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Microsoft Scales Down Palladium
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."
What, exactly, is Longhorn going to do? They seem to have dropped more features from it than there were in the first place!
Microsft reports today that Longhorn will not be shipped at all. Instead, it would be shipping a stripped down version of Windows XP with an all new startup screen and bundled with features from late Windows 3.11
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
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.
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?
You are probably hearing "security" and "trust" and falsely assuming this means YOUR security, or YOU being able to trust your computer.
In fact you, the user, are not the intended beneficiary of "trusted computing" at all.
The problem now is that people have too much control over their computers. From the perspective of somebody trying to limit what other people do, this is insecurity. If you write a computer program and sell it to someone, why, there's no guarantee at all that people will use it the way you wanted. People may find ways to trick your program into doing things it didn't intend, or even start to fiddle around with it and its innards, or use the files they made in your program in competing applications. It's as almost as if these people believe that just because they bought a copy of your software means they [i]own[/i] that copy. Something must be done about this. Vendors, like Microsoft, want to be able to "trust" your computer not to let you do things with it Microsoft doesn't want you to do. Hence, palladium.
Trusted boot is the first step in that. It convinces people that a piece of hardware in your computer that when switched on limits the ability to write to your hard drive to "trusted" pieces of code (and not scary things like Knoppix rescue cds) is a good idea. Somehow.
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.