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Windows 7 Likely Going Modular, Subscription-based
Microsoft CRM writes "When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most 'modular' operating system to date. That's not necessarily a good thing, of course; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. From Microsoft's perspective, though, there are many possible benefits. The OS's developers can add/remove functionality module by module. New modules could be sold post-launch, keeping revenue streams strong. A modular approach could also allow the company to make functionality available on a time-limited basis, potentially allowing users to 'rent' a feature if it's needed on a one-off basis. Microsoft is already testing 'pay as you go' consumer subscriptions in developing countries."
Their primary concern is probably far more to be able to ditch or unbundle a feature as soon as they feel a threat from Anti-Thrust agencies or something of the kind: they learned the hard way that saying "but its so integrated, we can't separate it!!" doesn't work, so there's no point to program their OS like crap on purpose anymore, and they can deal with the real problems instead.
Once again, Microsoft is making fantastic promisses that have little to do with their last set. I wonder how many current features will evaporate.
This is not a good way to make money. Vista is a failure and Windows 7 will be an even bigger failure. At a minimum, the next three years belong to GNU/Linux. Users and hardware makers alike know better than to buy into Vista now and people looking for new hardware and software are going to go Linux. By 2010, Microsoft's base will be erroded. The Microsoft game, at long last, is over.
No calls now, I'm
Once that becomes possible, less microsoft-friendly jurisdictions (like say the EU) might demand they open up the interfaces so competitors can use them. People buying chunks of OS from non-microsoft vendors probably isn't in microsoft's best interest...
Microsoft seems to be hell bent on making their product harder to use, and at its own peril.
What Microsoft doesn't get is that operating systems and computers, in general, are just appliances. Yes, people like to tinker, but, when one opens up the box, they want everything. This fascination with dynamically installed and dynamically loaded modularity has been the ruin of Microsoft ever since Windows 3.1 began prompting me for Disk 5 when I tried to do something, and it continues to this day. All the Windows versions continually ask for the CD/DVD, whatever, Visual Studio defaults to online help - which sucks when you are on the train, and now they want to make Windows even more modular?
By contrast, I put in a Linux DVD, and I install everything. If I want to install something more, I can do the insanely difficult exercise of typing "sudo apt get install [programname]".
This is my sig.
I wonder if this will backfire. A modular OS means that each component is easier to replace, as it's not intrinsically linked with the rest of the OS.
If you can replace a component, and choose which pieces to run piece by piece, people might make choices that aren't in Microsoft's interest.
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$tar -xvf
Microsoft intends to reverse the mistake of Vista by making an operating system that continues in the direction of Vista even further, and force users to pay continuously for the privilege. All this and they don't plan to release it until 2010 giving Mac OS X and Ubuntu a chance to chip away at their market dominance for two years whilst their current top of the range OS flops.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
... if you haven't started your plans for moving away from Windows, now would be a good time.
I think Microsoft is starting to realize the gig is up. In Vista, the whole "we'll just produce a mound of crap, and people will have to buy it" model is starting to dwindle. Unfortunately, it looks like the new model is "we'll only force half the amount of crap we used to, and you can pay for the rest when it's released."
I honestly like using Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I don't like it as much as my Ubuntu installation, but it isn't terrible... at least, not after SP2. I simply just can't tolerate Vista, though. I was somewhat hopeful for Windows 7, but news like this (albeit far from 100% sure to happen) puts a big dimmer on it.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
That's the same rhetoric that's been said by the anti-MS crowd for the past 10 years. What makes the next 5 any different?
Michael Hart (of Project Gutenberg) has it right. He's been saying for about a decade now that publishers, music companies, software companies, etc. are trying to move us into a world where ownership as we know it will no longer exist; nothing will be owned (at least not by consumers), everything will be rented. E.g. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2003&post=2003-01-22,3>here
This is an issue that both liberals and conservatives should be united on. The desire to own stuff goes deep in the human psyche. The person who rents everything is utterly dependent on a high, steady stream of income can't survive even a short interruption or reduction in that stream. It's a very insecure and anxiety-provoking way to live.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Renting an OS is only sensible if you aren't dependant on it for your applications and files.
If you're no longer dependant on the OS, then why rent one if you can get an identical one (from a productivity perspective) for free?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
a) What? You want to use ALL of your installed 8 GB or RAM, not only 2 GB? Sure! The "improved memory accessibility module" subscription goes for just $1.50/GB/month!
b) So, you say you want to use all 4 of your cores instead of just 2? Plus have access to the 2nd processor in your 3D graphics board? Why, no problem! We're selling a PERMANENT, I say PERMANENT license to the "multi-core compatibility mode" for just $35! Offers end by July 13th, 2011.
c) Ah, you need to have 5 USB devices connected simultaneously, and need them all to work in fast USB 3.0 mode instead of USB 2.0? We had a promotion for that last month, but unfortunately now we're back to the standard price, sorry. It'll be $0.50/USB device/month for every device above the 4th, plus $14.99 for the permanent 3.0 functionality, or $0.90/month for the subscription version. The module name is "FastUSB expansion/speed-up bundle package", and you can find the different option in the Connectivity tab at the Module Shop window.
And so on and an so forth.
Not a pretty picture.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
After Vista, you have to wonder what Microsoft thinks it can do to revive its fortunes. A modular OS? Hello, meet *nix.
I've been an exclusive linux user for ~10 years. I know more than some, less than many. But friends, relatives, and co-workers are suddenly coming up to me and asking about "Ubuntu." And three days ago I read an article in CIO magazine posing the question, "Is is time to dump Vista?" to which many replied, "switch to Ubuntu."
That's significant. I've been happy to be ahead of the curve in terms of usability, stability, and security. And I can't lie--it gives me pleasure still to hear about people having problems with Windows issues while knowing I'm immune. But when people who've previously given me blank stares when I extolled the virtues of FOSS come to me and ask about a distro whose name is based on an African language, I can't help but wonder at the exigency that drove them to such extremes.
I look forward to the era of the 2nd coming of Apple, and the underlying gospel of *nix. For a time, Apple will collect those who have money and favor dead-easy implementation. But eventually they too will succumb to the ineluctable realities of *nix.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It's the business model that's different. Technically, they're doing little more than selling/renting out DLLs. (Well, .Net assemblies, most likely)
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Many slashdot posters speak english as their second or third language. We should always remember that English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn; it is an order of magnitude less regular and its working vocabulary is far larger than the Romance languages. All rules about spelling, punctuation, pluralization, etc. are wrong at least 1 or 2% of the time. There are over 30 vowel sounds represented by 5 1/2 letters. There is quite simply no logic to the use of prepositions in idiomatic phrases, and idiomatic phrases are all over the language, even in basic tourist / shopkeep speaking.
That said, "no" "hello" and "OK" are just about universal words at this point. If people are forward and the other party isn't made uncomfortable by foreign language speakers (Americans, for fairly obvious reasons I think -- isolation and power -- are the rudest first worlders about people who don't speak their native language. It isn't just waiters and store owners who are blatantly rude to non-English speakers, it's about everyone. A really high percentage of Americans will simply shrug or outright lie to someone requesting help to get them to shut up and go away.
Anyway, don't pick at peoples grammar. They're a stranger and you know nothing about them. Plus, given the way education generally works, it's classist as all hell.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
And here I thought they were called "applications". And I believe they already are sold separately. And can be added/removed at whim. Hell, my Windows XP even has a friendly UI to help me keep track of, and add/remove any that I want.
What we're seeing is the end of Microsoft--not as a company, but as the monolithic OS vendor that they've been for years. It's much like IBM in the 1980s. IBM went from the monolithic vendor of PCs to a company that had to compete with the "IBM compatible" clones. The reasons are the same in both cases:
Corporate Culture: IBM, like Microsoft, had the "IBM way" of doing things. They had a corporate culture that stifled real innovation and was all about maintaining revenue streams above all. They weren't willing to take risks, they weren't willing to sell products at less cost, and they were all about promoting their own ecosystem. Just like Microsoft. There have been plenty of rumblings about the way in which Microsoft is becoming a less and less hospitable place to work, and the erosion of the corporate culture is one of the biggest signs of a failing company.
Erosion of Markets: Microsoft depends on a Microsoft ecosystem. Windows on the server, Vista on the desktop, Windows Mobile, SharePoint, etc. The second there becomes a viable alternative to anything, they lose revenue. If people don't upgrade to Vista, they lose revenue. If people stay with Office 2003 rather than Office 2007, they lose revenue. Don't even get them started on Linux servers, Macs, or iPhones. Microsoft's real biggest competitor, though, is Microsoft. The reason why they're moving to a subscription model is because they have to keep people on the upgrade cycle. If their old stuff works well enough that people don't need Vista, 2008, and the latest Windows Server, they lose their chief revenue stream. That's the wall they're running into today.
Stronger Competition: The iPhone is set to eat Windows Mobile's lunch. Macs are taking the educational market back. Linux is gaining more and more acceptance. Firefox has taken browser share from IE. Why pay $100 for a Windows license for a device like a $299 eeePC? As computing becomes a commodity, Windows loses relevance. The rise of the web has taken 15 years to start breaking the MS stranglehold, but it's doing what we said it would back then. You don't need Windows to use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, or Gmail. Every web app challenges Microsoft's OS dominance. If those web apps run on commodity UNIX servers, even more so. Microsoft is competing for the market space of 5 and 10 years ago, while Google and Apple are creating their own market spaces where Microsoft isn't dominant.
This doesn't mean that Microsoft will go away, but it does mean that their days of dominance are over. The OS market will fragment, and we're already seeing that happen now. It isn't nearly as quick as some had predicted, but it is happening. Microsoft won't go out of business any time soon--but they can forget about being the only player that really matters anymore. It's the business cycle in action, and this was bound to happen sooner or later.
I wouldn't call the bizarre mess of the MacOS kernel "modular". It's certainly not a micro-kernel, if that's what you mean.
All the mainstream operating systems today are somewhat modular, in that you can swap components in and out if they implement the same interface. This is especially true for Windows, in which long-term heavy usage of COM (which was explicitly designed to promote modularity) has meant that you can do things like swap out the IE rendering engine for Firefox, and it'll work. Well, assuming that Firefox supports the features the embedding app in question needs, of course. If you doubt this, feel free to download the Gecko ActiveX plugin and try it ... most apps use IE just as a convenient rendering engine and can run when Gecko replaces it.
That might not sound impressive, but try swapping out Gecko for WebKit or Opera on Linux and see what a mess you get into. Hell, just try upgrading Firefox on Ubuntu. You will almost certainly fail. I know, because I've tried it. About the only sane way forward is to leave the old version in place and install a new, parallel copy - but that has its own problems due to general brokenness in the way ELF was designed (it doesn't seal off shared libraries from each other properly, so they can interfere and cause crashes). Although to be fair, Linux (really, unix) does let you swap out your display subsystem for another one thanks to X. So they all have strengths and weaknesses in this area.
I'm not really sure why you think Apple has "specced out its software at a maximum consistent level". Dealing with missing features is just a part of the software development game, and Apple supports that with what they call weak symbols. It's important because not everybody upgrades their OS at once, so even if you only have one edition of your operating system, developers still need to adapt at runtime to things that are missing. The piss-poor support for this in Linux is another reason upgrades are so flaky (it's only done at compile time for most programs).
I'll be interested to see what Windows 7 actually ends up being. I suspect that this whole modularity drive is coming from upper management somewhere, and by the time it reaches the engineers they will say "well .... but windows is already modular!". They'll make some token gestures, clean up some cruft that users won't really notice except in worse app compatibility, marketing will trumpet the changes as meaning that things will Really Be Different This Time! and nothing will really change.
Can I just say, "Holy crap!"? On the surface, my first response was - "Huh. Actually, that sounds pretty cool. I'm tired of getting Windows installs with all the extra shit I don't want."
Then I put on my developer hat, and reached the aforementioned "holy crap" conclusion. The best thing that Windows has going for it from a development perspective is its consistency. (I know enough people disagree with this, but just let it ride for argument's sake.) What I mean by that is that you know, for a target OS version, exactly what is available to you. If you have Windows 2000+, various security APIs work. If you have win98+, various common controls are available, etc.
This obviously isn't ideal, but it does work well; and IMO it makes Windows easier to develop for than Linux (yes, I've done both). You know exactly what to expect for a given version of the OS, and for most of the functionality you want, you don't have to worry about a large number of external dependencies.
Now... enter subscription components. Let's say I build something that expects to use the Mail API that MS provides. Oops! the customer hasn't subscribed to the mail option! Does MS get the call? Nope, but I sure do...
This also means they need to make their 'Windows Genuine Advantage' checking really good: When they want monthly payments for all the separate modules, they sure can't let piracy happen.
This time it's not once that they need to check for validity but they constantly need to keep checking. (I do know WGA does this at the moment.)
That must be quite horrific to code though, they had enough trouble with XP and Vista. Now they need to start checking those modules in multiple configurations
Does this also mean the end of specific 'roles' of windows such as home premium, business and ultimate?
Dependency hell? =>
"Modular" is a tenet of good programming; it's not a dirty word. Modularity in the various Windows operating systems isn't nearly as much a problem as bloat.
Besides, this isn't about programming practises or about providing something that the customer has asked for. This is a new attack vector in MS's ongoing battle against piracy. The more the product shifts to online management and control, the easier it is for MS to cut loose individuals or organizations (or countries...) that it suspects are not fulfilling their subscription requirements. It also lets them offer value packages that have the same core OS without gimping the product.
I don't like this development, but MS is going to go this way regardless of what the customer wants.
I think that "the most difficult language to learn" varies from culture to culture. If you speak French then learning Spanish or English isn't too much of a stretch, but learning Japanese is going to be challenging. Similarly, I think that a Japanese person would find almost any western language very challenging to learn in comparison to say, Chinese, which at least has a similar "alphabet" (Kanji obviously, not hiragana and katakana).
Additionally, I don't see anything wrong with correcting people. If people are, in fact, on here and speaking non-native English then we're doing them a disservice if we ignore their errors and they assume they're doing things correctly. When I was learning Japanese I jumped at the chance to correct my grammar, improve my vocabulary and fix my verb conjugation.
Finally, those claiming that grammar correction is "classist" should realize the irony of their statement. If I'm taking the time to tell you you're wrong and giving you an opportunity to learn the correct way then I'm hardly promoting some social hierarchy. Far from it. I'm trying to bring everyone up to the same level. If I sat here and silently judged your inability to differentiate "their" from "there" - THEN I would be "classist".
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Sadly, practically every single time I've seen someone confuse loose/lose, they're/their/there or its/it's, they were American English speakers for whom English is a first language. Foreigners tend to get those things right.
On the other hand, if MS does this, then competitors can come in and offer the same components/services. Open source will do it very quickly, driving the cost to zero. If MS tries to shut out anyone else, the result is antitrust action.
Selling the OS as on-demand modules could be the first great leap in converting the Windows user base to 100% open source.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
What is different now from 5 years ago is that MS is facing heavy weather on a number of fronts: OOo is really growing up, with a certified, fully open document format with multiple other implementors; Google is one hell of a competitor; Ubuntu is improving faster than MS' offerings; MacOS X market share is rising, even more on laptops; Neelie Kroes (EU) is watching MS' every move; dirty MS politics are more well-known (ISO); all of MS' 'visionary products' are nowhere to be seen (tablets are but a small niche); and last but not least: joe sixpack reads everywhere that vista sucks.
And especially this last one may be very interesting: it is now fashionable to say that MS does not deliver good software. When the first features will be dropped from Win7 (which as we all know is inevitable for almost any reasonable sized project) there will probably be articles in the media comparing the dropping features from Vista (maybe even back to 'Chicago' / Win95, which was to have the new winfs filesystem) with the dropping of Win7 features.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Probably has to do with the fact that foreigners deal a lot more with written word and a lot less with everyday speech.
They make it out as if I'm the one making close-minded, stereotypical decisions.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..