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Vista the Last of Its Kind
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a TechWorld story about Windows Vista. According to the Gartner Group, Windows Vista is likely to be the last of its kind. "The problem is that the operating system's increasing complexity is making it ever more difficult for enterprises to implement migrations, and impossible for Microsoft to release regular updates. This, in turn, stands in the way of Microsoft's efforts to push companies to subscription licensing. The answer, according to Gartner, is virtualization, which is built into newer chips from Intel and AMD, and has become mainstream for x86 servers through the efforts of VMware." Speaking of Vista, C|Net reports that a new release candidate is on the way. The average tester should expect it by the end of September.
There'll never be another ridiculously late, overhyped, massively over budget, features touted then dropped software project again? ;-p
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I'll let you in on a little secret - Linux (OSS in general) is the poor mans porn downloading system, and porn has driven its development. No one prints porn, so forget printer drivers. A few people want to upload pictures of themselves naked, so there are a few camera drivers. Scanners, forget it. USAB keys ? Handy for trading PORN. I don't know how to do it, but if some sort of survey could be done I think you would find that 90% of all Linux systems are used for porn excusively. The other 10% are scientists Latexing their papers, and downloading porn. And don't forget, these are the biggest cheapskates in the world. They don't want to pay for porn or software.
Just because windows is bloated it doesn't mean that all other OSes are. This sounds awfully much like the "Mainframes are dead" and later on the "Unix is dead" (no, not the BSD-troll) predictions.
Speaking of Vista, C|Net reports that a new release candidate is on the way. The average tester should expect it by the end of September.
Well - you can wait until September if you like, or you can just download the torrent.
If you're an Apple employee - this is OK, but make sure you dont download something from Apple - they will fire you.
KISS = Keep It Simple Steve (ballmer) and leave the chairs alone
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Most of the time Windows provides few simple file, display and input services to MS word and excel. I can see why you would want to rewrite it to cut down on exploits, improve scalablity, etc. But why would MS need to create so much additional complexity? Other than the obvious reason that they already have windows built to do what they need and may as well rewrite it since they have all that revenue.
My advice is for Microsoft to spend the next 20 years rewriting windows to run on future quantum computing devices. Word will keep working in the mean time. Should make a killing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Gartner analysts: We predict Microsoft will start making OS'es like this.
Microsoft: Umm, no - there are a ton of problems with doing things that way (even more than with the way we do things now!!!11)
Gartner analysts: Pffft, what would you know.
Seriously, speculation can be fun, but I find it hard to take these guys seriously.
So, when's Linux going to take advantage of the hardware virtualization?
The owls are not what they seem
What does this article mean anyway? Its a bunch of buzz words mixed together in an apparently random order.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to start with a core operating system unit that could then have additional modules and applications bolted on as necessary? You'd have full control over exactly what functions the machine will and will not have. Too bad such a beast will never exist...
This guy's the limit!
The slashdot group think have known this since before XP came out and now a research firm predicts what we already knew, 6 years later. Microsoft haven't commented on this so its not worth discussing further (as we already have for years) until some announcement at some MS developer conference mentions it. Oh shit its saturday, slow news day.
Jonathanjk.com
That ought to be fun to work with. What will this stack do?
However what is not understandable is how virtualization will be helpful. Sure, you can make a virtual machine run only one process (services), but these services need to interact with each other through some mechanism to do useful work. Will the Windows kernel just do this interaction?
This seems to be oversolving the problem. Service isolation is good, but do you have to go overboard on that?
Quantum computing units will probably be an addon, like the GPU or the math coprocessor. You only need them to do some semi-specialised stuff like search, I don't think they'd help in displaying graphics and the like. It's scary how they can search an entire space at once though.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
And Microsoft's absolutely right on this point. I don't typically defend them, but when groups like Gartner with no experience in computers makes up such ridiculous ideas, I think it's justifiable.
There's no reason they need to resort to using virtualization to accomplish this task. They could do it now with the current NT code, but it works now so there's no need to fix it for the time being.
It just seems like a waste of resources to completely re-engineer Windows to make efficient use of virtualization that still presents a consistent user interface.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I am rather thankful about all the dropped "features" as they tend not to be so good until v3.0 and tend to be less than standard implementations (Internet Explorer) of technology that simply displaces 3rd party functional products.
As for being late I am hoping that they are taking he time to debug them more than previous products that were shipped to schedule with major problems. Anyhow the longer they take the longer my win2000 will remain viable.
Drop a curse on Microsoft.
Slashdot today released a report showing that stupid Garter Group releases will never come to an end.
Instead of critical evaluation or even serious research, the respected organisation will stick by its tried-and-true method of spatial-temporal probability matrix randomisation (marketed under the trademark Making Shit Up, Even If Obviously Stupid).
At a recent demonstration of this technique, Garter Group analysts showed releases on their drawing boards for next week's bullshit sessions, including:
* IBM to buy Apple and force the line back to PowerPC, in order to cripple Microsoft's XBox.
* Sun will no longer release any hardware products, pending a buyout offer from SCO.
* George Lucas will admit he's a dud and bankroll a new new trilogy written and directed by competent artists, such as Britney Spears.
At the time of writing, no Garter analysts were available to comment; being too busy trying to find where the crack pipe got to.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
And it's late as well. I don't believe so much in virtualization on this level to create security. I mean, how are the components going to communicate? Sockets? Sockets are their own security problem. Microsoft clearly thinks in the same direction. What we need is a more fine-grained security model, in which applications only get the resources they need. Applications themselves also must be able apply the same security directives to their internal components. Just assigning a user per application won't work either, I mean, I would like to continue to work with my text editor as myself.
.net and works with assemblies. Where Microsoft has an advantage is that it owns the Windows operating system, and can therefore easily use a centralized Virtual Machine (as in MSIL virtual machine), installation procedures etc.
Currently, applications can install themselves anywhere they want. They can destroy everything I own, including most things in the registry. They can take every bit of CPU power they like. Any amount of memory. Any amount of threads. Any amount of desktop space (including the whole lot through DirectX). They can even take away my keyboard. I don't think you can solve this by just giving every application it's own CPU and operating system. You can do this by restricting access, and by letting the OS take care of the installation and access conditions (maybe not configuration).
The way to do this is to create dependencies with modules, and create security managers to handle access. This is e.g. part of the Java security model, which is sadly hardly ever used. Microsoft has it's own copy of that of course. It's in
I've little doubt that this is the direction Microsoft is thinking for the long run. Unfortunately they don't seem to grasp it on the same abstraction level that Sun can, so it will probably take time. No doubt it will take double that time for Gartner to understand it. Just running every app in its own OS is much easier to grasp, especially when it is already there.
1. Collect Buzzwords
2. ???
3. Publish Report
I assume they use a Bot to trawl the internet collecting the latest buzz words, and then another to automatically assemble the report... but after reading that piffle I don't think they would have the compitence to turn on the computer.
Kevin Kelly's Out of Control got me thinking about this a while back. Although the book is a little dated, it is all about network economies and their similarities to ecological systems, and I realized that evolution is at work when it comes to platform adoption. Greater than 90% of desktops run Windows, so there's no variety in the PC platform genepool. Just like inbred populations, this PC pool is unhealthy: it can't adapt and infections run rampant because all specimens are susceptible to the same illnesses.
Of course, who's going to change to another platform when there's no software out there? (No flames please - try to remember perception is everything, and ask yourself whether an average user realizes alternatives exist.) Virtualization, I think, is a good answer to this. I like the idea of "booting" to an application like in the pre-DOS days, and if your games run no x86/x64 architecture, you could bypass the OS altogether to get the most out of games by just booting straight into Halo 4 or HalfLife 3. I also like the end of the API: we can go back to the days of static linked libraries (no version conflicts, ever!) and headers and just build our own OSes from scratch to run in a VM. Since you can virtualize anything, even VMs, you can get cross-platform apps and cross-platform platforms (Java, .NET, etc.) and consumers don't have to worry about physical hardware or their underlying OS components, apart from cost and performance considerations. As far as their apps go, everything could, theoretically, work the same on any system (whether business decisions will allow this to happen, we'll just have to see). In fact, my only worry about this is how to allow for a standard GUI on such a system (but since nobody, not even Microsoft, follows GUI principles these days anyway, it probably doesn't matter).
This is, IMO, a far superior way to do things than how they're done now. So, okay, then, OSS community, please get to work so you will be finished before MS is. Thank you.
Gartner or no, it seems unlikely that Microsoft would be able to sufficiently modularize Windows in order to do this even if they did agree it was a good direction to go. Modularity and separation of problem domains haven't really been Microsoft's strong suit, have they? I'm thinking, for instance, of how Windows Explorer locks up while waiting for a device (CD drive, network connection) to respond. There are good reasons for not mixing UI and device communications on the same thread, and yet they didn't even bother to separate them in the main user interface to the OS. (Well, they hadn't as of XP, anyway -- 18+ years into developing the OS.) That's just one example of a failure of modularity in Windows. The usual path they seem to follow, be it the message pump (remember when it was one pump for the OS and all apps?) or Internet Explorer, is to go monolithic and only modularize when the monolith fails. Not commenting on the good or bad of that strategy (that would be a different flame wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion), but it gives insight into their approach to software development, one which is not particularly friendly to Gartner's ideas...
Here I am writing code, where the smallest slip can cause serious damage to our company, our customers, and my paycheck.
When instead I could be writing *pure quasi-random blather*, with no consequences even if the stuff is pure blue-sky speculation, and unlikely for a multitude of reasons.
( *must* *get* *job* *at* *gartner* *group* )
( writing sample: )
"Huge monopoly software company will screw their own pooch and dump their cash cows for no visible reason and instead (mumble) (not clear who) will use (completely different type of technology with not much in common with previous sentence) or (hot new buzzword that hasnt been seen-thru yet) to completely bypass all the laws of human ignorance, inertia, established base, software trends, and economics. "
There, that should move me right to the top of their hiring list.
*hunches over and arches wrists -- picks at a few keys*
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
So, when's Linux going to take advantage of the hardware virtualization?
Sarcasm duly noted. Still, I think it should be mentioned that the problems Gartner claim will be solved by this use of virtualization can be solved in other ways than virtualization, and in Linux sometimes are. For example, the kernel and GNOME (or KDE) are separate entities, developed separately, and runnable separately - you can use different kernels with GNOME - e.g. BSD, and you can use KDE/Xfce/etc. instead of GNOME. Perhaps Windows would be easier to maintain and improve if things weren't tied-in as they are, the most famous case of which is perhaps IE.
I really don't see where hardware virtualization used to compartmentalize an OS is a better idea than correct modularization of the OS (which includes choosing the runlevel for the various parts, i.e. it may use 'virtualization', in a sense). Am I missing Gartner's point somehow?
Reguardless of what model of software life-cycle you use, software does die eventually. Only instead of calling it "death", software engineers call it "retirement". The retirement phase of the software life-cycle occurs when the product (in this case Microsoft Windows) is removed from service. This happens when the functionality provided by the product no longer is of any use to the client.
As much as some of us have loathed Microsoft and Bill Gates and Windows, it is quite untimely for all of this to happen. Talk about a private sale of the company, the retirement of Bill Gates, and the recent series of product failures is tragic.
Even if we never liked Microsoft, it is sad to watch this mightly sparing partner collapse under the weight of mutual self-destruction. Even bitter enemies mourn the loss of their rivals.
The wonton self-mutilation of Microsoft would be that in its hubris, they kept delaying Vista or Longhorn or whatever it was called in the beginning. Add to that, a list of software patents that while it protected themself from competition, prevented growth and development within the company. Greed settled in because the people in charge were happy making a ton of money with the status quo. Then they started to maximize their wealth by cutting out things that made the company what it was. Outsourcing workers. Removing subsitities and extras (i.e. Vulcan Enterprises which ran TechTV). Shortening the leash of how much code was released.
As the company became more miserly, the man who was the corporate face of this software empire wanted out.
We now see it not just as the death of a software product but the death of a corporation.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
After many years of excellent service, it's almost time to retire the BillGatesBorg icon for Microsoft stories. Esp. since he won't be with them any more, sorta. I vote for a chair icon. It can be a borg chair, I guess.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Someone tell me what qualification Gartner analysts have in predicting the future of OS research? To me, this looks like BS, virtualization is a tool for a different problem. But if these analysts have a PhD in OS design, maybe I could believe it. But come on, they are disputing with MS what MS is going to do. Mostly MS doesn't know what it is doing, how Gartner can know more... . Argh..
This is complete BS. Microsoft would love nothing more than to have Windows be a modular snap-together, snap-to-upgrade, easily patched model like this. But to do it properly will require a good decade of work, and a complete redesign of Windows.
Windows as it is designed today is monolithic. You can't separate one layer from another in the "dreamy" way that Gartner is wishing for. The irony is that Netscape once used the term "spaghetti code" to describe the pre-Mozilla rewrite. The same could be easily used to describe Windows in it's current condition.
Gartner analysts often amaze me. I've met a few who deserve the respect of people in the industry. But I've met many more who have an amazing talent for talking out of their bottoms about technology they don't understand. Analysts have the best job. They get to make crack-filled predictions about the future. And nobody ever calls them on them, because in 3-5 years, when it hasn't come true, nobody remembers it, and the analyst is there preaching some hazy, totally new vision of the future (that probably contradicts their earlier "prediction").
Gartner Group is the best proof I can find for George Carlin's theory that the most profitable business in the US is the manufacture, packaging, and redistribution of bullshit. It reminds me of friends of my sister who got a top-notch education, aced the SATs, got a degree from Harvard, and now get paid top dollar to go around giving Powerpoint presentations on how to create "synergy" in an "n-Tier multi-platform Web 2.0 AJAX solution".
I am officially gone from
Which is what is happening at Microsoft.
Yeah, cus EVERYONE had a computer back before Windows 95.
Cheap, ubiquitous computers largely coincide with Microsoft's support for cheap 3rd party hardware combined with a good-enough operating system.
Someone else MIGHT have come along to fill the void if they hadn't been there, but there's no proof that it would have happened, and certainly no proof that they set computers BACK 10 years. (Do you even REMEMBER what computing was like 10 years ago?!)
>>"But Microsoft tends to keep backwards compatibility for a long time"
Yeah--mass market kind of appreciates that. I suppose you'd prefer that the techno-elite (who have large budgets for new hardware AND software) have their own technology platform with no way to connect to, or pass files to the rest of the world? I mean, it'd be HORRIBLE if the guy using a 3 year old computer at home could bring his documents to work and use them on his brand new computer. (?!)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
* Windows came on a few floppy disks?
* The primary job of an operating system was to launch user applications, not to assimilate them all?
The reason windows is so big and complex is not because it needs to be. In fact the most efficient OS's are the smallest ones.
Its all because of marketing. Microsoft has to keep adding bullshit to their os that slows it down and makes it consume ever more CPU/RAM/HD just so they can claim it does more, in order to sell it to you all over again.
I bet there's only like 1% of us that even know all the 'features' in windows, let alone actually use them.
I wish Microsoft would allow you to selectively install the basics, just like most linux distros already do.
Although Linux now offers all sorts of GUIs and some drivers, it's still suffering from a legacy problem similar to Windows': it's based on the design of UNIX, from the 1960s! Is there any reason why a modern OS should routinely use strings like "apt-get sudo" or "#/usr/bin" other than that several generations of hackers have gotten used to those abbreviations, and the code is now too embedded to replace?
A modular, free, open-source OS is a great idea. But wouldn't it be feasible at this point to abandon the UNIX/GNU legacy and start a new OS based on modern design principles -- and that doesn't look like a clone of Windows? Yes, it would start off as a toy since it'd have no drivers etc., but if we could implement a few basic applications in it it would start to become worthwhile.
Revive the Constitution.
Ballmer used to call this "strategic complexity". As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows, "If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business".
There's no technical reason why an operating system has to be as bloated as Windows or Linux. Integrating Internet Explorer into the operating system was a business decision, not a technical one. And all that really meant was that IE's code was split up into various DLLs.
Technically, the "big OS" problem results from operating systems with poorly designed interprocess communication. When it's much easier and faster to call the kernel than another program, there's too much of a temptation to put stuff in the kernel. Both pre-NT Windows and UNIX had terrible interprocess communication systems, which is how we got to the mess we're in now.
On top of that classical problem, we now have the "DRM must be in the kernel" problem. DRM is really messing up operating system architecture. "Video streaming" crap is in the kernel, which means codecs with too many privileges and inevitably, codecs as attack vectors. Games want to have "drivers" to enforce their DRM. Even the iPod service wants privileged code in Linux. That has to stop.
I wouldn't be surprised to see next generation OSs beyond Mac OS X and Vista to take a more modular approach in terms of design. It makes more sense from a development cost standpoint as well. The idea being there is just one "windows" (for example) and Microsoft on a regular basis would sell/release replacement modules for the operating system. Need a server OS? No problem, just install the server core module. Want a fancier new desktop/interface? No problem, install the new graphical upgrade module.
Basically, make it more akin to Linux and other open source products. However, since it would be a single company developing these modules, they would have a unified design to them, which is arguably the biggest flaw from an every day Joe consumer standpoint with linux: the fact that by its nature, open source design is all over the place. That doesn't make open source a bad thing, because if you have the know-how you can customize it into exactly what you want/need. But your everyday consumer wants a unified feel to their product with minimal hassle. Something a Microsoft/Apple OS with a modular design could easily accomplish.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
You start with about 20MB install image, and add on what you need from there. That's why it's so popular for old boxes, servers, base for other distros, etc.
BFs (BeOS).
If you need virtualization to "unbundle" it into modules, then something's seriously wrong with the overall design... or you're not actually unbundling it.
I mean, when I think about "unbundling" Windows, I think about something like this:
* Windows NT "core" - NT kernel, the Win32 subsystem, Windows explorer and registry editor and the other associated utilities needed to boot to a desktop with no bundled applications or enhancements.
* Windows Network "core" - Windows firewall, Windows Networking, TCP/IP, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Graphics "core" - DirectX 2d and desktop enhancements that use them, Aero, Windows XP effects and transitions, and utilities. Depends on the Windows NT core.
* Windows Web "core" - The HTML control, HTTP and other internet protocols, Internet Explorer and Outlook, and the associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Network core.
* Windows Media "core" - Windows Media Player, CD and DVD burning, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Web core and the Windows Graphics core.
* Windows Gaming "core" - DirectX 3d support, Windows 9x compatibility support, and associated utilities. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Access "core" - Interix, Remote Desktop, Telnet, FTP and other legacy protocols, User Switching. Depends on the Windows Graphics and Network cores.
* Windows Office "core" - Active Directory, RPC, SMS, all the "Pro" versus "Home" stuff. Depends on the Windows Networking core.
I mean, Windows is designed from the ground up to be divided this way. They sell embedded versions of Windows NT that work this way, and Windows CE uses the same basic API with a different set of libraries... you can even develop for CE on Windows and run CE applications under Windows with the right DLLs.
So I don't believe they need virtualization to make Windows "modular", the monolithic nature of desktop Windows is a marketing decision... not a technical one. By virtualizing, they get to sell you multiple copies of Windows for one computer. No wonder they want to go that way... it's more a wonder they took so long to catch on!
How about the operating system prototype called Singularity?
... the sound of Windows developers shooting themselves over the prospect of having to learn yet another API/OS model/architecture/whatever.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now that Microsoft has added dynamic language features to the CLR with .NET 2.0, you'll see python,
smalltalk, scheme and other Lisps run tolerably well in that environment. This will enabling fresh new approaches for software development.
If Microsoft offered an operating system release that was:
1) An OS Kernel, no User Interface features
2) Allow new device drivers to be installed/uninstalled to support video, disks and other I/O devices
3) Runs only managed code on top of the kernel
you might have something a bit less bloated. But, you would essentialy be destroying the Earth in order to save the rest of the Solar System. It wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
After about 10 years, enough people will figure out that you can build common (shared) libraries that encompass the needs of word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video and audio codecs, network protocols, web services.
So applications are delivered as scripting code that tie these components together. [Look at the Flux& Fluke project from Utah, and Jini for ways to make all of this work.]
Then you'll be able to run most anything you need for 'everyday' computing in 2017, whatever that is. Will it seem like 1993 all over again? Probably.