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The Ad-Supported Operating System
An anonymous reader writes "The appearance of an ad-supported operating system is probably not that far off. This article takes a look at some of the finer points behind an OS which is financed with ad views, and more specifically the logic behind a free version of Windows which could make this a reality. There are a few issues which must be resolved first, but with Microsoft refining Windows Live and shifting some of their focus to advertising, many of the pieces seem to be falling into place."
Ads in place of a subscription make sense, but how do you justify ads for something with an exact value? When you see enough ads to have payed the price of the OS do they go away? I don't understand.
I've got Karma to burn, so here goes.... my true assessment of home-computing. A few of my relatives have home PCs - all running pirated versions of Windows. The ads come in the error messages:
e d-to-be-part-of-Windows, anti-spyware, external firewalls, broadband (modem drivers are clunkier in recent OSes), Flash, Support services etc.
* Program performed illegal operation
Sends the hapless home user scurrying to get a licensed copy of the OS.
* Windows did not shut down properly. Files may be corrupted or lost
And the poor chap goes out and buys a UPS. Never a chance to even imagine that ext3 rarely loses files even during a power shutdown.
* Photoshop Elements may not work well with this Service Pack
So the user pays Adobe for the privilege of being lazy enough not to explore better options.
* Windows encountered an error in lsass.exe and must shutdown
The user buys an upgrade since there's no support for the old OS any more.
And so on, Windows has been a huge advertising platform for anti-virus software, UPSs, Backup-software-that-actually-works-but-is-suppos
The fact that despite being an antiquated junkpiece several years behind in technology, Windows has succeeded as a platform, proves a coupla' things:
1. User apathy and lethargy is a very potent force. A user would rather patch a buggy junk, rather than learn something better, simpler and advanced.. like Linux, Opera, Firefox, Open Office, Gnumeric etc.
2. It's not possible to release Newer OSes forever, that's still prone to viruses and malware... remember You Can't Fool All The People All The Time...
and so, it appears
Microsoft has patented Web-Service-OSes that can be metered like Electricity and Gas. It's about time, one would've thought. Suddenly, all these lower-life-forms like anti-virus and backup s/w firms who depended on MS for their living.. would become redundant! There'll be hell to pay, since these guys don't die overnight.
Symantec, Trend Micro, Citrix or Veritas wouldn't take such initiatives lying down. Interesting times ahead!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Has everyone forgot installing Windows 95/98, and going through the process of deleting the bundled AOL trials, CompuServe this and MSN Online that? It's not "Punch the monkey and win a free iPod!"-style advertising, but it is paid product placement and it is advertising. Also in Windows 95 and 98 was a "Sampler" directory on the CD with games and reference utilities, although most were distributed by Microsoft Games, there was a game from Scholastic and another company. In Windows XP, view your My Pictures folder (or any folder you or windows has identified as a photo folder), and look at the task pane: "Order Prints Online" takes you to a list of paid links to photo printers, "Shop for Pictures Online" takes you to a page with two microsoft links and one to 'BizPresenter.com'. It's not a new concept! It's just been subtle, but I doubt it'll get too much more obvious (viewing a 10 second advertisement every time you boot up, or "Targeted Media" on your desktop, ala Win98's Active Desktop items but with Coke ads instead of CBS News -- wait, they're both advertising!
- Dragging a window caused a (slow) redraw. Haven't they heard of buffering?
- Inserting a USB memory stick went through some kind of add new hardware thing. Why wasn't it automatically mounted? The drivers were present, so why bother the user?
- Ejecting the USB drive meant going to a tiny PCMCIA icon in the task bar; hardly intuitive. Why wasn't there an eject button Explorer?
- The scheduler really sucks. Even the old 4.4BSD scheduler handled load better, and ULE wipes the floor with the Windows scheduler.
- Why doesn't the kill -9 equivalent always work? Some processes seem to get stuck in system calls that never return. Not good design.
- Privilege escalation is painful. RunAs feels like a horrible hack, and accessing it through the GUI is painful.
- Drivers. Why do I have to hunt for drivers for my hardware? The only specific configuration I've had to do on other platforms was to grab the DRI drivers for FreeBSD, and that was little more than 'portinstall drm.' Windows won't even tell me what hardware I have if it doesn't have drivers for it! It is very hard to find drivers for 'Unknown Multimedia Interface.' If it even gave me the PCI ID then I could google for that.
- Installing software is painful. Each application seems to have its own method of installing. On OS X, I just drag things to the Applications folder. On FreeBSD, I use portinstall. On OpenBSD, I use pkg_add. On Windows, it varies for app to app.
- ACPI support is somewhat flaky. Quite often my laptop would go into suspend mode and never resume. According to the comments in the ACPI code for FreeBSD there are some special work-arounds for a buggy ACPI controller in my machine, but somehow Windows doesn't have them. Why not?
- Drag and drop support in Windows is very hit-and-miss. Many things don't even seem to support drag and drop on text!
My conclusion was that Windows is not ready for the desktop, let alone the laptop.I am TheRaven on Soylent News