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Next Version of Windows? Call it '7'
CNet has the news that Microsoft is currently aiming to release the next version of the Windows operating system in about three years. Previously known as Vienna, the OS is now simply known internally as '7'. After achieving a quality product, the article states, Microsoft's big goal with 7 is to recapture a regular release schedule for their operating system product. From the article: "Like Vista, Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame. Next up on Microsoft's agenda is Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, which is expected before year's end. The discussion of Windows' future isn't surprising, given that Microsoft has been criticized by business customers for delays related to Vista. Many business customers pay for Microsoft's software under a license agreement called Software Assurance."
Bill: [with a Fed-Ex delivery of the new version of Windows] Linus, I never got to tell you how much I admire you and your operating system.
Linus: What's in the box, Bill?
Bill: When I saw your operating system, I wanted all the features in it. Everything from the widgets on the desktop to the exhilarating smell of its security policies.
Linus: I said, what's in the box?
Bill: And when I implemented them into my commercial operating system, I realized I had committed the sin of Envy, for which I must pay.
Linus: [Shaking] Aurgh! What's in the the booooxxx?!
Stallman: [voice suddenly crackling over the radio] Torvalds! Do not open the box! I repeat! Do not open the box!
Solomon Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I would call it Venice, it will be stinking and sinking anyway.
And of course Windows 7 will finally be secure, stable and simple. Which is always what Microsoft promises their new operating system will be.... a few months after they release their current version and victims start realizing that it wasn't any of those things. And they fall for it every time.
Just watch, all discussion of the shortcomings of Vista will now be answered with, "yes but Windows 7 is going to address that issue."
For about two years that is, then will come the talk of features being dropped on the cutting room floor to make it to a shipping date. But never to fear, they will only be leaving out stuff you don't really need and Windows 7 is still going to finally be THE secure, stable and simple to use OS you have been waiting for.
Then it will ship, after a four year development cycle (see, we beat Vista's development time!) and it will be wash rinse and repeat as people actually see it and realize it is Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista all over again. And somehow the masses will escape coming to a 'sad realization' or will and still rationalize not doing anything about it.
But there is one ray of hope in the announcement, not that anything they say at this point can be believed of course, but if they are still staying with a 32bit version it means they have pretty much given up on ramming Trusted Computing down our throats.
Democrat delenda est
7 eh?
I'm assuming they're using this name to tell us how many service packs it will take before it should function like advertised, right?
Microsoft is scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year time frame...
Somehow I think, like Visa, this will take a hell of a lot longer than expected. Anyone else think that MS will have to endure lots of we'll-see-it-in-seven-years jokes?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
My guess is its biggest sin is Gluttony. Any disagreements?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
To name it after a hot Star Trek character.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Is it really neccessary to support 32bit processors when it probably won't run on anything that doesn't support 64bit anyway? Kind of like Windows 3.1 being 16bit when it wouldn't run on anything older than a 386 (32bit) anyway.
32bit operating system in 2010...I wonder how many floppy disks Microsoft will be supplying it on.
7
I like microcars
Because that is what it will take to run it. And 16GB RAM, minimum. And you will need a new UltraMegaPCI spec to run a graphics supercomputer for the "NitroXtreme" interface. And security will still be for shit.
I have a better idea - why don't they morph whatever it is they run on Xbox360 into a full blown OS?
Ummm no, OSX is supplying PPC32, PPC64, ia32 and supposedly x86-64. Apple has no interest in IA64, and rightfully so.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
> Kind of like Windows 3.1 being 16bit when it wouldn't run on anything older than a 386 (32bit) anyway.
:)
From your profile it is clear you are too young to remember it first hand so I'll educate instead of flaming ya.
Recall that there were versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.1, the first clue to which should have been the version number. Moving to Win32 was a major upheaval in the software world, keeping compatibility with Win16 and more importantly, DOS were the major selling features of Windows 3.1. By 3.1 a lot of major software was running in Windows 16-bit AND business depended on a lot of DOS code, home users depended on DOS for the majority of games, etc. Heck, most of the software people were actually running on WinNT was 16-bit code. And most games were DOS based well into the Win95/Win98 era. It wasn't until XP was looming and game makers saw sticking with DOS as a death sentence that they drank the DirectX Kool-Aid for any project not depending on 3D.
And there were a LOT of 286 based machines not only in the installed base but still being sold. For example on the day Win3.1 shipped I was working at a Radio Shack in the D/FW area and the only 386 class machine in the store was the SCO Xenix box in the stockroom running the store. To buy a 386 class machine from Tandy you had to go to a Business Computer Center.
Democrat delenda est
Erm no..
Windows NT4 = 4.0
Windows 2000 = 5.0
Windows XP = 5.1
Windows 2003/Windows XP x64 = 5.2
Windows Vista = 6.0
I must be ahead a few versions, it says 10.4.10
Let's see:
Glutony: It will probably require at least 32 GB of RAM.
Envy: They keep copying other peoples ideas.
Sloth: Too lazy to fix bugs, so they release new operating systems instead.
Lust: It's hard to beat all those porn trojans.
Greed: Well, it's M$ after all.
Wrath: That's how you feel after 5 minutes of using it.
Pride: And after all that they'll still pretend it's the best OS ever...
Yeah, Windows 7 is a pretty good name for it.
Three years isn't that far away, and most businesses aren't planning on moving to Vista any time soon. My guess is that many of them will just skip it entirely if the next version of Windows, which presumably will be what Vista SHOULD HAVE been, is right around the corner.
It just confirms the widely-held opinion that Windows Vista was rushed to market, and is really just a crappy "place-holder" operating system, much like Windows ME.
vista is 6.66
WHy would anyone bother with vista is it will be reaplaced just as it begins to reach maturity?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Infinite time is a regular release schedule?
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'm looking forward to Microsoft ClownPenisFartOS then.
AT&ROFLMAO
I think Microsoft have one real option if they want to stay in the game.
They have to do like they said before Vista: Rebuild everything, implement winFS, and give us a new, functional GUI, and a stable system. They also have to maintain a near 100% compatibility with Vista and/or XP.
I think Vista might be the last time that software companies will even bother to rewrite software for a new Windows. By the time 7 comes, Linux and Mac will have a significant part of the market share (I would guess at least 15-20%). If Microsoft fails this time, the future for Windows looks very dark.
Remember, no other Windows version is as hated as Windows Vista. Proof here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcARXN7cr9Y
The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows
The more you tighten your grip, Ballmer, the more desktops will slip through your fingers.
is to build a new OS from scratch. This is the only thing that can save Windows from its own increasingly complex API and general sluggish performance The Singularity Project could give us a clue of what a future OS from MS could look like.
.NET is a move in the right direction, pushing and encouraging developers to use managed code. Legacy code will probably run under some virtualization technology.
The problem is that MS cannot just abandon all the software that is built on NT so the only solution is to take it very very slowly.
Getting good performance under a virtual machine still requires a lot of resources that the average home user never has. Perhaps in order to push home users to buy this new version of windows - which will give everyone worse performance when using the software they all know and love (NT software) - MS will decide to give it away for free and make their money selling ads
Of course this is just wild speculation and I haven't really looked into its viability from a business point of view.
Strange, my windows version is 11R6...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done)."
Uh, considering 2000 was just NT 4.0 with the IE 4.0/Explorer shell jammed on and a bit of tweaking under the covers for DirectX, I'm pretty disappointed. NT 4.0 ran reasonably well on a 486 with 24mb of RAM, and even better on a K6 233 with 128mb of RAM. However, without DirectX support newer than 3.0, the only real thing that I use Windows for (since the Wine/Cedega DirectX support lags a bit), I was forced to start using Windows 2000 -- an OS which does not run nearly as well as NT 4.0. NT 4.0 was also hobbled a bit by a lack of USB support. If you were to take a computer from anywhen between 1998 and 2001, and compare its performance under Windows 2000 and NT 4.0, you'd find it was not as close as you might think. By that metric, Windows NT 4.0 appears to be better than Win2k, and thus makes it the best Microsoft release ever.
Windows XP is only a minor revision to Windows 2000 (far more minor than Windows 2000 is over NT 4.0) -- which is why the internal nomenclature for the two is Windows NT 5.1 and Windows NT 5.0, respectively. Activation and a fisher-price interface (which you can disable) are the big differences, although the broken VM (minimizing a window to the taskbar lets it tell the VM to pageout its memory to swap -- even if you have many gb of RAM free!) and some other "tweaks" are also "features" of Windows XP. In any normal setup I've had, the only really bad difference between XP and 2K was that XP was limited to 10 TCP/IP connections at a time OOTB.
You could even argue that Windows Server 2003 is the best Microsoft release ever -- it's definitely the successor to Win2k in terms of no fisher-price UI, and the code tree used inside. Have you tried any of these, or are you making your claim purely on XP vs. 2K? I don't consider your Win9x experience to count, because that's a completely different codetree/build from Microsoft.
Of course, YMMV, since I only run Windows inside virtualization with either MacOS X or Linux as the real host operating systems (no troubles with search or sleep inside MacOS X -- although I disable Spotlight due to its rather large and unwelcome metadata cachces).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If your active distribution *can* run 64-bit, all the drivers are 64-bit. The kernel must be 64-bit (and by extension all drivers, where we define drivers as loadable kernel modules). It's simply not that big a deal as the lion's share of the drivers of interest were open source and the change to a new architecture for many was little more than a recompile, however, there were many exceptions, and early adopters of x86_64 linux distros are probably painfully aware of them. Source code explicitly calling out uint32 data types as memory addresses, some funky things with PCI addressing and memory holes, etc etc. I think the open source world benefits somewhat from 'code nazis' with nothing better to do than nitpick such peculiarities as they find them, even before they would have functional impact, while commercial development has project managers with whips to meet schedules, leaving no time for being pedantic. Additionally, many of the most popular drivers frequently were somehow applicable to an existing 64-bit platform (i.e. sparc and ppc64), therefore the code had largely already evolved to be more platform agnostic, or at least trained a large number of OSS developers in how to do it so porting of those drivers was not bizarre. Applications are another matter, i.e. because of Sun's Java plugin and flash, my 64-bit systems still run 32-bit firefox, and provided all the libraries are there, the 64-bit kernel doesn't mind hosting 32-bit applications at all.
Now Windows 64-bit is a different set of circumstances. Most drivers have source guarded by the hardware vendor, and most of these hardware vendors ever really cared about support Windows and the only platform where Windows dominated was x86. Thus the situation is pretty grim for those companies, many of which still don't care about 64-bit, and the ones that care being ill-equipped for knowing the sorts of things that break in a platform change of this sort. The fact that the driver API is so close to what they've been using, it means the logical schedule move for them is to try to port their existing code. Of course, as Vista has shown, the commercial vendors have even more of a hard time getting it right porting from XP driver model to Vista (even without an arch change) than 32 bit to 64 bit within the same driver model.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ballmer: I think they really went for that Soda. ...especially an app. Or an OS.
Gates: What, are you crazy? They hated it. They were just humouring you.
Ballmer: Ah, alright. Believe me, that OS is gonna be called Soda.
Gates: I can tell you, I would never name my system Soda.
Ballmer: Oh, no no no. Course not. I got a great name for our OS. A real original. You wanna hear what it is? Huh, you ready?
Gates: Yeah.
*Ballmer uses his finger to draw a number 7 in the air, while whistling*
Gates: What is that? Sign language?
Ballmer: No, Seven.
Gates: Microsoft Seven? You're serious?
Ballmer: Yeah. It's a beautiful name for an OS or an application...
*Gates scoffs*
Ballmer:
Gates: I don't think so.
Ballmer: What, you don't like the name?
Gates: It's not a name. It's a number.
Ballmer: I know. It's Mickey Mantle's number. So not only is it an all around beautiful name, it is also a living tribute.
Gates: It's awful. I hate it!
Ballmer: Well, that's the name!
Gates: Oh no it is not! No program of mine is ever going to be named Seven!
Ballmer: Awright, let's just stay calm here! Don't get all crazy on me!
I work for a mid-sized business; four locations with about 500 employees.
We use Avaya (formerly known as lucent, formerly known as AT&T) phone systems. They are truly awesome -- in a not-good-at-all way. I am the primary administrator (UNIX background, not old-fart-telecom background).
So first we bought them, paying thousands and thousands of dollars, but now we have to RENT them too. You see, you pay a maintenance fee every month that works out to something like $8,000. If we stop paying, it's Avaya's policy that they will dial into our phone systems and cripple them so that we can't use about half of the command set. No, I'm not kidding -- they've done it to us by mistake and they are being sued over it in other states.
What do we get out of it? Not much. If some of our server hardware breaks, then Avaya will replace it, but Avaya won't assist with programming unless we pay them something like $80/hour for assistance. Given that a 24-port digital line card costs as little as $3K from authorized resellers, and we've never had one break, we would be much better off just hording our cash and buying a couple of spare cards and parts.
Unfortunately, Avaya also has a tight control over their supplier market. They have "authorized resellers" and then the SCARY "GRAY MARKET" oooooohhhhh BE SCARED!!! It's also known as eBay, where part prices are roughly 1/3rd of the cheapest Avaya authorized-monopolistic reseller.
Our sales person reminds me of a used auto salesmen.
Subscription services usually suck when it comes to software. Be warned.
Windows 7 is going to implement WinFS.
Really.
I'm serious!
Would you stop laughing?!
Rethinking email
Remember when 95 was released, and we all made those jokes about 95 meaning the minimum recommended memory in MB, or the amount of disk space in MB it would use? Sometimes I think "If we only knew."
Nope. I just checked. clownpenisfart.{com,net,org} are all taken.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
build a new OS from scratch
That would be a disaster which would finally bury them, so I hope they do it.
IMHO they should do what Apple did: Start with the best around (UNIX), and get on with adding value.
you had me at #!
1. Windows 3.1
... which means that it will have very large breasts and be covered in blue Spandex.
2. Windows 95
3. Windows 98
4. Windows 98ME
5. Windows NT4
6. Windows 2K
7. Windows XP
8. Vista
9. Seven
Seven-of-Nine
This one may have potential.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"My mum upgraded and it's exactly the same, except now it's got 'rounded corners', big deal it's the same thing except the 'corners are round'!!!"
I was quietly suprised, but she went on..
"My mum has gone throught the same hassle everytime she decides to upgrade her computer, she spends a whole lot of money, a whole lot of time and in the end the result is the same thing, except 'the corners are rounder'".
That is the perspective of a average computer user with no technical interest, I simply agreed with her and said I had noticed pretty much the same thing.
For as long as I can remember M$ have underdelivered. I don't even support windows users anymore, it's simply not worth the effort, if I fix it, it will break again subject to the three R's of windows;
Reboot the machine.
Reload the application.
Reinstall the Operating System.
I can charge them for it, but I usually just make suggestions on how to fix it so they have to go through the hassle themselves, after all it was their choice.
Nowadays, I just give people a Ubuntu live install to try, I tell them it will probably be a bit slow running of the CD or DVD and to focus on the way it works rather than the speed. I think that, despite the fragmentation in the Linux distribution's, I continue to notice a trend of installing more Linux, either Fedora or Ubuntu. This year I've actually had people asking me for linux installs, I haven't had any of these lay-users wanting to go back to windows even though I give them the option to. In reality, I think it comes down to this,
You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
I don't think this simple peice of wisdom factors into M$'s business plan.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think they simply rolled the dice on this one.
There is no need to re-invent everything, especially at the hardware level.
What Microsoft needs to do is write a UNIX like O/S with the following features:
1) write the successor to the C language: a strongly and statically typed C derivative with none of C's deficiencies but allowing access to the bare metal, also incorporating functional features. They certainly have the stuff to do that. Then use this language to:
2) simplify the driver development system using microkernel techniques.
3) write a single tree file system, like in Unix, where filesystems are mounted/unmounted.
4) write a network-abstraction system on top of the file system described above, where resources of the system are abstracted over the network.
5) write an object/typed database layer on top of this network abstraction system, and offer it as the default. Use MIME as the typing mechanism.
6) write a Window System, ala X, which is a regular process sitting on top of the database system.
7) write a truly object-oriented toolkit which includes gui, xml, database, and everything else required for modern apps. See the Qt model for a good example.
8) use unicode throughout the system. Don't have 8-bit functions and wide-character functions. Make character a single 32-bit data type which can host all unicode characters, so you don't have a problem on how strings are handled. Forget C string handling, and do it in the modern way.
9) provide garbage collection where appropriate. This means that all code, except the microkernel and system drivers, should be garbage-collected.
10) use the Erlang model for multithreading. Provide userland multithreading libraries for the fastest multithreading possible.
11) virtualize the O/S for the user. Make it as if the user can read/write/execute everything, but any change will not be reflected to the system files or other users' files. Provide a ring security mechanism, like 80x86 rings, so as that networked applications can not hurt the rest of the system and can only communicate with it through specific call gates.
Microsoft's problem is entirely a software problem. They want to use 70's technology for the 21st century. It's doable, but only if UNIX like principles are followed.
(Thank God Microsoft does not read slashdot though, because there are quite a few interesting proposals here).
Except...
First versions of 98?
Windows ME?
The patterns seems to be one big step forward, a few small steps back.
Win 2000 was the high point for me so far.