt Windows is not modular (at least a little bit). They are using the microkernel concept since WinNT (a very small kernel and "servers" for the more advanced features) and dynamic libraries for most of the code (I think).
Maybe they can arguee they cannot strip some stuff because of dependencies. I am not a Windows expert, but it seems they won't go too far away with those claims.
But it is always nice to hear from M$ they don't know how to build a operating system =)
If they can't put it out the door without bunding parts of IE and Media Player or whatever, then just don't put them on the program menus, don't put them on the desktop, and don't make them the default file handlers. What's so hard about that?
It's a piece of cake compromise, and I sincerely doubt it's anybody's goal here to remove every bit of IE's code from Windows. If MS wants to use the IE code to display the user's desktop, or to show files in Windows Explorer, fine. Correct me if I'm wrong (always a given on Slashdot, people will even correct you if you're right) but I think the goal of the suit is to stop the anticompetitive measures, not remove certain lines of source code. Just start with the Start Menu, and go from there.
What's your damage, Heather?
Now forgive me if my understanding of what Microsoft are saying is incorrect. Let me start with some assertions.
So what is the prime difficulty of doing a piecewise removal of the core applications (the EXE's) and the libraries (DLLs) that support those applications alone?
Of course you will not be able to remove the core dll's that may contain the IE control, but other applications depnd on that, but you still can't kick up IE and maintain your cookies, URLs and so on.
The end result is what is required. The users get a system that they have to go through a second step to get a browser, IM client, or anything else installed, thereby giving the user a choice.
I would expect that an addition to the 'click here to install the Microsoft Application' that Windows would have, there would have to be a 'view Non-Microsoft alternatives' that would have to be at that decision point.
So their argument appears to be that, if we try to enforce the law, they'll make their "stripped" Operating System such a joke (it costs $20, but there's no GUI) as to be useless, de facto forcing everybody to buy the full version.
This isn't a troll or a flame...I've supported Windows for a living in the past. It's ALREADY a support nightmare. Any indication by MS that they're "going to make it worse" in a stripped down version of Windows is a serious threat... Imagine if your already sky-high Windows support costs went up 40% overnight...
The best thing that could happen to the ulcers of IT people would be for Windows (and Microsoft itself) to go the way of the Do-Do bird.
Who did what now?
http://www.98lite.net/ieradicator.html
Taken from that site:
"
IEradicator is tiny, script that uses the Windows setup engine to surgically remove Internet Explorer versions 3 through 6.0 from Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000(sr1).
If you are one of the 70+% for which IE is the browser that floats your boat you can reinstall the version you prefer. If not, then you can bask in the inner glow of knowing you just secured your PC from all known and unknown, past and future, IE security bugs while claiming back 30+MB of closet space. Isn't it nice to have the choice?
The removal process is elegant with all COM servers politely being asked to de-register themselves from the system registry using their inbuilt deinstallation routines before being eliminated from the hard disk. IEradicator then pulls out the cleaning gear and gives the registry a good polish before returning control back to you. The MS HTML Engine (shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll) is left on the machine to provide needed functionality for other applications that render HMTL (e.g. Outlook Express) or that launch a mini-browsing window (e.g. Winamp's Mini Browser, Netmeeting's Online Directory).
We will re-release a version that removes the shell integration like IEradicator used to do shortly. People complained the old IEradicator went to far, now people are complaining the NEW IEradicator is not severe enough...so be it, two versions it will be. If you are hard-core, you can rid yourself of IE altogether using the new 98lite Professional."
My brother used it on some windows boxes and it worked great.
For anyone wondering, "why windows?" Audio.
MSN Messenger ships with WIndows XP and likes bothering you to register a passport account. This is a pain in the ass, and it doesn't appear in the add/remove programs list. Luckily if you edit the sysoc.inf files you can find the msmsgs line and remove the 'hidden' option from it. Then you CAN remove it through add/remove programs. It seems to me that Microsoft is being intentionally misleading about what parts of their operating system can be safely removed and which can't.
If it's discovered that they've lied in court I think the company should be dissolved for a period of time not less than what an individual caught lying in court would be sentenced to. It's time that corporations enjoyed some of the responsibilities of being considered 'individuals' as well as the rights and priveleges.
Disk space and bloat...
.NET, or have more hard disk space taken up by MSN Messenger which I dont use...
.DLL failures, etc...
.NET Messenger (MSN Messenger), we cannot work out any way to remove this, and every day, we find some shmuck trying to use it. Why is it that we are unable to remove it? Is it a crucial part of the NT5 kernel??? Would XP cease to work without it??? NO! It is just bloat and pointless waste of space, and time.
If I have another browser installed, why the heck would I want an extra 50+MB of space taken up on IE??
If I install another IM system, I dont want the OS nagging me to get
If I install another Media Player, I dont want to have to have yet more hard disk space wasted because some if I try to remove WPM I get
The reason there is all the bitching is because if you dont want to use M$ products, you whould not have to have them on your system!
It is like Ford saying "Here's your new car, it comes with tires, but if you want another brand of tires, you still have to keep these four tires in your car otherwise it wont work..."
Its just stupid, pointless and, frankly, quite childish to prevent users from removing IE, WMP, MSN Messenger, etc. from their systems if they dont want to use it.
Take for instance my school. We have, for trials, migrated 2 workstations over from NT4 to WinXP in our CISCO lab. It comes with
So this is not just Anti-M$ bitching just for the sake of bitching. This is about M$ forcing its aplications down the throats of people who dont want it. Not everyone has a 40GB HDD, and why should we be forced to endure the waste of space and bloat of aplications we dont use???
[root@GRIFFIN root]# rpm -e coffee-1.22.3-1a.i386.rpm
error: removing these packages would break dependencies:
Isn't it a mark of a good design when a system is modular?
From a code design standpoint, yes.
From a business standpoint, assuming that your business model depends upon absolute control of the whole shebang, no.
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
I actually agree with this-between Office, Media Player, and MSIE; each of them provides vital system functionality that would be hard to replicate perfectly elsewhere.
Microsoft doesn't want to have to support 3rd-party extensions to their core software-rightfully so. That's why overclocking voids your warrenty on OEM systems...it's an unsupported modification.
So, let the OEMs who are modifiying Windows do ALL the support. "Sorry, we do not support modified versions of Windows."
Let 'em continue selling a Microsoft-supported version; and for the same price let the OEM's pick either a full copy of a "modular" copy. Just, when the modular copy doesn't work because someone didn't follow the specs properly, they can't complain to MS about it.
Windows 3.1-ish was relatively modular...there were available replacement environments and stuff. For more complex OSes, modular and workable (not necessarely stable) are different things.
hmmm, Linus doesn't think that designing software is the way to go : "the people who think you "design" software are seriously simplifying the issue, and don't actually realize how they themselves work. "
1 12 .0/0004.html
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0
Every time a subject like this comes up all the morons crawl out of the woodwork and show just how little they know about the whole Microsoft issue to begin with..
THIS IS NOT ABOUT WINDOWS SUCKING OR LINUX SUCKING Get a grip people
I use Windows and home and Linux at work.. Why? Windows plays all the games I like to play and linux handles all my work better, makes development easy..
I use linux, I would switch to linux totally if I could.. Do I hate Windows.. Its not the SOFTWARE thats on trial people its the Methods that made the software so popular..
Linux people should stop saying windows sucks.. Thats not truly the issue at hand.. You should be saying Bill is a backstabbing, cheating ahole... But then if our president can get a blowjob and get away with it.. Why can't Bill screw over companys.
Windows people have to understand its not windows itself that is pissing linux people off.. its the pure power Microsoft has over companys.. In essense they Had a button at hand that said you live or die by my word..
If a company refused to obey microsoft.. They refuse to sell to them.. The company has to buy off the normal market.. there prices go up there sales go down.. the company dies..
Microsoft HAD THAT POWER AND USED IT ABUSIVELY..
We made it wrong for Coke to tell stores if you want to sell our product you CANT SELL PEPSI.. why can't it be the same for Microsoft..
That is ALL WE ASK
Personal Website
Yes, modular software is better. However, good luck finding any in the Real World. People think modularity has to be this heaviweight headache like COM or CORBA, or perhaps Java.
I think it is not widely understood that modularity can be fine-grained and pervasive while still being efficient, especially if it is done in such a way that module boundaries can be optimized away (eg. through inlining) at compile time.
(Incidentally, speaking of inlining, gcc is actually a pretty good compiler to use if you want to take this approach. It has great inlining facilities, which makes up for its lackluster optimization capabilities. I had a system I wrote using fine-grained modularity that relied very heavily on inlining for performance. When I moved from gcc to icc (Intel's own C compiler) it became about ten times slower, even after some fairly careful tweaking of icc's command line options. The difference was that icc simply refused to inline most of my function calls for a variety of reasons.)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Im a Level 2 helpdesk specialist... whoooo has about 9 years worth of Linux experience (means nothing in a MS world)... They say that Windows would be hard to support if they removed components... My answer to that is, how would we know the difference?
Not only is it complete BS, it's a downright lie! The entire point of COM was to make the system modular so that components could be replaced with different implementations. If someone really worked at it, they could probably get IE to use the Mozilla rendering engine by writing a COM wrapper that implemented the right interfaces (I forget their names at the moment). I'm not saying it would be easy, but definietly possible. All of COM is like that, and hence all of Windows (since Windows relies so heavily on COM).
Their other two points are more valid, though. The system would be less user-friendly (since MS and most of the world defines user-friendly as how close the interface is to MS software) and it would be a real PITA to support. How many things can go wrong with Windows when most all of the stuff is comes from MS? Now start adding in third party stuff into the system creating all sorts of new configuration permutations. Definitely more work to figure out what's wrong.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
"Removing them would result in a slower, much-less user friendly Windows that would be a support nightmare."
Really?!? If your going to tell a lie at least make it believable. No way it would be slower...
And support would have to exist before it could become a nightmare.
Microsoft Windows is a support nightmare period.
The closed API, the closed specs all across the board mean that error codes are simply, 'it's broke' indicators, not debugging information that can provide a fix.
Less MS windows means more reliability, and more support (from someone other than MS Non-Support).
Apparently the Maxim will have to change...
There are Lies, Damn Lies, and Microsoft P.R.
While the users may think of buying a "Dell" or "Gateway", who do they bash when their machines become finicky? Why Microsoft of course.
Maybe those users who have just enough technical awareness to know that Microsoft is the company that made Windows... but in my experience, a good chunk of users, indeed the vast majority of the kind that buy computers off retail shelves, don't know even that. Over the four years I've been at college, I've actually asked several non-techie students if they knew who made Windows. Total blank. What about their compter? Dell, Gateway, etc.? "Um, I think it's a Gateway... I'd have to check." They're barely aware of the existence of who manufactured their hardware, let alone their OS. When their computer crashes, they blame either simply "my computer," or the one BIG word that's flashed in front of their faces when they turn on their computer: "Windows." The association they form in their minds is simple: "My computer = Windows," whatever mysterious entity this "Windows" is--they don't know it's an OS, because they don't know what an OS is. When they call me for help, they say one of two things: "My computer's messed up," or "Windows is messing up." And the first is much more common.
The coolest voice ever.
But go back a bit further. Microsoft's original claim was that, by including IE (and dozens of other packages that used to be sold separately), they had made computing easier and cheaper.
By analogy, suppose I'm a cattle farmer. I raise lots of cattle. I have so many cattle that they're spilling into my neighbor's lands. I ignore their complaints, tie them up in court when they sue me, buy their properties at fire-sale prices, you name it.
In the supermarkets, I make questionable agreements: buy my beef, and my beef only, and I'll give you a discount. But sell my competitor, and I'll charge more.
I slowly drive my competitors out of business.
Someone else invents heat-and-eat prepared beef. This threatens my position, so I use my dominance to squash him; I introduce heat-and-eat beef myself, but sell it below cost to drive him out of business.
Years pass. Finally, the government gets involved; a massive multi-state lawsuit if filed. But by that time, I've cornered the beef market!
Think of the arguments I can make: I'm more efficient. Consumers like me. My beef is standardized; everyone's familiar with it. It's pre-packaged, heat-and-eat, no fuss, no mess.
Why, the marketplace would devolve into dozens of confusing choices for the consumer if I was stopped!
If I were to raise that defense, I would be laughed out of court.
The issue -- the ONLY issue -- is whether I had acted in an illegal manner in establishing my market dominance.
If the answer is "yes," then a remedy has to be proposed which punishes me for that behavior. I may be a popular hero, but if I kill someone, I'm guilty of murder. The fact that I'm popular and loveable has no bearing on the facts of the case.
When the ATT breakup occurred, lots of people complained. I remember Howard K. Smith on ABC doing an editorial about it being one of the "ten dumbest decisions" he'd ever heard.
But the *initial* confusion (and stock crash at ATT!) was eventually replaced by a much better marketplace with better choices for consumers. The end result was improvement in the long run.
Well here's the one concession to Microsoft's defence. The more 3rd parties are able to modify the layout and content of Windows, the more it will be a support nightmare. It's just a fact that, at my workplace, one quarter or so of windows users calling tech support don't know what version of Windows they're running and wouldn't know how to determine said version. It's also a fact that around one half of this category, when asked to right-click 'My Computer' on their desktop, will deny that such at icon exists. At this point, they must be told that this icon does in fact exist and that they are a moron. What do we do when the users are using Dell Windows XP, Micron Windows XP or (God help us) Circuit City Windows XP? Trying to support an OS the layout of which may be modified at all is a pain (Windows XP's minimally modifiable GUI is a big enough one), but trying to support an OS stripped apart and reassembled by the OEM to have their logo in every nook and cranny could be the nightmare Microsoft mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a maximally modular OS, I just think my users should have to take an IQ test before they're allowed to use one.
I recall saying that the exclusive/secret OEM contracts should be the first to go, as a penalty.
.NET, IM, IIS, PWS or anything else (I, or another customer requests be removed) MS *must* provide the tools to remove it, without "crippling the os".
:)
True to form, this comment was ignored. No big deal.
Recently, when Gateway's CEO spoke up on this very issue, I saw my comment on abolishing OEM contracts "paraphrased verbatim"...including the 10 year moratorium I'd suggested.
I found this amusing, but it also got me thinking of how this could be improved.
Well, frequently invoked or ignored is the "grandma/joe6pack" arguement and could best be brought to the attention of those it affects the most:
1) No exclusive/secret contracts between ms and oems, period, for 10 years.
2) No OEM preinstalls/rescue disks on/for machines for those 10 years.
3) force ms to *support* all its OS's (9x/NT) for 10 years after release (this will decrease the upgrade treadmill, I think)
4) If windows is to be put on a machine (as per #2): The customer will have to purchase it directly from MS (thus getting rid of the EULA loophole where refunds can't be give because you did not "buy it *directly* from MS" and make people aware of the actual *cost* of the software).
5) and finally: Bugs/Features/security holes should be *fixed* in a timely manner.
By this I mean; if I don't want Outlook/OE, IE, WMP,
I'm sure the 98lite team would be perfect for providing insight on how to do it, if they need help.
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Yes, let's take a loot at the OEM's.
Microsoft has reduced them to mere box pushers.
Well to be fair, Microsoft offered them a deal to become mere box pushers in return for 0 control over the OS, and the OEMs gladly took them up on their deal. (Well, they actually chose long-term slavery to Microsoft over short-term slavery to IBM.) For an industry that prides themselves on making "Clones", what do you expect?
Some of these guys have second source requirements in their contracts with Intel, and those arrangements have allowed AMD to thrive and create a competitive CPU market. Yet for the other major component, the OS, they were more than happy to put a single source provider in charge.
So, I'm having trouble feeling sorry for them. Their strategy of taking commodity parts and sticking a commodity OS (Windows) on top and then providing "value" with some logo bitmaps and shareware is pure drek that any consumer could see through. They mutter here and there, but they are still wetting their pants and signing every contract whenever the next great Windows XMe 2003 is about to ship.
you might have a very high bar raised for those who would write core Windows components. For example, Netscape would have to be written in such a way as not to break the thousands of applications that have been written that make use of IE's low-level components. For example, I wrote an intranet application that uses the address bar, back & forward buttons, etc. You can't tell that IE is part of it, but it is.
This program WOULD NOT RUN if you stripped IE out of Windows. I think it would be neat if you could just drop in another browser and have everything work. But are the 3rd party players going to be willing to support all the functions, features, etc to create drop-in replacements? They just might be getting into more than they bargained for.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Yes... and this is why the states want Windows to be *modular*. Therefore people can keep in, for example, the IE rendering engine ... or they can replace it with a Mozilla rendering engine. Both IE and Mozilla are then on a level playing field in terms of start-up time and integration with other applications.
:)
:)
What the states are proposing really wouldn't affect you if you want to keep all the MS options... but those of us that don't like the MS stuff cluttering up their hard drives and constantly trying to take over and telling us what it thinks we should do (MSN Messenger prompts in XP?) would be rid of it
I finally made the switch to Linux on my desktop because I installed XP and was so disgusted with how it was limiting me from doing what I want to do and how every time I booted up it would come up with new prompts/crap telling me what happened to my icons and asking me if I wanted voice recognition etc. Hell... when I installed it, there wasn't even an option to install to anywhere other than a "Windows" directory. Ugh!
Now I use linux for my development work and writing of documents etc... I kept the XP partition just to play games.
However, if there was a modular version of Windows, where I could have just taken out all the crap I didn't need, I would have stayed in Windows and just replaced some of the MS stuff with alternatives. I think the modular OS would actually help MS keep market share in the end. So I'm not quite sure why all the linux crazies on here are so gung-ho about it.
I can nuke everything but the main kernal and the shnit loaded by the registery and have everything still work A-OK.
:)
All that is really needed is the already modular DirectX and the support for various other APIs (and few products use them all and it would be easy enough to use other ones such as SDL when need be) and everything would work just fine. Of course some of those APIs DO present a problem, but no one in this right mind still uses the older then heck ones and a lot of the new ways of doing things suck so much (such as the HTML help files, bleh. Those suck horribly) that well, heck;
I have been saying for quite some time now that Microsoft needs to strip out some of the older shnitz from their OS, such as the program to detect for the Pentium Bug (bleh).
One thing that is REALLY missing from Windows is a NICE auto-shutdown utility. Sure third party utilities exist to do that, and Windows has the proper APIs to handle all of that, but no truly GOOD free program has come out to accomplish that task yet. A lot of programs have it tacked on as an extra and some programs exist to do timed shutdowns (though they tend to not be all that good, such as shutting down right away as the default action when invoked with no command line parameters) but having one that can say;
"Shutdown the computer after there has been no traffic on port XXX for the last TTT minutes"
would be rather nice.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Absolute nonsense. The kernel and the Win32 subsystem, along with a command shell, is all you need to run all the third party software you could want. Mozilla and/or Opera can replace IE, Pegasus or Eudora are big improvements over Outhouse, and Trillian is certainly a better solution than MS Messenger.
The ridiculous claims that windows won't work without these components are disproven on a daily basis by myself and other users who actually know how to make windows work. The only real problem is that MS is dead set against ever letting OEMs do what I do with my own system, and therefore steadily add more and more cruft and "integrated" code to try an obstruct windows' inherent modularity, and legally forbid OEMs from making such changes as well. They have yet to make it impossible at the code level, although they've certainly managed to make it more difficult than it should be.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's all bollox. Code can be broken apart, their only challenge is the size of the problem, nothing more...and they have more than enough resources for the problem.
;-)
Of course it's modular, of course it can be seperated. If not then they have no business building such important tools in the first place.
All of that IE crap, 'coolbars', HTML help and the other crud that has been shipped 'with windows' in the form of IE is just a red herring.
I don't need IE if I wish to use 'HTML style' help, I don't need WMP to listen to MP3. Cut the crap guys.
They made the mess they're in and they can fix it. If not then I'm available for contract work
One thing that is REALLY missing from Windows is a NICE auto-shutdown utility.
I always use Shutdown.exe from the resource kit (along with AT.exe) for my unattended reboot needs -- in your case you would need to script that together with somehting that monitors the ports.
Now why all the useful resource kit stuff is not on the OS CD is another interesting question.
There was interview posted here a while ago with a former project manager at Microsoft (a link would be appreciated by someone not too lazy to find it) about the business of programming and so forth. One of the things that struck me about it later was the way that he said that rewriting code is bad from both a business standpoint and because every line of code is there for a reason. In my (albeit limited) experience a large number of patches and changes to code are made to accomodate initial errors in logic or lack of foresight for such things as scalability, and with major changes a rewrite allows you to most cleanly adjust for either of those things, and quite possibly improve the code with other techniques learned since the original writing. Microsoft is obviously a heavily business-oriented company, so they've probably seen quick hacks as a less time-consuming, more profitable solution than restructuring their design, which would explain why every MS product seems just like the one before it but with a couple more features and system requirements :). A fully modular operating system with the technologies that have been integrated into Windows probably would not have been as appealing to them as just building off what they already had.
Why I took Windows 2000 off my home computer (quick true story)
I was trying to get Routing and Remote Access set up with NAT so I could plug my laptop into my desktop (something I've done several times on other computers). First I was getting an error becuase File and Print Sharing wasn't set-up (which is of course a key component to any type of routing).
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think