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First Details of Windows 7 Emerge
Some small but significant details of the next major release of Windows have emerged via a presentation at the University of Illinois by Microsoft engineer Eric Traut. His presentation focuses on an internal project called "MinWin," designed to optimize the Windows kernel to a minimum footprint, and for which will be the basis for the Windows 7 kernel.
So Microsoft tells something about the next version of Windows not long after the people have noticed that their current version isn't all that it's made up to be?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
"Windows kernel to a minimum footprint"
It depends if you have size 24" feet (MS) or 8" feet like real normal OS's. No matter how big the foot, you can only reduce your footprint to the smallest size of the foot.
So that, as far as I am concerned, is a nebulous comment intended to fool the press and others that still believe every MS 'press release' they spew out.
Apparently it goes:
2, 3, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7!
No wonder kids have so much trouble at math....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I'm sure Microsoft developers have good intentions and big dreams for Windows 7. I'm sure they did for Vista at the beginning of the project. But they'll have to cut corners, meet dates, add legacy support, and all the things a behemoth like Microsoft always thinks they have to do. For all their failings, you've gotta give Apple credit for having guts to change things - the Mac has gone through three CPU architectures, and two completely different operating system kernels.
I can't help but wonder if this is a reaction to OS X being used on iPhone and iTouch(mySelf). Maybe they're trying to consolidate windows/windows CE. Or maybe this is just another feature that will be cut in favor of demanding a DNA sample before allowing you to access the internet.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This seems to coincide directly with some recent patents filed by Microsoft. It seems what they're truly after is an al-la-carte style OS where DRM is used to control the subscription of such "base OS" additions. Read more on the patent here, http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060282899%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060282899&RS=DN/20060282899
Basically, you purchase the base-system and tack-on additional subscription based modules. My concerns are how the subscription model will function, the subscription pricing, and the potential for removal of prior features such as 3D acceleration on the 'base' system.
It also appears that DRM will be used extensively in this model and will not be solely limited to music/video as previously thought.
Honesty, and I'm not trolling here, but this looks pretty scary. This reminds me of driver-signing gone awry. I don't see the potential for open-source/free modules due to item #3. Arbitrary application, memory, CPU, and process limits are also concerning.
The whole "add-on" 3D support as well as "don't limit my desktop to 5 open applications/processes" seems incredible. I imagine the base system will be usable to about 3% of the population and the subscription-based add-on modules may be pricey. I can't imagine a DRM style approach for 3D gaming/enthusiasts being acceptable. Imagine having to pay $20/mo for 3D + multiple core CPU + 2G RAM and the minute you stop paying all those modules expire and are no longer active until you resume payment; like Napster and other DRM based music models work.
-evilghost
when its at least in beta.
It's going to have a database file system! It's going to be secure! No more rebooting! It will have a really good command line!
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
The kernel hasn't been Windows's problem since NT 4.
The real problem is the middle-management clusterfuck. The direct result of which is the bizarro world of Windows the platform and its zillion libraries and APIs that have subtle (and not so subtle, but probably undocumented) incompatibilities.
Microsoft's own devs can't figure that shit out and they've been trying since XP. It has only become worse since they shoved all the digital restrictions management into the system.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
looks like Mistersoftie is up to their old hype the vaporware tricks to dissuade buyers from going with attractive alternatives.
One of Apples biggest wins with controlling the hardware AND the software is this very fact... they have phased out legacy equipment and software every so many years.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
You turn on the computer. You are greeted by an angelic chime that gets progressively louder until your speakers shake. You attempt to adjust the volume but it only gets louder still. A full screen Window icon ripples across the screen then all goes black. The product activation screen prompts you to enter your activation keys, printed on 27 pages of holographic alloy glue to the inside of the aluminum DVD case. For the next 3 hours you enter the activation key, taking breaks to use the bathroom, eat, and make phone calls.
... and so on...
After entering the correct activation keys, a dialog appears prompting you to select your social login profile group. You have no idea what that is so you click "Other Networks" The next dialog says "Connecting to networks..." for the next 5 minutes. A message apears saying "New Hardware Found" but it can't find the driver. Another popup appears "No networks found". Then your desktop appears. The wallpaper is stunning. The Internet Explorer icon appears to majestically float above the screen. You click it. A message appears warning you that the Internet can harm your computer, do you want to continue? You click "Yes". You are prompted to enter your administrator key. This key is on the sticker on the inside of your PC case. You shutdown the PC, get a screwdriver, open the case, write down the 18 digit administrator code, put the case back together and reboot.
After rebooting, blocking your ears during the chime assault, and oggling the amazing wallpaper, ignoring the "live folders server not found" error, you try Internet Explorer again. You dutifully enter the administrator key. You are asked if you want to save this key to your "universal keyring" You click OK. You are warned that the universal keyring is encrypted and your sending encrypted information. You click OK. After 3 minutes you get an error saying "No key server found"
You never do get to see the Internet. But the wallpaper is amazing.
"has mac done this or is it just that the OS on a linux bas system is just plain faster"
The implication that the Mac might have got rid of the BIOS (and hence gained speed) is tied to "a linux-based system is just plain faster". You could easily read that as suggesting the Mac is Linux-based.
FWIW, the Mac doesn't use a BIOS, it uses EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) these days. And it's not Linux-based either.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Take it from a former Microserf - this "internal project" will be taken to the nearest corner and shot (and maybe also mutilated and spat on). When you have a huge turd of a codebase dating back 15 years in some places, the last thing you want to do is dramatically rehash it. Projects like this are DOA at Microsoft after the WinFS fiasco.
Good. Small kernel is a good start. Now make it open source and let me install whatever the hell I want for a desktop manager and applications on top of it.
I've been saying it for years now. Windows should either be an open standard for operating systems to be built or be a desktop manager built on a Linux kernel. Of course, then what would the diehards bitch about on slashdot?
The game.
This is essentially exactly the same as Windows Vista except instead of removing features as they get close to the deadline, they've started out with all the features already removed. When you don't meet your expectations, lower the expectations.
Qxe4
Until the next great advance in OS technology, the kernel, the core OS is a solved problem by modern standards. Microsoft should build windows around the linux kernel and be done with it. they could refocus their huge resources toward all the great stuff they have cut out in the past. Even the massive wealth of Microsoft can barely compete with their proprietary system against open source developers. Why waste so much time on security issues when the answer is just there for the taking? Of course, they will never do it without a massive shakeup. it's just too threatening. This is their downfall, eventually, at least insofar as platform domination goes. they still have shifting proprietary file formats and forced upgrades, though, at least. what a business.
must... stay... awake...
Legacy support can easily be virtualised. That's how Apple managed the jump from OS9 to OSX (the "Classic" environment was launched on-demand), and that's how Windows 7 should be built.
Sure, legacy apps will run marginally slower, but new apps will be free of the built-up cruft.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I know this is severely outdated, but once, when I needed to reinstall '98, I didn't install my sound driver, and I was getting a incredibly fast boot, something like 20 seconds on a 650 MHz system. When I later installed the driver, my boot time went up 50 seconds to around 70. I know that in the last 8 years, a lot of time has been spent reducing the amount of time it takes to boot Windows, but I'd be interested to see what happens if people disabled some of the non-critical hardware on their machines to see what it does do to their boot times.
gentoo's portage system being ported to windows... emerge outlook
Jumbo shrimp
...
Military intelligence
A new classic
Efficient bureaucracy
Peace force
MinWin
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Every odd Windows Version being good?
1) Windows 3.1?
2) Windows 95
3) Windows 98
4) Windows Me
5) Windows XP
6) Vista
7) First Contact?
> So Microsoft tells something about the next version of Windows not long after the people
> have noticed that their current version isn't all that it's made up to be?
Duh. They have been doing this same bait and switch for the life of the company.
Step One. Release wonderous New Version! It is THE must have thing.
Step Two. Everyone realizes it sucks but their money is already in Bill's pocket. And everyone realizes they have no choice but to adopt the new product anyway because of the three year hardware replacement cycle and the illegal (as certified by a US court) bundling agreements with the OEMs that continue to this day. Especially in the case of their OS but to a lesser extent with Office and the other crap they peddle.
Step Three. Microsoft begins hinting about the upcoming new version. It will fix all of the (not quite admitted) problems with current version AND add exciting new must have features. And it is coming Really Soon.
Step Four. Have their minions in the trade press obsess about Upcoming new version. All complaints about Current version are answered with "But Upcoming version will be out soon and will fix that problem." After a year or two make sure to begin writing reviews for competitors products by comparing them to features that Upcoming version will be shipping "Any day now". By this point EVERYONE must be lamenting how crappy the shipping version is to help generate the NEED to upgrade when the new version ships.
Step Five. As the death march to release continues and feaures get cut, spin it as a good thing. (We are focusing on the needs of our customers, blah, blah.) Now that there is beta (anyone else would rate it pre-alpha but.....) code get the drumbeat ramping up in the press with lots of articles and screenshots. Will your hardware be compatible? Can life as you know it continue without the exciting new features? Etc, blah blah.
Step Six. The product finally releases... See Step One.
Democrat delenda est
That IS Windows 7! It's the return of the CLI! Everything old is new again! Reviewers are already writing accolades for the new interface. It's been called "Bold" "Clean" and "Unobtrusive".
The perfect OS for people new to computers, no longer is there a rash of icons to confuse them, the OS is "simple" for those not technically inclined.
Enterprise customers love the lack of superfluous eye candy. Windows 7 screams "business" and "just the facts" and with a lack of translucency and 3D effects it runs much faster on businesses' hardware. Upgrade cycles can now be extended another 5 years and save millions in hardware costs by not having to buy higher end processors, memory, and GPUs to get basic work done.
Gamers will also appreciate more of their system's horsepower being put to use on their favorite titles. "It's like playing Doom on DOS 6 again!" raved one user.
Yup, Windows 7, it's not outdated, it's VINTAGE CHIC!
I used to have a program that analyzed the boot log file from a windows 98/ME machines and pointed to anything over a set time frame. It diplayed everything in the boot log but it let you filter it to specific times, failures and all that. Often the generic devices that used system memory and processing power took the most times to load. Taking the modem out and replacing the on board stuff with good full blown cards would decrease load times enormously.
It is possible you had a sound card that just wasn't a full blown hardware sound and off loaded a bunch of stuff onto the system's processor and memory.
Of course the different types of boot logs on NT machines didn't work so it cannot look at XPs boot logs. I haven't found anything like it for 2000/XP either. Which really sucks because often the boot log can show all sorts of problem areas that could lead to other glitches in the OS.
Where they trade out command line and GUI for a full emoticon-based interface.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
OSX was loosly based on NeXT. It's kernel is Darwin which is based on NetBSD.
Linux is loosly based on Minix only ditching the microkernel design and got support as the GNU kernel (another microkernel) was going nowhere.
Minix and BSD are based on UNIX, anyone can make a UNIX System III derivative for free as the code is public domain. Just most of the code is obsolete so you are better off making a BSD or Linux derivative (or Minix 3 if you want a microkernel)
So if you look at a family tree, Minix and Linux are brothers while OSX and Linux are more like cousins
Windows is the annoying friend that spunges off you for handouts and crashes on your couch
Make SELinux enforcing again!
The nice thing about microkernels is that the kernel itself it's completely isolated from the rest of the software running on it - even device drivers, which can (and are) a breaking point in common monolithic kernels. Instead of doing direct calls to the kernel, the software now uses a system of messages.
This, of course, works just fine and it makes the kernel rock solid, but makes system calls slower. I'm guessing that when Win7 is released hardware will be fast enough that this will be a non-issue (hell, it might even not be one now), but the point is, a "regular" kernel will almost always outperform it on the same hardware.
Consumer line:
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 95 (v. 4.0)
Windows 98 (v. 4.1)
Windows ME (v. 4.9)
Line killed off.
Business line:
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (v. 5.0)
Windows XP (v. 5.1)
Windows Vista (v. 6)
Windows "7"
There were no NT versions prior to 3.5 because the first NT was released after Windows 3.11, and Microsoft wanted their numbering to be consistent. NT 3.5 coexisted with Windows 3.x (and shared the same GUI design), NT 4.0 coexisted with Windows 4.x, and then MS killed off the "Consumer" Windows line, leaving the NT line to fill versions 5 and 6.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Oh God... I can't believe this actually made news. In. Such. A. Horribly. Skewed. Fashion. But this is /.
You can watch the presentation HERE - http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2007/videos
It was ONE of MANY presentations given as part of the ANNUAL UIUC ACM-hosted conference.
Please actually watch the presentation and STFU. Please. All it shows is that Microsoft is working on fixing what it considers to be mistakes in the design of its NT system. That is it. It's work as part of Win7. It is _not_ Win7. Listen to the questions that students asked Eric about MinWin. Listen to the answers.
What does a BIOS do? It does POST, lets the user customize some low-level system settings and puts the system in a known state before loading the OS's (boot-)loader.
An x86-style legacy BIOS does the same fundamental things as an x86-style EFI BIOS, the only major differences being the BIOS APIs, how the boot process is structured and the fact that EFI is not backwards-compatible on its own. Other than that, a BIOS, by any other name, is still a BIOS. EFI simply has fewer kludges and ties to legacy x86 hardware.
BTW, a few weeks ago, I read an article about some MoBo manufacturers considering adding 512MB-2GB of flash memory to boot an embedded Linux desktop from the BIOS for disk-less web-browsing and other stuff... a BIOS with embedded Linux does not seem that far-fetched, we only need 1GB firmware hubs to plug into Intel's chipsets and hope we will not need to flash our 1GB BIOS too often.
actually you'll find that conditional operators don't expand like that. The sentence is saying "the value of Linux != UNIX is not equal to OSX. In other words, (Linux != UNIX) != OSX or (true) != OSX.
He is clearly attempting to say that UNIX is not true, whatever that means
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Given that all it does is check encryption keys and decrypt data - i would wager it could be done in the equivalent of 1-2 lines of Perl. I've noticed no real speed difference between XP and vista on an old 2.4ghz non-ht PC. That machine is 5 years old.
The "bloat" in windows is things like:
I like linux/bsd as much as the next guy, but you'll notice that as they begin to get feature parity with windows, the "bloat" is going up in them as well.
When putting out an OS you have a choice: do you provide just the bare minimum of services (useful for embedded apps), or do you provide a complete OS including graphics libraries, 3d graphics libraries, various programming widgets, etc?
Is Windows bloat free? Of course not. However, when RAM costs I'd much rather be running FreeBSD full time, but it's not because of the bloat - it's because of the user environment - windows treats you like a fucking retard, and it's irritating... but for the apps most people want to run/develop, it's a fairly usable platform.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Just yesterday I was on some site (CNET, I think) and was going to flame someone who posted that "OSX is not LIKE Unix, it IS Unix." Sure, it has BSD wedged in there over Mach, I thought, but that's not Unix. It's POSIX compliant, but not Unix. It wasn't actually based on BSD.
Then I went to check my facts. I found this visual history, and OSX was nowhere on there. Great, I thought. I just need one more link to cement my position. Then I found the Open Group's list, and damn, I was wrong again. OSX 10.5 is Unix 03. Sucks to be me.
Put identity in the browser.
HIRE SOME FUCKING UI EXPERTS.
Sorry to be shouting and all but I'm a Windows guy, I always have been a Windows guy, sure I have that slashdot bone in me, wanting OSS to be huge, great, free and out there for everyone to share and love but let's be realistic now, for some people it's not an option, myself included.
Honestly I have been really quite satisfied with XP (after becoming accustomed to its own issues)
However after having recently tried Vista (multiple times) it's a disgrace, PURELY from a look and feel perspective, it's like 500 people designed it around a board room table but consistency and ease of use just aren't even considered.
I'm definately NOT an apple man by any means, yet having now used OSX for a week and an ipod for a year, they just get (most) stuff right, logical and simple - just how it should be.
Vista is wrong, it looks wrong, some of you can whinge it sucks under the hood or perhaps DRM ate your babysitter, maybe it has poor performance copying files and playing MP3's (doesn't bother me) but that UI? Good lord if you can't make it better at least give us back the XP one as an option.
It's time that MS made some RADICAL changes to the user interface, crazy out there stuff, which is actually USEFUL! rather than just re-hashing the same old thing, stapling on some stuff (poorly) and expecting us to enjoy it.
looks like Mistersoftie is up to their old hype the vaporware [wikipedia.org] tricks to dissuade buyers from going with attractive alternatives.
:P
Because, of course, you can't wait to have MinWin on your machine - the Windows that does only one single thing: publish your tasklist via HTTP.
Hmmm, so much better than Leopard
Come on, it's just a tech demonstration, Microsoft in fact closed themselves solid after the release of Vista. Management thinks part of the bad reception of Vista is because they were so open about the whole process for the entire 5 years.
For some part they are right. We'd never know about the dropped features if they were never pre-announced. Most products plan various features that get dropped or deferred in the process of development.
We'd also be surprised at the Aero Glass UI, and the new security features.
What we'd be most surprised about though, is the lack of consistency in the UI and stability/performance issues. So I'm not sure Microsoft has the right strategy right now.
Must be NT-based counting.
0. CP/M
1. VMS
2. OS/2
3. Windows-NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51
4. Windows-NT 4
5. Windows 2000, Windows XP
6. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7
8. Ubuntu Octal Overlord
9. Plan-9
10. OS-X
Plenty of future, you see..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The numbering system has nothing to do with this. Microsoft named it "7" in order to announce that they are finally catching up to MacOS's revolutionary System 7, from 1991. I for one can't wait for Windows to finally get "Balloon Help"!
Apple: 15,810 Microsoft: 61,000 Microsoft has a little under 4 times the number of employees Apple has.
They both do Hardware: xBox vs Apple Line (I think apple probably has more employees on their hardware than Microsoft.)
They both do MP3: iPod vs Zune (It should be a wash in employee #'s)
They both do Office Suite: iWork vs Office (Office has obviously more employees than iWork)
They both do "Family" apps: iLife vs Microsoft Movie Maker, etc. (iLife probably has more)
They both do an OS: OS X vs XP/Vista. (With out a doubt XP/Vista has more employees on it than OS X)
You'd think that they'd be able to do something right. Heck AppleMaybe it's bureaucracy collapsing the whole thing. Maybe what Microsoft needs is a Steve, a dictator, someone that says what goes and no questions from above. Back in the day Apple wasn't run like this and we had Copeland and all other "Next OSes" there were some iffy products (OpenDoc). Then Apple bought NeXT. Steve came back and the rest is history. (And about 3000% in the stock market).