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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.
No matter how horrible a business model they use, it still can't be worse than Vista.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Considering Microsoft has, in the past, been accused of artificially bundling components together (IE+Windows, DirectX10+Vista, etc), I'm going to remain skeptical on this plan. It seems like Microsoft can get much higher revenue from a several-hundred-dollars major upgrade than a pick-n-choose bundle of features. The only way I see them breaking it apart is if their monopoly really does begin to be challenged and they have to start selling in a truly competitive market.
E pluribus unum
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.
--
$tar -xvf
...how that more & more Windows looks like *nix sometimes.
Since NT 3.5 we've had:
True multi-user (Terminal services, fast-user switching), sudo (UAC), headless servers (server core), decent scripting (PowerShell), and now more modularity?
Yeah I know, some of these aren't exactly the same, but you see my point.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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?
How is this any different to what they have done all along, where custom installations allow you to pick and choose components? I remember doing that all the way back in the mid-90s.
I guess what I'm saying is: what separates a "module" from an application or a library? There appears to be no meaningful difference.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Losen up, will ya? Their not that bad. You just can't let it effect you.
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!
that "object file system" is gonna rock
Microsoft secretly wants you to switch to Linux. Really, they do.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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?
I've got one of those modular operating systems, can just have a bare-bones core for appliance or add things until it turns into a desktop or server or supercomputer node.
but what I'm scared of is I've been hitting the shopping cart too often, apt-get this and apt-get that.
I'm dreading the day the bill for all these nifty modules comes in the mail.
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.
Okay, there is no way in hell that I'm going to run any OS as my main OS that requires a fucking *subscription*.
What happens when you're late with a payment? You windows will refuse to let you log in?
I've been using Linux pretty exclusively at home for the past year (my wife does OSX on her new intel macbook). The more I use it, the more I can envision a completely MS free life. Now this news just gives me a date to go along with that vision
I'm going to say it: 2010 will be the year of the Linux desktop! Thanks to MS!
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Anybody remember Vista Ultimate edition? The one that promised Ultimate Extras - regular extras that you could download through Windows Update? They released 3 things through that: an small card game, DreamScene (sucks up CPU to animate your desktop background), and Bitlocker full drive encryption. That was all just a little after RTM - nothing since then.
When they came up with the idea I thought it might be interesting, but they've shown they can't follow through. If this is at all similar I'm sure it will fail. Microsoft won't be overthrown just from this, certainly not by 2010, but I'm sure it will pave more of the Disappointment Road that Vista started.
When they say "subscription" I get kind of worried. Valve carefully calls their Steam games "subscriptions" to remove your right of resale.
What they REALLY mean is that they are going to be taking out huge chunks of functionality, and then charging you separately for each of those chunks.
I *fully* expect that the first version of Office that runs on "Windows 7" will have formerly free features that no require you to pay for add-ons to Windows before they will work.
I actually like Microsoft for the most part, but their push towards software-as-a-service is really turning me off. If anything is going to bring them down, it will be this. I don't think they understand just how much of a backlash their is going to be. No one wants to be nickeled-and-dimed to death. Business won't do it, and consumers won't care.
It's the business model that's different. Technically, they're doing little more than selling/renting out DLLs. (Well, .Net assemblies, most likely)
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
1. Post statement bashing Microsoft/Vista.
2. Don't provide any evidence
3. Predict the downfall of Microsoft in X years.
4. [optional] Add reference to glorious "Year of the Linux desktop".
5. Profit?!
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
Does this mean we might see drivers for most devices that aren't part of the kernel itself? A stock Windows XP install is surprisingly robust, but add even one crappy driver to the mix (Yeah, ATI, I'm looking at you!) and soon the computer's gone on a one-way vacation to Reboot City.
In what way? How is it more modular that, say, the Linux kernel with as much as possible compiled as modules?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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? =>
Salesman: Here are the keys to your new car!
Customer: Thanks, and just in time its starting to rain. (gets in car and buckles up)
Salesman: Are you sure you don't want any upgrades?
Customer: No, a million times no. Just the basic car!
Salesman: Your choice. Have a nice day!
Customer: Hey! Why won't the widow roll up?
Salesman: Oh, You wanted a Window?
Customer: Of course I wanted a Window!
Salesman: But you said you didn't want any upgrades.
Customer: Well I NEED a window, my car is getting wet inside.
Salesman: Ok, that will be another two thousand dollars.
Customer: TWO THOUSAND!!?? Are you crazy? Why that much.
Salesman: That particular option package is bundled with the expensive model radio.
Customer: Thats crazy! Why would you bundle the window with a radio option.
Salesman: Now that would be silly to put an expensive radio in a car if its just going to get wet now isn't it?
Customer: Ok, Ok, just give me the window now.
Salesman: (reaches in his pocket, click click) There you go, you can put the window up now.
Customer: What about the radio? You said I get a radio with that option!
Salesman: You already have the radio installed, it should be activated now.
Customer: But wouldn't the radio get wet without the window?
Salesman: Thats why its bundled with the Window. If you don't have the good sense to put your window up we are certainly not going to waste a good radio by leaving it out in the rain.
Customer: That still makes no sense!
(Salesman reaches in his pocket again; click, click, Window rolls up automatically, sprinkler on the roof turns off, engine starts, and the tires start laying rubber through the parking lot.)
Salesman: (shouting) Are you still sure you don't want any other options? We have a great deal on breaks today!
"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.
I'm still waiting for that closing parenthesis ...
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
> English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn
Bullshit. English is so damn easy compared to, for example, Polish. Polish is the Perl of spoken languages. I speak both, and am a native speaker of Polish, so I guess I can say so.
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.
In 2010, the EU rules Windows still not modular enough, tells Microsoft, "All these desktops are yours, except Europe. Attempt no installations there."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because, in the next 5 years, Linux will really be ready for prime time. Trust me.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
- Installation of Windows 7: the OS communicates with the TPM and 'takes ownership' of the TPM. (The tech docs can't spell it out any clearer: the programmer controls the computer, not the user.) When taking ownership of the TPM, Windows provides the public key of Microsoft to the TPM.
- Booting the computer: During installation, Windows installs a hash of the bootloader code and the OS code into the TPM. The bootloader performs a sanity check using the TPM to ensure that it has not been compromised. The bootloader then verifies the OS against the TPM and only loads 'genuine' copies of Windows. Note that the definition of genuine is entirely up to MS; at any time the TPM can be instructed, only by its owner, to invalidate any credentials. It's perfectly possible, and in fact designed into the specs, for the TPM owner to completely disable TPM protected software at any time. Irreversibly, because the binaries are encrypted and require the TPM's cooperation to run.
- Updating Windows: Before updating, the OS instructs the TPM to provide a guarantee that it is a genuine TPM (using information manufactured into the chip), and the TPM signs MS's public key. This cryptographically proves that the computer has a TPM and that Microsoft owns the TPM. Microsoft then transmits the update to the computer, encrypting it with the TPM's key to prevent the native code from being revealed to the user or installed on a non-authenticated machine.
- Installing a module: Similar to updating, but more insidious. The user purchases a certificate to run a module, then the module is securely transferred to the machine. The certificate is stored by the TPM itself to prevent it from being read from disk or RAM by a third party. This is done for all the TPM's information. The module is then installed if and only if it is authenticated by Microsoft. This may seem to have some flaws, but that's taken care of with the following...
- Running a binary executable: The OS can require that every single binary be signed by a person who is authenticated by the owner. The TPM verifies this, and then either provides the OS with the decrypted binary or a failure notice. 'Configuration states' are a key principle here; at any time the state of the system (all programs that are running) can be saved into the TPM. This can be used for example by Windows update. The updater saves a configuration where only the core OS and the updater are running, and then can ensure that it will not update if not in this configuration. This keeps any on-the-fly memory editors out.
A lot of very smart people put a lot of effort into this system; it works. It's just been waiting for that 'killer app' to use it...Japanese grammar is actually very uniform. There are only 1 or 2 verb conjugation exceptions or something like that. The hard part is reading/writing the Chinese characters, which does include knowing which pronunciation to use (Japanese or "Chinese"). And actually I've spoken with Japanese people that felt Romance languages weren't too bad, particularly Spanish, especially because of the conjugation system, and the somewhat similar tones.
A German guy once told me that he felt his language was one of the hardest in the world, and all the reasons he described reminded me of English to be honest (which makes sense considering English is Germanic, with lots of Romance vocab bolted on).
Many Japanese can make sense out of written Chinese, but that doesn't mean they find the spoken language easy to learn. From their point of view, it seems to be every bit as devoid of logic as English. Despite having borrowed a lot of words from Chinese, the underlying language is very different from Japanese.
A multilingual Japanese once told me that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for Japanese speakers to learn. Its grammer is regular and it uses about the same set of sounds that Japanese does.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
). There you go.
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.
Dammit Microsoft! You're making it harder and harder to pirate your damn OS. Why do you isolate your users like this?!?!? I'm fed up! You've been reducing the capability to pirate since XP came out, and i'm damn tired of it!!!!! If you keep this sh*t up, we might just move to linux, or worse, Mac OS
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Probably has to do with the fact that foreigners deal a lot more with written word and a lot less with everyday speech.
heh.
Mein Englisch ist besser als Dein Deutsch! Parlez vouz français, je ne comprende pas!
Ciao,
-S
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... in a way. COM is now pretty dated, and it required a lot of extra programming to make sure that things were properly supported. Programs that bundle with Microsoft Windows are extremely integrated, regardless of whatever libraries and APIs are made available. There is no "cd %notepad_dir%; make" command for the Windows system, literally, there is no way to know for sure if something needs to be rebuilt without literally recompiling the whole source code.
You make a change to some random library, that changes the publics for that library, and that disseminates out and touches potentially tons of binaries. The reason Vista started using componentization is exactly for this reason, so that you could trust that updating a certain library only hit a limited number of binaries. However, even this isn't ideal, as many of the changes to library don't propagate changes out to binaries, but since they're all in the same component, you have to bundle all of them together, even if most of the component is just updating version numbers.
For quite awhile the Service Pack for Vista was looking at being a ton of GiBs big... once they made some changes to be able to again only patch at the binary level *gasp* the SP size went down. Oddly enough it was called "small SP", even though it is still larger than other SPs before. (There's just data to "touch" the version number of all the binaries that didn't change despite being in a component that was serviced.)
(it's only done at compile time for most programs).
As noted above, most of the internal modularity of Windows the OS is done at compile time as well. As for updating things, I've updated on the fly the Linux kernel, X-Windows, WINE, and Mozilla/Gecko before on the ol' Red Hat systems. Honestly, I don't know where you're getting your troubles from, but I've never experienced any of them myself. Most notably tough, I don't have to recompile everything from scratch each time a new version of Gentoo is released... rather, I just compile what was updated. Windows Vista still isn't uncomplicated enough in compiling to be able to do this. No less, its dependence upon the Microsoft Corporate network.
And you're actually wrong. Mach is a microkernel. But just because the kernel is a microkernel doesn't mean that the stuff built upon it actually make use of that microkernel. Windows has also been based on a microkernel since Windows NT. The difference between a microkernel and a macrokernel are pretty irrelevant once you get to the layer of stuff on top of the OS.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I hope you're not too serious, but I'll try to explain.
Ubuntu uses Debian's apt package management system. It's a great thing, fast as hell (especially when one's coming from Gentoo or source-y relatives), easy through Synaptic and so on. It does, however, have one major difference to Gentoo's way of handling new releases: Only security fixes are applied to packages after a release.
That's a great advantage to admin staff. Never touch a running system's config unless upgrading to a new release. It's also a (rather large) disadvantage to people favouring the bleeding edge. A seperate "backports" repository will contain some new releases but it's not as extensive or current as gentoo's. The actual updating process itself, though, is typically orders of magnitude faster because packages are distributed binary (source optional) instead of as source and compiled locally.
Updating Ubuntu's embraced and extended* edition of Firefox to it's newest version is as easy as "apt-get upgrade" (emerge -u world) or "apt-get install ubufox" (emerge firefox) after an "apt-get update" (emerge --sync). Updating to vanilla Firefox from mozilla.org is, as GP stated, another beast.
* I'm seriously hoping for that third "e" there -- all those annoying Fx banners and buttons and other nuisances are enough to ruin an already mediocre product completely. Freedom in software should mean letting people use whatever browser they like. Be it Opera, Safari, ELinks, Lynx or even a properly secured instance of MSIE.
The Linux kernel is monolithic, even if you compile everything as a module, it's basically stitched back together as a big monolith. Linux modules are just excised chunks of the kernel that you can load on demand, but you still need something specifically compiled into the kernel for each specific module to hook into.
With XNU, kernel extensions are more self-contained, and insert themselves into the kernel using more generic/universal interfaces.
That's why OS X device drivers don't have strict requirements for kernel version while binary Linux device drivers require a specific kernel version with specific compile-time options, and source drivers need the kernel to be compiled with support for them.
"Losen up, will ya? Their not that bad. You just can't let it effect you."
I hope one day I'm so smart that I can't comprehend what you just said. Heh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Stack overflow averted. *whew*
Program Intellivision!
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..