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Microsoft Scales Down Palladium

Posted by samzenpus on from the secure-enough dept.

bonch writes "Formerly known as Palladium, Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) will not be fully available in Windows Longhorn after all. Instead, Longhorn will offer "the first part of NGSCB: Secure Startup," says Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms. However, most hardware will not support this technology on release."

5 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. So... by madaxe42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What, exactly, is Longhorn going to do? They seem to have dropped more features from it than there were in the first place!

  2. Microsoft is totally dropping the ball by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft is totally dropping the ball. Not that I'm complaining. But giving previews of software that's so bad that they have to threaten those that publish screenshots? Dropping important features?

    I tell you, if IBM sunk $1 billion dollars into making a single grandma-usable Linux distribution, it'd be the best $1 billion they ever spent. That's a pipe dream, but seriously, if nobody capitalizes on this, it's a total missed opportunity to break the Microsoft monopoly.

    In my opinion, the software is ready. KDE is all set to go. We've got office applications, dtp, multimedia, internet, databases... If somebody could fix CUPS, make software installation simple, and populate all the most important configurations in one area and give them easy-to-use and consistently-designed wizards (that the experienced users could of course ignore), this thing would be ready. Not World of Warcraft ready, maybe, but ready enough. Hell, I'd buy it in two seconds.

    The problem is, you need someone with deep pockets to finance all the boring aspects of making a unified-feeling distribution and fixing all the intricate bits (like CUPS or whatnot), but if they did, and slapped a big old IBM on the cover, it'd be dynamite. And having IBM on it would probably add a center juggernaut quality that might make hardware companies more interested in doing proper driver support.

  3. Truth in Advertising? by argent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If Microsoft was going to start naming operating systems consistently, then... let's see...

    Windows 2000 -> Windows NT 5.0
    Windows XP -> Windows NT 5.1
    Longhorn -> Windows NT 6.0 or Windows NT 5.2?

    Or maybe even Windows NT 5.11?

    1. Re:Truth in Advertising? by mcbridematt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      True. Leaked builds have had NT 6.0 for ages. NT 5.2 is WinServer2003 AFAIK.

      DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51). It sucks, when I played around with the LH Alpha leaks, a lot of software didn't work out of the box because they didn't know what NT 6.0 is. Your firm may go bankrupt long before the LH release but don't go screwing your customers of any forwards compatibility.

      But congrats to the Mozilla devs for having good native UI integration - Mozilla looks really good under LH 3653 and LH 4008 and the plex theme.

      And among all the talk about LH being souped up XP in the past few days, isn't this feature called Aero still under lock and key? Or have M$ Shafted that too?

  4. DEVELOPER RANT - Version checking. by argent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).

    DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.

    Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.

    One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.