Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
. . .why would MS need to create so much additional complexity?
"Trusted" computing.
KFG
What does this article mean anyway? Its a bunch of buzz words mixed together in an apparently random order.
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?
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"
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.
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.