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Fresh Air For Windows?
jmcbain writes "The NY Times has an opinion piece on how the next Windows could be designed (even through Microsoft has already laid plans for Windows 7). The author suggests 'A monolithic operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design. We don't need to load up our machines with bloated layers we won't use.' He also brings up the example of Apple breaking ties with its legacy OS when OS X was built. Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/technology/29digi.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=technology&pagewanted=print
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?
Based on past performance: No.
This has been another edition of Short Answers to Stupid Quesitons.
They could throw some time and effort (and $$?) into the support of WINE to allow the use of legacy Windows applications in an 'archaic OS'
Remember Vista? Supporting legacy apps is already something MS has no interest in, apparently.
but I still wouldn't buy it.
Anonymous Cowards get no respect.
Now that Bill Gates is retired from Microsoft, the editors should get with the times and lose that dated, painfully unfunny logo they use for Microsoft.
Most people probably wouldn't get the Borg reference to begin with, and now Bill Gates era at MS is officially in the past.
Only MS gets this ridiculous logo..now its finally the time they get rid of it.
I don't have any problem bashing Windows, but being modular is exactly the change from XP to Vista and what Server 08 does even better. Which is it going to be, that Vista should go monolithic for performance or that Vista should go modular for ease of design?
Why bother pretending that Microsoft will do anything with Windows that's interesting at all, when it's clearly spending its time and money making "more of the same", and its design constraints are clearly defined by its corporate interests.
How about just making a version of Linux like that? If more work also makes Wine work a lot more reliably for most Windows apps, the whole thing could do a lot better than Microsoft at making "Windows" users happier.
--
make install -not war
No
Actually it stands for Windows NT 7.0. Here's a quick run-down:
NT 3.1
NT 3.5
NT 3.51
NT 4.0
NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000)
NT 5.1 (aka Windows XP)
NT 5.2 (aka Windows 2003)
NT 6.0 (aka Windows Vista/2008)
frist!!
someone who knows nothing about OS teaching people who know about OS to write an OS. TFA is a troll.
As someone who started developing applications for Windows in 1991 and stopped around 1999, I doubt it. Better let legacy applications (and the whole x86 mess too, BTW) fade away, they have gone far beyond their useful life.
âoeOur approach with Windows 7,â he wrote, âoeis to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7.â I must have missed something. When did the investment start to pay off?
Apple could do that because they were much smaller than Microsoft, and had a small but relatively loyal customer base, and their rewrite did pay off, as people are generally very happy with OS X and don't care about the incompatibility with OS 9 and older anymore.
Microsoft has a huge userbase with much less loyalty, and generally a huge existing investment in software.
We don't need a MS Windows rewrite, we've already got Ubuntu, because that's essentially what the article author wants: an operating system that Just Works[tm], even at the expense of compatibility. That's a pretty good description of any popular Linux distribution.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Oh, yeah, this is slashdot. /.ers everywhere. I mean, imagine if MS actually delivered a wonderful, light OS! That would certainly be the end of /. as we know it!
Microsoft already said they will build on Vista instead of going the microkernel way, and we have discussed that fact to death.
Windows 7 will not be "Fresh Air", to the delight of
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
WinCE. Pity about the name, though.
"Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
Well, considering the fact that Vista's all but killed the chance of running any software made before the year 2000, I'd have to say "no".
It's pretty bad when old Windows software is much more likely to run under Wine than with the latest version of Windows.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
full backward compatibility is trivial... the windows kernel and platform team will use transparent Virtualization of all the older windows kernels (XP and Vista) to support all old apps and drivers.
- No Sig for you!
To me it's always been an excuse to keep windows bloated, and not actually any effort to keep old software functional.
Seriously kids. We did this already. Windows NT.
It should be noted that when Apple decided the Copland project wasn't going to rejuvenate the Mac OS they decided to license an OS from another vendor. One of the four major contenders was, in fact, Windows NT.
In fact, if you got back to Nextstep OS X is several years OLDER than windows NT.
The danger of this kind of rearchitecting project which we hear of to no end from the popular technology press is that it doesn't actually solve anything. In many ways Vista itself was an attempt to rebuild Windows from the ground up, But that simply made it a muddled, confused bag of broken promises and half baked technologies. The only good thing in Windows is what it inherits from XP and 2k - the large existing base of Win32 applications.
Windows NT had an emulation layer that handled 16-bit apps. OS X had Rosetta and the Classic environments. And Microsoft now owns Virtual PC.
They have the technology to make Windows a clean OS with emulation errors for doing whatever legacy OS you want. They just seem too lazy to do it.
He really doesn't know anything about the internals of the Windows kernel or the Mach kernel, he's just assuming that since the NT kernel is "monolithic" and the Mach kernel is a "microkernel" then the latter must be better, and the reason it's better is it is "smaller."
If you want to know where the real problems with Windows lie, they're in the API and the shell, not the kernel. The NT kernel is perfectly fine. See this Ars write-up by someone knowlegeable:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars
I'd like to point out that Microsoft employs one of the original authors of the Mach kernel, Rick Rashid. He runs Microsoft Research. Look it up.
Just switch to Mac and get parallels :P
Yeah, I know, not very funny. But does every comment have to be great?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
There was a time when a much leaner Microsoft highly respected and rewarded employees who could write good code. These were the people who rose to positions of responsibility. Today, Microsoft is run by Sales and Marketing and coders are viewed as an expense. Until this situation reverses itself, don't expect any improvement in the product they create. They are too stupid to realize their product is the code. Ballmer being from sales only reinforces this problem. Perhaps he should be moved to a chair throwing division that does the monkey boy dance, and someone who can both create great code themselves and manage coders should be brought in as CEO.
When I.T. professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That's it?
Vista as delivered is significantly different from Vista as promised. So different as to be perhaps unrecognizable. It breaks everything, fixes nothing that wasn't already fixed with third party software, and expands Microsoft's victory over Novell on the network by being consistently unreliable with Novell networking.
I was wondering if this NYTimes article would hit slashdot. It reads a little like the author's an Apple fan, but not offensively so.
While the author issues Microsoft some good guidance, they won't take it. They can't hear us at all. It's time to switch.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
Answer: No.
Next question.
out of my cold dead hands!
Seriously, and it pains me to say this, but windows does the job pretty well, and most recent features have been nothing special and/or just plain irritating. And the computer world has moved from being a world of competing, hard-to-use (for joe average) OSes that almost do the job, to a world where we have several OSes (windows, linux, whatever apple is calling their latest) that all work so well that most people don't even register their existence unless they fail. Seems to me that given this the best thing MS could do to ensure their futures is to do one last push to clear out the bugs and polish the edges, then set the result more-or-less is concrete and move on to newer areas with better prospects for future growth.
Any software that was created in the past few years which vista 'broke' were most likely poorly designed or were associated with managing or doing the functions expected of the OS itself (with a few exceptions.)
Vista really isn't that 'buggy.' It is top heavy and uses way too much resources if you are only using it for limited things, but as a general purpose OS it really isn't that bad. I would still prefer Windows XP on new computers simply because I can get away with more power with a smaller investment in hardware, but I'm not necessarily 'against' Vista.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Vista proved this. Even though it dropped Win16 support (iirc), that turned out to be inconsequential, since no one's really been doing Win16 development for over a decade.
Which leaves Win32, going all the way back to NT4, then 95, 98, 2k, XP, 2k3, Vista, and 2k8. Eight releases which changed, added to, and muddled the Win32 API, but very little is deprecated, and even less has been removed, all for the sake of the legacy apps. Not much design improvement during this time either, as the industries based on Win32's flaws (ie, anti-virus) continue to thrive.
If Windows 7 is not a shining, slimmed down beacon of flawlessness, Windows and MS are doomed to be crushed under the weight of the legacy they have nurtured over the years.
I laugh every time I hear someone say that Windows has become so bloated, so slow, that MS needs to start from scratch and loose all the backward compatibility. Then I think of every time MS releases a new OS, and the whole world is complaining how their 15 year old apps no longer work, how their hardware manufacturers haven't created drivers, etc.. MS can, and could make New Windows, with a backward compatibility layer. Just expect everyone and their three dogs to be complaining that MS should have simply forgone the new and improved the old.
- develop Microsoft Virtual Machine to perfection
- make sure it runs perfect with win 7
- continue to provide it freely as you are doing now
- youre done
thats rather easy aint it.
Read radical news here
Ship it with VirtualPC or allow support for VMware and throw in a free copy of Windows XP of which ever flavor the user likes with real time backup/shadow copy/whatever and you've done it!
Just have the new secure O/S or security program scan the virtual network link for abhorrent data and quarantine it.
An IBCS-like layer in Windows plus WINE-like shim DLLs would be quite sufficient for the majority of legacy code. In fact, if they used IBCS as a starting point, they could also suppor legacy Solaris, legacy Unixware and legacy Linux applications as well, with very minimal effort. As for retaining Intel support, I'd say that at minimum, there has to be Intel binaries, although the adoption of the Cell processor might not be a bad idea. Sun's T2 is too expensive and they'd never be able to scale production up fast enough, although the benefit to Microsoft of an open-source processor is that they could shift some of the core routines and helper functions into the CPU itself. (They have the money to sway Sun into applying the patches at the fab plants.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, i bet they could retain legacy application support using Virtual Machine technology.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
quasi-informed op-ed piece. don't bother.
better to spend your time reading the classic piece about why software projects fail and why "version 2" is the most dangerous. a central point of that is "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", ie it is a fallacy to believe that your 2nd version will be less buggy than the first. it will probably be just as buggy, only less well tested.
I hope a learned CS major can provide the link, as I'm drawing a blank on the author.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I just had a great lesson in "legacy" support today when I bought a "Clifford the Big Red Dog" game for my son from the discount bin. "Supports Windows and Macintosh!" it said. On the old PPC iBook my son uses, the installer brings up the OS9 emulation stuff, which then seems to hang. So I try my work XP laptop, only to have the game announce "Requires a minimum of 256 colors" when I try to run it after the successful install. Only after lots of digging do I discover where I can find a dialog to set to 640x480 256 color graphics. (It certainly isn't in the main screen resolution dialog.)
This game is only eight years old. Heaven help you if you want to run software from the early 90s. And yet things aren't changed because in theory (though not in practice) Windows is backwards compatible all the way to DOS.
The cake is a pie
Fresh air happens only when the windows are opened (or broken). Which one is more likely, Open Windows or broken Windows.
I think the author of the article doesn't realize the difference between the legacy code and kernel architecture. Kernel architecture of windows is fine - its a hybrid kernel, which in general similar to Linux, you're not able to run in HPC on it, but hey, it is better than DOS! It's the legacy code that creates so much bloat, and swapping out the kernel won't change anything if the same mountain of code still runs.
Of course Microsoft could create virtualization layer, but then Linux has Qemu, Xen and Wine, and OS X has Parallels and Wine, and of course there is VMware, so if Microsoft would ever support legacy code through virtualization, alternative implementation of it would be release pretty quickly, and everybody here knows how Microsoft likes competition.
My guess there will be dying for the next 10-15 agonizing years, dragging any progress in the industry with them.
The lamest idea of the last 15 or so years. The new Windows would just forward legacy registry calls to some simple program which would create text files in the program directory. Then read them back, eventually transitioning to the old Windows 3.1 style configs.
You try telling millions of nerds that the new (and now decent) Windows PB (Post Bill) will no longer run any of the games they've played for the last 20 years. I'd punch someone if I could no longer run my games from the 90's. Do I play them a lot? No. But sometimes I'm in the mood for Baldur's Gate or Heroes of Might and Magic (1, 2, or 3) or some other old game.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Bashing Vista has become like pouring hot grits on Natalie Portman around here. It's just a meme anymore. It was funny for awhile but now it's just old.
Vista really isn't all that bad. I still have XP machines (and Linux, and OS X, and Solaris, and OS/2 even) but I don't mind my Vista machine at all. I also run a lot of old apps on it just fine.
How is that informative? It's just plain wrong as others have already pointed out, and it gets modded Informative? Heh.
I guess you never experience a version change where they did a complete rewrite of the OS. With Vista most apps run just fine. They broke some drivers and some software that went beyond the way it was recommended to program for the OS. I remember the same problems with XP, heck XP was worse then Vista in upgrades. Many of the old apps were based on the Old DOS and XP was based on NT. There were a lot of problems with compatibility. I remember problems with installing Word Perfect on XP because the system permissions with XP caused many features to not work in XP. Now this isn't just a Windows problem.
Lets take an old Linux app say back in 1994. Lets assume that you are not willing to recompile the kernel, and you use the default kernel of the distribution. There is a good chance that some apps if not most apps will not run in straight binary form. As shared libraries change perhaps changing a parameter data type or adding or removing a required parameter. Or if the new version of the kernel is not installed the a.out binary format installed. Or reads from the Proc Directory and the file format has changed.
Now Linux being open source for most apps you just need a recompile of either the apps or the kernel to turn on the legacy feature, and a slew of other things you can do to allow legacy compatibility for the app. However... The amount of work done to get the app to work could be just as much as installing Win98 in a VM (BTW it is not that tough at all), to run the app.
But for closed source OS's or even Hybrid Source OS's (OS X being part Open Source and part Closed Source) To meet the need of the most customers you need to make a decision for going further what will stay and what will go. Vista was better then XP in terms of compatibility. There are other problems with Vista that makes is Suck HyperActive Stupid Security, Slow even on fast systems, UI that offers no advantages other to look different.
If Windows did a full rewrite only a very very few legacy apps will still be around that will work for it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are we not in the time where everyone and their brother is using virtual machines? It would seem that MS should relegate legacy support to virtual machines instead. They have the source code so they could "easily" create a VM (or some very transparent layer that makes it look like its running natively) for each version they've ever sold.
Then they can do whatever they want and just keep the VM layers up-to-date.
I surely can't be the first to think of this...
:wq
Is it too late to vote this down as bin spam?
Microsoft: get with the plan and just adopt one of the FOSS kernels and libraries.
I know that Microsoft is making strides with their Microsoft Virtualization efforts. So what prevents them from going in a completely new OS direction and providing legacy application support through virtualization?
I'm not sure it's a lot. More a problem of agreeing it's the right thing to do than the technical work required. So political vs. technical.
A while back, Ars Technica had a good piece: "Why modular Windows will suck for Microsoft and suck for you". This was the persuasive snippet that stuck with me. ... ...
The issue is that modularization strikes a blow against the very concept of a platform. When a software developer writes a program for Windows XP, they more or less know what they're going to get...
With a modularized Windows, that could fly right out the Window.
As our friend in Redmond, Steve likes to say, "developers, developers, developers, developers...".
Anyhow, the full article is a good read. If nothing else, it serves as some inoculation against the MS PR machine that got its claws into that NYT story.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/modular-windows-will-suck.ars
What a whole lot of trolling effort.
Windows isn't a monolithic design. Its a hybrid kernel, and with every release of Windows Microsoft has seperated out user space even further, including dll-hell to further improve the paradigm.
One of the main guys behind Windows NT was David Cutler, a renowed software engineer and designer for VMS. Go and Google him, I can't be bothered to look up the URL.
That should at least give you a clue as to the seriousness of the product and what they set out to achieve: the copy bits of the system that mattered most to Microsoft.
Has been since Windows NT...
Plus I thought you guys were all Linux fanboys here. Linux is the exact opposite, and about as monolithic a design as you could get.
Indeed (although, not about the drivers thing so much.. but if you had hardware that only worked on XP/Vista, a pass-though could be implimented to allow that hardware to work ONLY in the virtualized enviornment.)
And Microsoft could release some new API that would allow a VM access the graphics hardware directly (or at least make direct D3D/OpenGL calls), so that old apps could still do accelerated 3D.
Honestly, it wouldn't be the end of the world; with virtualization being so good these days they could implement a VM layer for compatibility pretty easily, and shit, it could even make some XP apps run better on Windows 7 than Vista.
However - all that being said - I don't think Windows requires an entire re-write. The NT kernel isn't bad, it's pretty efficient. The Explorer UI isn't bad. They could trim away ALL of the fat, remove all legacy filesystem nonsense, implement a sane security/user model, and build from there - and still use the VM for backwards compatibility instead of hacks.
I dunno. We'll see. I don't hate Vista, but I do sometimes get disgusted when some things that should JUST FUCKING WORK, don't.
I also don't think that MacOS is some sort of MagicOS with no problems. I've used (and use) Macs extensively, and I've had a lot of bullshit problems with MacOS, too. You know, shit that doesn't work, or shit that's "what in fucks name were they thinking?"
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Is that a challenge?
Static
Animated GIF
Keeping in mind the theory than given an infinite number of monkeys banging away on an infinite number of keyboards, one will reproduce exactly the entire works of William Shakespeare, let's not get one thing wrong: Although Microsoft has several thousand monkeys, they also have several hundred of the brightest programmers in the world. They need to set up a team of experts to create a new operating system from scratch, designed for the future and based on all of the best knowledge available about operating systems. Such a system could be modeled on a similar design as that used by Apple: Open-source microkernel providing the most basic and lowest level services; open-source full-featured CLI-only operating system built around that; friendly user interface component which could be proprietary, open-source, or a combination of the two. This could give Microsoft the ability to protect true innovations in all the parts of the system with which most users would need to interact, while simultaneously capitalizing on the free work of those enterprising souls outside of Microsoft who would fix bugs, close security holes, or make other improvements to the system. Bottom line: Apple has made a fine example of how to become incredibly successful. Microsoft could learn a lot from them. It would put the $25 million that Gates invested in Apple to good use!
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Overall I thought this was a very well balanced article. It didn't come across as preachy or geeky. However, the author did seem to be a bit of an Apple fanboy, not mentiponing that this is the way that *nix has been pretty much since the day of it's inception.
As to whether M$ has the requisitely sized dangly bits to take the task on will remain to be seen in the next few years. I very much doubt it will happen in Windows 7 but if that OS proves to big a bloatware turkey as Vista has been then this may well happen. Having said that the hardware vendors will be on M$'s back to make sure that the next iteration of their OS will be as hardware hungry as Vista has been, requiring yet another expensive hardware upgrade path.
...as Avie Tevanian pointed out in the piece. Their backs were against the wall, and it was quite literally do or die for them. Microsoft is certainly not in that position by any stretch of the imagination. Their stock price may have hit a plateau, but they're still making shitloads of money despite the relative failure of Vista, and no matter what many here may believe or wish, Microsoft is not in some sort of death-spiral.
Can Windows move forward with a secure OS and still keep legacy insecurity? Sounds like a job for PR man.
If they had kept Xenix instead of trying to re-invent it, maybe they world stand a chance.
They have no interest in supporting legacy apps because someone already paid them money for the legacy apps they make money on, like Office, Outlook and IIS.
MS is already past its zenith: Vista is crap and Windows 7 built on it will be crap as well. That's the path MS chose.
If they want to sell a proprietary OS that just works, let them buy Apple. They already have some experience porting their money-maker to that OS.
Apple had a virtualized version of OS9 built into OSX for years. I don't know how having an entire OS included inside another is anything close to reducing bloat.
There's no need to read the piece; the URL provides the perfect summary. Genius, I tell you!
Here's the thing. Backwards compatibility tends to work best on software that's written well. That particular game wasn't - it wasn't checking the right settings to determine the resolutions, or it didn't know what to do when it found that you were running in 16.8M colors. If it did, it would have worked.
You can't blame the OS provider for shitty programming in old apps. And unfortunately, there's a lot of software that has shitty code.
Windows can't really know what version of Windows to "emulate" for many old apps, so in this instance, you were able to turn on a specific compatibility mode to make it run. So, it WAS compatible.
There's backwards compatibility, and there's wishful thinking. Windows is enormously compatible with old applications. Sometimes they take a little tweaking, but I'm still amazed how compatible Windows really is with old stuff. It's a testament to the programmers at Microsoft for sure, but it holds them back at the same time.
A new approach will be necessary in the future.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Trouble is, most apps are shitty, so it is questionable whether backwards compatibility, especially to the pre-NT days, is really worth it.
The cake is a pie
Having run Vista32 on this laptop when new, and just recently moved to Vista X64, I agree.
I turned most of the "eye candy" off on 32 bit, but 64 doesn't seem to get bogged down nearly as bad with the eye candy turned on. NOTHING else was changed, only the OS.
Anywho, yes, Vista is fine. Pisses me off that I can't run Win16 apps on Win64 (like, install C&C, for instance), but oh well.
I think I'll try 64 bit linux next.. Never tried a 64 bit rev... Any suggestions? I've always run Slackware since my first install, but it's not always the most "hardware friendly". It's a HP DV2000 based laptop, x64 1 gig ram.
--Toll_Free
No. The code bases were to merge at Windows 2000 Professional. Windows 95/98/ME were based on DOS. Win2K was the merge point at server and 'desktop'. XP came after Win2K, sealing the fate. At Vista, support for 8/16-bit code using DOS functionality essentially died. Try Duke Nukem II if you're unsure.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Correct.
However, that is not the problem ... the problem is that microkernel designs, such as Windows, despite the indication of "micro" given in the name, actually perform quite poorly compared to monolithic kernels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel#Performance
Even though the Linux kernel is monolithic, and hence enjoys decent performance (for example look at the dominance of Linux in the Top 500 supercomputers list) ... Linux still enjoys some of the modularity benefits of microkernel designs via the use, in the Linux kernel design, of loadable modules.
They can always contribute to wine
G
April 1, 2002
"Microsoft to base next generation OS on OpenBSD"
In a surprising development Microsoft stated today that it would
not be using the eight year old NT kernel in its next generation
operating system. The new system, to be called Windows BSD, will
be based around the freely available OpenBSD operating system.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer had the following to say: "As part of our
new commitment to security, we are developing the next Windows
product based upon OpenBSD. We feel that OpenBSD's security record
fits well with our new proactive security model. Furthermore, we
fully approve of the BSD license and encourage developers continue
to write similarly-licensed code and avoid the infernal GNU GPL."
When asked whether the decision to base the new Windows operating
system on OpenBSD had anything to do with the success of Apple's
BSD-based OS X, Ballmer exclaimed "There's nothing those Mac people
can do that we can't do better. Microsoft has a long history with
Unix-like systems, dating back from our original development of
Xenix. We are dedicated to providing the Windows experience to
Unix on the desktop."
And it is not just the desktop that is the target of the new OS.
As servers have traditionally been Unix's strong point, Microsoft
sees a bright future for Windows BSD, Server Edition. One of the
first tests of Windows BSD Server will be running on Microsoft's
Hotmail servers, a trial by fire that always left Windows NT a bit
scorched. Said de Raadt "We are confident that Windows BSD can
more than hold its own in the server arena. Indeed, we expect
it to become the benchmark against which all others are judged."
OpenBSD founder and project lead The de Raadt will be relocating
from Calgary, Canada to Redmond, Washington to oversee the new
endeavor. When asked if he felt he was selling out, de Raadt replied
with characterist aplomb "I've dedicated my life to free software,
it's about time I got something in return." Other OpenBSD developers
will likely be moving to Microsoft's Redmond campus soon. Joining
de Raadt in Redmond is OpenBSD packet filter designer Daniel
Hartmeier. Hartmeier has already started work on a new firewall
codenamed "Microsoft Ward." Said Hartmeier, "I had some trouble
getting to the states, what with the airline problems we've been
having in Switzerland, but I'm looking forward to working with my
development team on the new firewall."
When confronted with the apparent inconsistency of developing a
Unix-based system while at the same time sponsoring a wave of
anti-Unix marketing, Chairman Bill Gates replied "That campaign is
targeted towards those other, incompatible versions of Unix. It
has no bearing whatsoever on Windows BSD."
One potential problem with Microsoft's plans were the revelation
that the BSD trademark is currently owned by embedded operating
systems specialist WindRiver systems. According to Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates, "WindRiver will surrender the BSD trademark
to us or we will bury them!"
During the announcement of Windows BSD at a PR blitzkrieg, Ballmer,
Gates and de Raadt jumped around shouting "Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Come
on, get up, get up... Give it up for BSD!". A beta version of
Windows BSD, codenamed `Brobdingnag', will be available to MSDN
subscribers in 6 month's time.
However, not everyone was happy with the news of OpenBSD's commercial
success. A group of disgruntled OpenBSD developers who were not
offered jobs at Microsoft have created a competitor to OpenBSD.
Unlike OpenBSD, this operating system will be available under the
GNU GPL, effectively preventing Microsoft from using their code.
The new project, called GNU/BSD, is headed by French former OpenBSD
developers Dr. Marc Espie and Miod Vallat. In a joint statement,
Espie and Vallat stated "We feel it is grossly unfair to the European
developers of OpenBSD that all the attention sh
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
We'll have to wait for Windows X for that to happen.
A. ELNEC - which I believe is written in VB6, I think the author mentions it on his website.
B. Never heard of it. I'll see what google turns up.
Anonymous Cowards get no respect.
For a long time, MacOS X could run Classic apps by running most of the classic OS in its own process. Aside from some code sitting on the disk that you won't use much, I see no reason why the old APIs couldn't be supported. Or how about doing it like WINE? Create a thin translation layer to support legacy apps. Or worst case, rely on recent CPU virtualization features.
And finally, legacy app support should be optional, something you can install from the DVD, if you need it. Win32 and even Win16 can be add-ons.
#1 Base Windows 7.0 on the Singularity OS project.
#2 Work with the WINE team to get 100% of the Vista and XP API calls supported under WINE, and port WINE to Singularity OS aka Windows 7.0 for legacy support.
#3 Profit.
Microsoft make sure to make royalty checks made out to Orion Blastar via Paypal to my email address for this idea. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
NT was released in parallel with the 95/98/ME days for quite some time. There's really not a very big distinction between them besides updates to the Win32 API, for most programs. Sure, system utilities and such will usually be dependant on a specific version of the OS, but most normal applications didn't care if they were running on Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
The funny thing is that supporting very old applications, like Win 3.1 apps and DOS apps, is easy and relatively low-impact to the overall system compared to supporting apps that were written for Windows 95.
Compatibility *is* worth it, though. How willing would you be to use a new OS, even if it were from Microsoft, if you couldn't run a single application you use now? You could browse the Internet and check e-mail, but nothing else. Good for some people, but not for most people. So you NEED a level of compatibility.
I truly hope that Microsoft does something interesting (integrated/seamless virtual machine for old software?) the next time around, but who knows if they will. They don't really have to, yet. Not like Apple did. People will still use Windows 7 even if it's just Vista 1.1 - But not if there's zero compatibility. I'd finally make permanent the switch to Linux at that point.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Oddly enough, I've started to read reports of old apps such as Fallout running better on Vista than XP. Go figure.
There's no reason to even contemplate it. The article, as well as most of the comments posted here so far, assume that Microsoft acknowledges that there's something wrong with the existing Windows system and that it would be a good idea to start from scratch.
That's a false assumption. Microsoft thinks that Windows is, in fact, Pretty Darned Good (tm) and suggesting otherwise will usually get a chair thrown at you.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
If only I had mod points today... ;-)
Seriously, I'm not a fan of MS by any standards but I have Vista installed on my desktop box and it annoys me less than XP on my laptop does. It's not a bad OS really and good enough for me not to scrub it and install Linux instead. Years ago, I couldn't stand Windows and always hosed the HD so I could put Mandrake or Debian on, but now I find Vista to easily be good enough.
bang goes my karma... again...
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions, memoizations, tablings and/or materialized views similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded hence time-optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
It may turn out that due the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, the growth of reward may need ultimatelyto go exponential but the principle remains true.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Seastead this.
For kicks I recently setup Oracle 7 on a spare box running XP, considering it was originally ported to NT 3.51 it's working surprisingly well for a 13 year old piece of software. As long as you stick to core stuff, the NT lineage is amazingly backwards compatible.
Still, compare this to UNIX software - which may not be binary compatible (being rooted in minicomputer culture), but on a number of occasions I've compiled 20-25 year old applications with only a few very minor changes to account for GCC's bitching.
So whats the new approach for future? Give us the source code and we'll figure it out :)
Have the linux 64 distro's come up with a way to use wine and flash?
I'm running FreeBSD 7 amd64 on my laptop and for most things it's fine. Except no nvidia driver, no way to run wine, gnash is a hit or miss proposition and there is no adobe flash available.
Repeat after me: people buy and use computers for their applications.
The OS is a utility layer. The graphics package is what I use. The ABI and video codecs are commodities. The video player and music files are what I use.
I know that if my purpose for having a computer was running some funky 1995-era video game or 1985-era ERP app that didn't work on Vista, it's not the application I will blame for 'downgrading' my experience.
The same thing that hurts Linux adoptions hurts Vista's adoption.
This is why some people in 'Enterprise-class' datacenters still have Windows 95 running on old Pentiums. If the Vendor won't support you and you cannot support it yourself (re: proprietary) you are screwed.
(And yes, I am aware that some Linux aficionados treat administrating their own Linux systems as a video game in and of itself.)
I agree that it's not a bad OS... just horribly unfinished. "Release early" works for open source projects, but is not something we expect from a commercial entity like Microsoft.
My Dell XPS has a host of Vista-related problems (i.e., fails on Vista but works on XP). Some have nothing at all to do with the OS. For example, VMWare Server doesn't work quite right on Vista (can't change certain settings), but it works flawlessly on XP. Some are partially the OS and partially a third-party issue. E.g., the wireless keeps on disconnecting. The drivers from Broadcom are the culprit. But by disabling IPV6 the disconnects occur less frequently. Then there are pure Vista issues. For example, Vista does not hibernate properly. The pre-linker is not tuned properly and can thrash the disk for hours. And why can plugging in a USB network device cause Vista to bluescreen?
Decisions that aren't bad in themselves are not well thought out. For example, prompting to allow every app that runs may help security. After a while though it can get annoying and soon after that it becomes useless because we've been conditioned to just allow everything.
Yes, but look at relative hard drive capacities and prices. When the first version of OS X was released hard drives were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive than they are right now. Adding a few GBs for a compatibility VM would not be necessarily excessive--and if that VM was essentially Windows XP with all of the extras stripped out I don't think that a target size of a few GB would be too difficult at all. The other thing to realize though is that Vista was a large change architecturally (although not necessarily on the surface) from XP and these major changes (mostly in terms of sound and video frameworks) accounted for more problems (NVidia's drivers, especially) in many cases than the OS itself. Windows Vista introduced several new technologies. Windows 7 will be by contrast an evolutionary release and will refine and enhance that which is present in Vista rather than trying to introduce too many radical new changes at the OS level. While Windows 8 may be (and probably IS) a very good candidate for dropping legacy compatibility and implementing it with a VM or some similar plan, Microsoft desperately needs a stable, well supported OS right now, not *more* changes.
They have the code and the rights to Windows XP. Just make an application layer that runs WinXP stuff in a manner similar to how VMware Fusion does.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Anyone hear of Windows on windows?
That's basically the backwards support model.
on a 64 bit computer, you can run 32 bit apps without a problem with inline virtualization, kinda fooling the app into thinking it's on a 32 bit computer. Vista 64 and I think XP 64 have it, and that is the solution Microsoft wants, since that is what they have been planning on...
Well, I didn't really mention UNIX compatibility because it's a whole different thing. It goes without saying that open source is the only one true way to ensure that your old applications and data will be available far into the future.
That's not saying that said apps will run out of the box. Shit, some Linux binaries won't even run between minor kernel revisions, or minor updates to libraries. But, if you have the source, you could at least hire some programmer to make your app run, if it were critical to a business operation.
Somewhat off topic: In many ways, I wish "Linux" (or maybe more specifically, "major OSS projects") would stabilize more, but the very nature of it (there is no single entity controlling enough of it) prevents it. Sometimes I think many of the big OSS software falls victim to "Latest and Greatest" syndrome, forcing major system updates on us far too often. It makes binary backward compatibility a near impossibility. But, as you said, the source is available, so it tends not to be a big problem in the end.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Any new version of windows usually one broke applications microsoft was trying to destroy! Windows 3.1 broke DR dos, 95 broke other offices (and made sure no other dos would ever work with it), 98 broke other offices and browsers, xp broke quickbooks, vista broke quickbooks very well, it took intuit months to get it working with vista! And to no ones surprise, vista broke itunes...
Could they break from the past and start clean? Yes.
Will they? No.
Spin off a new company whose sole mission is to support legacy Windows applications. You really have to make this fork at the "corporate mission" level. Since their mission would be archival and historic support, the Legacy Windows Corp could even get excited about supporting customer's custom code that works perfectly well but is threatened by forced upgrades.
Isn't "legacy" the only reason that customers hang onto Windows in the first place, though? Businesses have all their documents in MS Office format, grandma only knows how to send email on Outlook, and everyone else wants to play their Windows-only games.
I think redesigning Windows would be a foolish move, because legacy support is the only thing it currently has going for it. If members of the Windows audience are going to completely switch OS, why wouldn't they pick one of the free ones?
Have the linux 64 distro's come up with a way to use wine and flash?
yes, but you need a multilib system
I work for a college. You would be shocked at the sheer number of textbooks that have CD's that have to run as Administrator to work. Things like using incrediably old versions of Macromedia authorware, which tries to copy files into windows\system32 before the program loads.. (i've tried manually coping them there, it doesn't check first!). Call the publishers, and they test it on windows 98, and WinXP home edition. Thank good for deepfreeze, so I can allow all users to run as a local administrator, but were not talking about old software, some textbooks we just got the newest version of during the winter break have this same problem.. The software works fine on students home computers, since they usually run as administrator, but not all students have PC's at home, so they come try to use the software in the labs..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Windows is big but most of the applications are centered on kernel32.dll, everything else is a layer on top of that (dozens of them).
The exceptions are mostly multimedia APIs like GDI and DirectX but there's not too many of those (in the big picture).
Microsoft has source code for all the middle-tier DLLs so if they can get kernel32.dll, DirectX, etc. working on the new OS then an awful lot of stuff is going to work.
The main carnage will be in the drivers ... again.
No sig today...
Any software that was created in the past few years which vista 'broke' were most likely poorly designed or were associated with managing or doing the functions expected of the OS itself (with a few exceptions.)
I have to disagree. The average user doesn't care WHY something broke, broke is BROKE. If something was able to be done in one version of windows, whether against the advice of MS's best practices or not, and then doesn't work in the next one, who are they going to blame? The program is the same, only the OS is different now. To 95% of uses, it is obvious to them who's problem it is. Break compatibility and the only reason for sticking with windows, in their mind, is..er.. out the window.
today is spelling optional day.
Eh?
Speaking for my own work in Microsoft, we get a ton of cool stuff from MSR in little ways. I've probably got a half-dozen interesting video things I'm talking with them about. None of which will be a product in itself, but would be incorporated into improvements to existing products and platforms.
One cool thing that came out of MSR in my own work is the new video deinterlacer in Expression Encoder 2. Huge improvement over the old one in Windows Media Encoder. It didn't get a big "Produced by Microsoft Research!" on the box or anything, but that's an example of MSR technlogy making it into a product.
My video compression blog
Wait for July 3rd and get Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 amd64, that will almost certainly do what you want. It has a 32-bit WINE that runs 32-bit Windows apps, I've used it a bit, it's the same as 32-bit WINE on 32-bit Linux.
Flash... I use swfdec which is *really* unreliable, basically just a Youtube client. But if you elect to use the official Flash player, it will be wrapped in a 32-to-64 layer which means it will still work in 64-bit Firefox. I prefer not to use the binary blob player but I've heard it works fine for others.
Ubuntu Hardy wasn't so great when it was first released, but the updates since then have really improved it, and all of those updates will be rolled into the 8.04.1 CDs.
Sam ty sig.
Virtual pc will be used to run really old windows apps for compatibility.
The windows 7 kernel is only 26 megs as was demonstrated and vista provides alot of layers in software to port to the new kernel to make it easy.
If anything windows 7 is turning more exokernel in alot of ways which will prevent what happened with vista where it was so bad ms had to start over many times with a new design with layers.
http://saveie6.com/
Irony of ironies, before dumping my PC and moving to the Mac, I wrote a blog post comparing Microsoft to the fall of communism; namely, that an inefficient system was collapsing under the weight of an enormous legacy, and that entropy awaits.
Lots of relevance to this story.
Here is link to full post if interested:
Comparing Microsoft to the Collapse of Communism
http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2007/03/microsoft_and_t.html
Cheers,
Mark
Windows Classic wouldn't suffer from these problems thanks to VT-x.
+++ATH0
Microsoft = Legacy
It's a simple as that. Windows users have always expected their legacy applications to work.
I think there is an obvious balance of legacy vs. security and stability. Microsoft could build a new OS from the ground up. They could learn from past design mistakes and make a secure, stable, and reliable OS. Of course legacy support would screw up this vision but it doesn't have to. Microsoft could create a sand boxed legacy virtual machine into their new OS.
-with every copy of Windoze 7, you get a complete Museum of Ancient Operating Systems! Working copies of Everything -from the original CP/M clone through XP-Pro*- including the truly historic disasters MSDos4.0 and Windows ME!
Experience living history bug-for-bug just like your grandpa did in the safety of our hypervisor environment ( when an os is corrupted just reload from the dvd )!
Old games will run like they did 1999 so, in celebration of this Marketing Triumph, the package is PRICED at $1999!
You may have "owned" them all before, but NOW you can BUY 'em all AGAIN!
*no, you don't get Vista, but ?WHO CARES?)
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
Nope!
For two reasons. First, too many apps depend on kludgey behavior of legacy OS features. If you clean up the kludges, you break stuff that assumed existence of or depended on the kludges. The only escape I see is if some kind of "new mode" and "old mode" can be selected for the app. The default would be old mode such that requiring a selection does not break old apps. But, new apps could select new mode with cleaner system interfaces. The problem is that by allowing both, enough apps will continue to use old such as to keep the kludges alive.
The second reason is cloning the OS. If MS made a "clean" logical design, it would be easier to clone. Kludginess introduces difficulty for cloners because it adds arbitrary, messy, and undocumented features that need mirroring, and thus serves a purpose for MS.
Table-ized A.I.
Who cares?
I switched all my PC hardware to Ubuntu, and replaced my laptops and desktops with OSX.
Rock solid easily maintainable servers and smooth workflow desktops.
Never been happier with my computers.
M$ started by buying an os, was Q-DOS, and a few tweeks became MS-DOS.
Needed an internet Browser, "Bowser .. what's that? ... what's this internet? ... would some shlock tell me!" .. Bill Gates at best.
They bought the Grad Student browser, SpyGlass, which was Mosaic for UL-UC NCSA, which bacame I.E.
Blah blah blah ... goes on and on.
Short ... M$ buys what they desperately need .. cant write or invent it.
Short .. MS litigates what they see as threat ... then tries to buy on the cheap.
Short ... Balmer will ride M$ to Davie Jones locker before turning to anything that M$ Research has cum up with ... M$ Research only exists to serve as a smoke screen for legal (US and EU) purposes, nothing more.
Doumo
That backwards compatability slows down performance in an OS is an old myth that refuses to go away. Its just a popular myth that simple minded people who dont know what the heck they are talking about can use to blame performance problems on. Code for old APIs isnt usually even entered until a program requests it. Backwards compatability is a feature of FreeBSD I use, I can run binaries back to 3.0, and Linux binaries too, and its very fast. There is a module that implements Linux syscalls. This code doesnt slow down other parts of the system, and is only activated when you run Linux software, and is only used by Linux software. It doesnt affect the FreeBSD software. Wine often runs windows programs faster than on windows. Backwards compatability is an important useability feature and does not affect OS performance significantly.
nt
Thanks for the info. Seems Ubuntu is the ::next greatest thing::, or so it would seem.
--Toll_Free
I think I'll try 64 bit linux next.. Never tried a 64 bit rev... Any suggestions?
Give the 64-bit version of Ubuntu a spin. I'm running it on my Core Duo Thinkpad have yet to run into a single problem where the 64- versus 32-bit thing is concerned.
Nah actually it is that bad, it's a piece of shit and I'm not a linux man to boot.
Vista Explorer - absoloute trash.
I'm not sure what you're trying to point out with your link. Existing Qt 32-bit applications continue to work, and either Apple will provide 64-bit Carbon in an update or they'll fix the HIView dependent Qt libraries when they transition away from Carbon. This issue has a negligible impact, and has nothing to do with "stuff suddenly disappearing" as you imply.
I've been developing, publishing, supporting, and updating my Mac shareware program for 12 years - since Mac OS 7.5. Originally written to the Mac OS classic toolbox, I adapted it to CarbonLib in 1999 with some effort, to get ready for Mac OS 9, and I ported it to Carbon OS X in 2001, making it much better in the process. And I'll be porting it to Cocoa later this year, and taking it an entirely new level through the use of the latest Mac OS X APIs for compositing and animation.
All along the way Apple has been great, and always getting better, especially since they released XCode. The tools are free, very usable, and every bit of API documentation is right there in XCode. And now they've released Cocoa 2, which is just a clear and wonderful programming API.
Apple may have made a lot of changes over the last 12 years, but the changes have been constant improvements, and have had minimal impact on legacy applications. I am grateful for the quality of the work they do to save me time and make the work easier. And as a guy who started programming as a young hobbyist, I'm especially happy to see Apple giving away their development tools for free. It means kids can stumble into programming just like I did way back in 1977.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Well I like Ubuntu Hardy because it's stable enough to keep me running until Debian Lenny hits in a few months. I'll re-evaluate then, but right now, yeah, I can't think of anything I'd rather run on a desktop.
Sam ty sig.
It's all perception though, I think. You might also ask if people would pay $500 for the hardware if it's available for $50. They will pay $500 for the hardware if the $50 hardware isn't actually what they want. This is the same for software, just as it is for everything, and the only real difference here is that the roles of the hardware and software in making up the total price are being reversed.
Most people I know think they want a computer, but really they want Windows running on a computer. What they usually need is something that's fully compatible with Windows and its applications, but what they want is Windows. If they'll pay $500 for a PC with Windows attached, they'll pay $200 for Windows with a PC attached. The fact that they could buy the hardware for $50 and install another OS isn't really an option for them, because Windows is what they want until they're convinced otherwise.
From a marketing perspective for Microsoft, it could make a lot of sense to start focusing on convincing people that for all sorts of things, Windows is what really matters. In other words, Microsoft could end up going into the business of including commodity hardware when it sells its software. A PC wouldn't be the real product being sold, Windows would. Going into a computer shop, you'd buy Windows, perhaps with a few hardware specs that might adjust the price in minor ways. (eg. The executive gaming brand of Windows would cost three times the price, even though the main differences are in the installed commodity hardware.)
Obviously this would be a big task for a Microsoft Marketing team, but that's what most people in the marketing profession do, like it or hate it, and they have a lot of often-underhanded tactics to manipulate people in the course of doing it. Granted that if someone could convince people that a $60 non-MS hippie system is just as good and useful and practical as a $200 Microsoft system, those people might take that instead it, but at the moment I think it'll still take a lot of thought and effort to convince a lot of people of that.
What concerns me personally if this happens is that it might become more difficult to get commodity hardware at reasonable prices without it being bought in a Windows box. Can you imagine what it'd be like if the personal computer market was transformed into something more like a game console market, primarily built around devices optimised to run Windows? For one thing it'd be easy for Microsoft to use DRM to tie Windows to its own hardware for one thing, so it'd never run on home-built PCs or laptops and thereby forcing people to buy Windows-approved console hardware to use it. In the longer term it'd also be much easier for governments to regulate.
This assumes they'd actually get away with it of course.
Why are there so many articles written by people who dont have a clue?
Vista just absolutely ruins legacy support, acting as sort of an executioner for a lot of the laggards using Windows 98/2000. And it's loaded with bloat and slows PCs down to ensure that it really has no market viability.
So that when Windows 7 shows up, they don't have to worry about legacy support, because they killed it last time, and they don't have to worry about the transition, because XP will have been so old that most everyone's dying to upgrade and anyone who already upgraded to Vista will be dying to move on from that!
I think I cracked the code.
My first thoughts "Andy Tanenbaum". But apparently his name is Randall Stross. Must be an acronym then... hmm, no "l" in Tanenbaum.
/bin) and why Windows has to be 2,5 GB.
Does Linux not prove that a monolithic kernel may not be so bad after all? I think it's the "Windows" part that makes it so bloated. I still wonder why I can install Linux (Ubunut 7.10 in this case) in less then 1,5 G (that is including X and everything in
Nothing wrong with monolithic. Something wrong with the decisions from Microsoft
but as a general purpose OS it really isn't that bad.
So it's still bad, just not THAT bad ay?
I would still prefer Windows XP on new computers simply because I can get away with more power with a smaller investment in hardware, but I'm not necessarily 'against' Vista.
Thanks for that, I'm sure we were all just dying to know what you thought
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?
You mean, vista? Oh wait, no legacy support. It's also a little slower... and not all that new. Oooh, now I get it.
On Ubuntu, wine works just fine. Flash sort of works with nspluginwrapper, which Ubuntu automatically installs and configures when you install the flash plugin.
Funn, my dad is partially computer illiterate and he just acquired a Dell machine.
It came with vista home, and his first impression is that the new windows does not let him do a lot of things (either because it blocks them or because they are hidden in places different of where they were on XP).
I was very surprised that he asked me to help him install Linux instead. That is quite funny because the last time he tried Linux was IIRC with Mandrake 7. And it was a complete disgrace. What I did is to tell him where to download Ubuntu.
If "normal" people (i.e., not geeks) are complaining about vista, for some perceptible issues, I think it is not as good as it should be...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Seems odd for such a non-technical article to latch onto a term like "micro-kernel" like it was all hot and new. OS X is built on a BSD which has it's roots in 60's and 70's OS design, just like the VMS roots of WinNT.
OS X didn't change the world by bringing some great new underlying architecture to the table. In fact, their kernel and filesystem are arguably getting long in the tooth. The value that OS X brought to the table was the fantastic Carbon and Cocoa development platforms. And they have continued to execute and iterate on these platforms, providing the "Core" series of APIs (CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, etc.) to make certain HW services more accessible.
There's very little cool stuff to be gained in the windows world by developing a new kernel from scratch. A quantum leap to something like Singularity would not solve MS's problem. The problem is the platform. What's really dead and bloated is the Win32 subsystem. The kernel doesn't need major tweaking. In fact, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning such that it could easily run the old busted Win32 subsystem alongside a new subsystem without needing to resort to expensive virtualization.
Unfortunately, the way Microsoft is built today it have a fatal organizational flaw that prevents creating the next great Windows platform. The platform/dev tools team and the OS team are in completely different business groups within the company. The platform team develops the wonderful .NET platform for small/medium applications and server apps while the OS team keeps crudging along with Win32. Managed languages have their place, but they have yet to gain traction for any top shelf large-scale windows client application vendors (Office, Adobe, etc.) Major client application development still relies on unmanaged APIs, and IMHO the Windows unmanaged APIs are arguably the worst (viable) development platform available today.
What Windows needs is a new subsystem/development platform to break with Win32, providing simplified, extensible *unmanaged* application development, with modern easy-to-use abstractions for hardware services such as graphics, data, audio and networking (which would probably look not entirely unlike an unmanaged counterpart to WPF/WCF/WinFS).
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
You need to open the windows to have fresh air.
MS should get all their developers to start contributing to Wine, then develop their next GUI as a skin for Ubuntu.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?"
Hah, Microsoft coudn't keep good enough legacy support on w2k > XP or XP > Vista. how could it keep on newer Windows NT versions?
The first rule of critical thinking about Microsoft and operating systems is to recall that they are a monopoly. This means they have zero need, desire, and (now that Bill has officially gone) ability to innovate. As long as those legions of faceless IT managers all over the world argue successfully for the upgrade licences, M$ is immune from having to make any good or original ideas.
Yes, there's Linux, yes there's Apple, but M$ have lost the ability to care about competition.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Microsoft is a greedy cult founded by a second rate science major dropout. It is bad software.
If Vista isn't perceptibly slower for you (running on "expected by Microsoft" hardware" than XP is on substantially slower hardware (say, 1.5GHz/1Gb) then you're really not trying all that hard to use your computer. It takes very, very little to tax Vista to the point of "oh my god, I'm going to go get some coffee".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Microsoft certainly have the resources to develop a modern operating system from the ground up, and ditch every bit of bad code they have produced in the past. But they wont, it will never happen since Microsoft is stuck in their old mentality and locked in by backwards compatibility. And the whole thing is moot anyway, since the general layout of Windows 7 is already set. Apple killed OS 9 and Classic because it had zero potential for the future, and it was a matter of survival for the company. (Without Mac OS X and NeXT, Apple would have died in the late 1990s.) For Apple, the switch was necessary and comparatively easy, except they had to keep Classic hanging on like a giant backpack for a number of years. But it was completely separate from Mac OS X, not an integral part. At some point - in my case it happened years ago - you can leave the old baggage behind. But Microsoft needs to keep that not bolted on, but built in! As somebody mentioned earlier, hardware prices continue to fall, but I think a more important factor is that people have different needs now than they hade during Windows' heyday. They expect things to work without configuration and reading of manuals. They have seen what GOOD software can do, for instance in the iPhone and iPod, and so that is what they expect from their regular OS. Apple is not interested in the low end of the spectrum. Apple is a money machine. They want to sell high yield products, not bargain basement stuff. That's how you evolve and win i the long run. That's Apple. Enter Linux. Here is the exact market position for Ubuntu, Xandros and other desktop Linux-based operating systems, and this is happening as we speak. This year and onwards, Linux will enter the mainstream for sure, and Windows will lose prominence. It all depends on a single thing thing: WILL IT WORK? Most people and not interested in the nuts and bolts. They don't care if the laptop is running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and don't even care what "the thing that makes the computer work" is called. They just want to plug in their camera, printer, scanner and network cable, or connect to a wireless network or a phone. They just want a machine that works without error messages, manuals, installing new drivers and all kinds of confusion. Microsoft has failed to deliver such a system, and that's why the competition will keep eating up their market share.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Today's Apple isn't the same Apple. When you replace all of your computers internal components and reinstall a completely different OS, isn't it a completely different computer, even though it has the same case?
"Fakes?" said Vimes. "They were all fakes?"
Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again. "This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. Will you tell me this is a fake too?"
Ignore this signature. By order.
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?
Sure it can. It could release "Winux" and bundle wine as a compatibility layer.
Nope. Vista and MS really suck. The real, astroturfing meme nowadays is "Vista is actually OK/quite nice"
It would have to be open...
"A monolithic operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design".
The author seems to be under the misapprehension that Windows' architecture reflects technical decisions. On the contrary, it stems mainly from business decisions, so its technical correctness was not really a primary concern.
The main idea was to aggregate as many different computing features as possible into a single product (or product set) in the pursuit of self-reinforcing market domination.
Technically, making a Web browser an organic part of an operating system is a frightful idea. It's beyond bad. From a business POV, it's brilliant - and has been outstandingly successful. Likewise for office automation, software development, database, transaction management, disk management, HTTP serving, etc. etc. etc.
Technically, getting all your software from a single source is probably going to be a bad idea. Especially if that source is a commercial corporation devoted to maximizing its long-term profits. But psychologically, it's very attractive, especially to PHBs who know nothing about IT and are uneasily aware of their own ignorance.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Maybe Microsoft should buy QNX and use that as a starting point?
Try splash top
http://www.splashtop.com/
MS have done all they could to make previous versions of Windows not work the same as later ones. To screw over Wine/Samba and to ensure that "Microsoft X for Windows" would have a head-start on a competitors "X for Windows".
They keep the information secret deliberately.
So they are the only ones who CAN make old programs work.
Or they could drop the copyrights, release the patents (which shouldn't be necessary if the patents actually told you HOW to implement them) and then let someone else continue the legacy code.
There's no incentive for Microsquish to to do a complete redesign. Apple did it, took a big chance because it was trying to improve market share. Windoze already has enough market share to keep on putting big bucks into the pockets of the boys in Redmond.
Not a cult, a corporation. Greedy, yes, but that is the nature of a corporation. Bill Gates has been very successful at running the business, and I've heard he was also a very good programmer. Calling him a 'second rate dropout' is ridiculous.
The perceived problems with Vista are largely from functionality we asked for. We wanted greater security, since the security problems of Windows XP essentially launched the multi-billion dollar spyware industry. Vista attempts major security improvements, and the people howl.
Frankly, it's been so long since a major OS change, people forgot what a nuisance it can be. Where Vista falls short is that it lacks obvious compelling reasons to change.
If the next operating system change is worse for backwards compatibility, it will be hated even more then Vista.
They could write a brand new OS, and bundle XP in a virtual environment for backwards compatibility - like OS X which, when it first came out, included a "Classic" environment. Only they could probably make it more seamless than that, like VMWare Fusion's unity mode.
And as others have noted, like OSX it would probably take two or three versions before it was really good enough. But being new and legacy free those versions could probably come relatively quickly (relative to current Windows release cycles).
The problem is... There's no advantage to buying that version of Windows over OS X or Linux with VMWare. And several disadvantages; like the above, and a lack of native software to begin with. It's *already* the case that the only reason for running Windows natively is if you're a gamer.
They're stuck, aren't they? They're buggered.
Here we go again....windows is rubbish blah blah....apple is better blah blah....linux is best blah blah... The clue was in the statement pointing to Apple's OS X - while ignoring that in the grand scheme of things, *no one uses it* - especially since they decided to abandon their old OS (no backwards compatibilty? That'll sell). Imagine if MS had brought out XP with a proviso that you had to wait for W95 to run on top of it before you could run any old apps...Gates would have been stoned to death. Ditto linux. This race was over decades ago, when Apple, Digital, Novell and Netscape went for the dollars instead of the users. Now here we are, squabbling over which app is claiming the most of what's left of the pie MS have almost finished. Firefox? No Group Policy controls, plus I can bring up a users' passwords, in clear english, with three clicks - Hmmm very secure. And MS have already stolen the best bits (as they always do). Linux? No Support. From a corporate point of view, that means End Of.
Or Wing Commander 3.
At this stage in the game, I can run Windows and Linux in virtual machines on a Mac. Of course MS could create a virtual layer that provided a win32 API for legacy apps. However, once that VM on Windows 7 was working well enough for the majority of business users, you can bet it wouldn't be long before something similar was working on *nix (including Macs). They, why even bother upgrading to Windows 7, when you can buy a nice shiny Mac or download for free the latest Ubuntu, knowing that 99% of your apps will work fine?
Legacy application compatibility is called XP.
Most people in the age of Vista who want legacy compatibility use XP. MS can just make use of the wisdom of crowds and make it an OS strategy: XP for legacy, Windows Functional (TM) for all the new stuff.
Care to let us know specifically what about the design is obsolete? What are these "layers" you don't use. Please, by all means, bore us with the details.
I'll get my popcorn, this should be great comedy.
VMWare Fusion is better than Parallels. :P
Yeah, install OpenSuSE 11
Just came out, and its really slick. No problems with Flash, Wine, etc . .. in 64-bit mode.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Get of the registry!! HATE IT!!!!!!
Most folks in research are stellar PhDs and hired at the equivalent of architect upon entry to the company.
It is hard to ship a new product at MS, because making a product is hard. It's much easier to contribute ideas to groups than code because the product groups have plenty of talented engineers. Some example tech transfers into products include Vista Sidebar, Windows driver verifier, Link-Layer Topology Discovery in Vista, SAL annotations, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
There are plenty of options for getting ideas out:
1) Get up and talk to product groups.
2) Start an incubator or find one to take your ideas on.
3) Build the demonstrator.
FWIW, I have contributed to Singularity and it's major benefit to the company is not as an O/S, but a demonstrator that systems code can be written in managed code and the tools that can be applied to that.
I don't see why legacy app support is such a big deal in the world of multiboot configurations, VMWares and excess CPU power (for "normal" applications), except perhaps that setting up a dual-boot config or installing a VM is beyond the capabilities of the average PC user.
What Microsoft should do is create a new, clean and stable Windows Version with integrated multi-boot support and ship it with the most recent, useful Windows (eg. XP) free of charge. Then find a way to sorta Alt+Tab between OSes.
[dreammode]And then make it open source and only charge consumers for help & support.[/dreammode]
That's what is needed, not only for Windows and PC software, but also PC hardware, starting from the shitty Intel processors, which still carry over legacy shit from the freakin 1970s!
There was no "home" version of Windows 2000 (like "Windows XP Home").
The plan initially *was* to make a "Windows 2000 Home".
They merged most useful bits (DirectX, USB, etc.) into the NT-kernel-based line for 2000.
They wanted it to replace all previous windows.
For the corporate segment, 2k Pro was designed.
But they didn't manage to get a working "Win 2k home" so instead they patched back some couple of modern bits into the dying DOS-based line and produced the monstrosity known as WinME.
They only succeeded producing a "single kernel for the whole product range" with WinXP.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The new mission needs to be: Kill Windows. Until Microsoft does this, they'll be doomed by all of their legacy support issues. If Microsoft creates an OS that kicks the crap out of Windows, they'll be making money from Windows and from the new OS, until gradually the Windows user base shifts. But the problem is that Microsoft is unwilling to kill the goose, even though it's obvious that it is no longer laying golden eggs.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
> The NY Times has an opinion piece on how the next Windows could be designed
> (even through Microsoft has already laid plans for Windows 7). The author
> suggests 'A monolithic operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete
> design. We don't need to load up our machines with bloated layers we won't use.'
Ahhh, you give them eyes, but they cannot see.
1. By adding in tons of stuff, especially things that "work", i.e. sell well, which is done after someone else figures out that X sells well, that cuts down on competition.
2. The more things in the OS, the more applications that use it are dependent on Windows, and the less likely they are to be ported to other operating systems, and thus create a threat to Microsoft's primary advantage, Windows itself, one of the priciest components of almost every computer sold the past 15+ years.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This has basically already been done with Windows Vista 64-bit. There is a lot of backwards compatibility issues with this version that I don't think have been or will be addressed. The plan for backwards compatibility for Microsoft going forwards is going to be virtualization. I do that now for many of my old office programs on Vista 64. The whole microsoft debate seems to me to be really losing a factual basis. Many people fail to realize the true paradigm shift WITHIN vista as opposed to between vista 32 and xp 32 bit.
If they used their new virtualization technology (which actually isn't half bad, the beta even lets you take multiple snapshots, unlike vmware server), they could theoretically build in a "compatibility" model that could be enabled/disabled but could run older windows applications even if they new OS is radically different in how it handles such things.
And with hindsight being 20/20, we all now know this OS should have been Vista. Half the problems have to do with performance and compatibility because of old cruft...
Open Source Sushi
I own a MacBook, and I'm happy with it. But there's little doubt that OS X, while still better than Windows, is a hugely complex OS with many layers of bloat. Even the OS X Internals book, which attempts to sort out the architecture for advanced developers, is a thousand pages of convoluted diagrams and intertwined components, and it barely touches the surface of what's going on.
You aren't, it's been done before, as Apple did with Classic. And in fact Microsoft tried it before as well .... when developing Windows 95.
The 16->32 bit transition was rather complicated, and basically meant rewriting large parts of Windows. The whole programming model changed. It seemed like the easiest approach to compatibility would be to run Win3.1 inside a VM, with a "screen in a window" design. This would certainly have been convenient for the engineers.
One small problem. People hated it. Really hated it. They would have to run a mix of old/new apps and they couldn't copy/paste between the apps. They got confused by the window-in-a-window. They couldn't drag and drop. File associations didn't work well. More and more holes had to be poked into the VM to give users the experience they expected, that pretty quickly the VMs became so tightly interlinked that they weren't really a "virtual machine" anymore. But the upgrade experience was great!
You can read more about it here. Anyway, I don't want Windows to run old apps in a VM. You're practically guaranteed to be running an old app at some point, and then you double your overheads. Many good apps aren't being rewritten to new APIs anytime soon - look at the pain Adobe goes through trying to keep up with Apple. Often they are the last by a long way, because it's so painful. Now multiply that by 1000x and you have the situation on Windows.
Microsoft can't do this. Their entire business model is called "lock-in". No one buys Windows because they like it, they buy it because they need it to run the software they are invested in. If the new "Windows 7" did not run all the old software and looka dna ct just like Windows always had then people would see no reasn to buy it. Microsoft is stuck and is chained to it's own past.
The popular term "bloated" is meaning less. Who cares about software you don't use. All modern OSes (even Windows) simply leave the parts you don't actually use on the disk and they don't slow anything down. (Look up how demand paged virtual memory systems work.)
Apple did not have to create a new OS whne they switched to OS X. They bought it from Next and Next had adopted BSD Unix. So Apple was able to get a mature system that had been under continuous development from 1969. I doubt Microsoft would simply adopt Unix and thereby save a decade of work. Technically it would work but it would destroy their "lock-in" business model
Presumably the same arguments apply to that other well known monolithic kernel, Linux.
I love the assertion that Apple wrote Mac OS X. Or am I mistaken in thinking that it's actually Mach/BSD.
Anyway, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the Windows kernel as any number of other commentators have said.
They did it before for WinME.
1. Release WinME that is worse than Win98 and make all users angry.
2. ??? (Release WinXP)
3. Profit.
"%s/WinXP/Windows7/g"
"%s/Win98/WinXP/g"
"%s/WinME/VISTA/g"
I think that this model only works for monopolies though.
Yes, remember Windows 3.1? Windows 98 was a massive rewrite. Then the move from 98 to the NT kernal. They control the API, they can simply have an API that runs everything old within the new OS.
Linux does a decent job of showing this is possible with Wine and they don't have the source code to the Windows API.
Besides, I just don't hope that they move from one legacy OS to another like Apple did.
SAN FRANCISCO, Redmond, Friday (UNN Technofear) - With Vista(tm) just out the door, Microsoft is drawing up plans to deliver its followup, codenamed Windows 7, by the end of 2009. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP.
Vista's uptake has been stupendous, with copies flying off the shelves and midnight queues on release day turning into major street riots, with police deploying water cannons and rubber bullets, to rival the release scenes for the PlayStation 3. It is expected to give a significant boost to the computer hardware industry, per the Mended Windows Theory of economics. But Windows 7 aims even higher.
"We have a radical vision for Windows 7," says Ben Dover, corporate vice-marketer for development. "It's definitely the one to wait for. You should avoid buying any other operating system or even looking at them until you see Windows 7 ... Except Vista, of course. That's pretty good. But Windows 7 is just so amazing. Wow(tm)! It's the most fantastic thing ever. Incredible. Mac OS 10.4 can't possibly hold a candle to it."
So what will be the coolest new feature in Windows 7? According to Dover, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors, or a new user interface paradigm for consumers, or rotating cubes like in XGL, or WinFS, which is definitely due to ship with Windows NT 4 in 1994. Or whatever Apple puts in Mac OS 10.6, really. Hell, I dunno. What's really shiny?"
The much-derided Digital Rights Management system in Vista will be worked over. "We'll be including user-downloadable 'tilt bits,' which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content."
Independent blogger Wiki Jelliffe was incontinent in his praise. "I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And theyâ(TM)ll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. Itâ(TM)ll be awesome! I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION."
When analysts asked whether GNU/Linux systems with graphic sophistication comparable to Vista Aero that run on present hardware could possibly be a factor, Mr Ballmer started shouting something about "DEVELOPERS!" while black-suited security officers with red, yellow, green and blue lapel pins rapidly escorted the press from the room.
Apple, Inc. shares were up 5% in early trading.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"Apple breaking ties with its legacy OS when OS X was built"
OSX is still a properitary, monolithic OS. Last I recall it was legacy code from NextStep, with a few niceness of another, better monolithic OS, Linux/BSD.
The NYT writer is smoking something I don't want.
I think the best chance they'd have at restarting would come from the Singularity team http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/
The best thing that comes from this is the following:
* Written in managed C# code
* Statically verified
* Runs in software isolated processes (SIPs)
* Excellent performance due to not needing hardware protection for buffer overruns
Just a thought. You can find it on CodePlex right now at: http://codeplex.com/singularity/
...I just open the windows.
...and now when the gates are gone we can open windows.
The problem with virtual machines is graphics related stuff.
Too late for anybody to read a comment from an anon, but this is a typical reporter who is not an engineer. "Let's just start over!" There is nothing more irritating than an irritated engineer (or product manager, or third-party-looking-in-at-a-vast-distance like this guy) who advocates a development reboot. As Spolsky has said a bunch of times, a shipped product has *thousands* of bugs fixed. In the case of Windows, it must be *tens of millions*, if we are to believe that Vista is an actual descendent of NT anymore. Wishing for a reboot in order to get excited about an OS is as dumb as a bag of rocks.
While sitting on the toilet meditating) I realized that since I switched to Apples, I haven't missed Active X, MFC, OLE, the Windows API, or any of their obsolete toolkits, or even NET
Microsoft has just done the same thing. OS + database + proprietary networking. They are having a very similar result. IMHO we should unbundle the OS from the database, and settle on networking that works. Because MS has more drivers, how about something like NT as kernel with BSD as userland with wingui or other on top?
Microsoft would have to compete on the application layer with everyone else. If they did a better job on the kernel and drivers, they could continue to sell operating systems.
On the other hand, Apple managed to rehost their gui on top of bsd userland on a microkernel. Why can't Microsoft do the same. Obviously re-writing the operating system in visual basic is not a good idea. It is too bad they don't have some real brain-power at Microsoft to properly apply the resources they do have. If they would make some good decisions, just think of how things could be.
Oh, and whoever decided to toss the menu in favor of the ribbon should be canned right now. Back when Microsoft wanted to steal what Apple had, Microsoft and IBM stood publicly for the CUA for the sake of the user. Now they have their cake, they toss the menu because they don't care about the comfort of the user. Just when did the values promoted by CUA stop being real. The first time I confronted the menu-less "word", I couldn't figure out how to save a file with a name. Making the users feel helpless doesn't promote loyalty.
It would be great if we could go back and revisit each of Microsoft's strategic decisions on the basis of whether they were about making things better for the user, or locking in Microsoft's monopoly. When they made a mistake, they should have fixed it instead of renaming it and covering it with another layer of code, hoping we wouldn't guess it was still underneath.
As I always point out, the computers today are 1000 times faster than the IBM-PC, memory is 1000 times larger, and the disk is 1000 times larger. Why is the machine sluggish? If they are so smart, why can't they answer this question in the form of an operating environment where they don't use the majority of the cycles and there is something left for the users programs.
8086 had 16-bit path to memory, 8088 had 8-bit path to memory, bit the math in the processors was 16 bit. I assume that was why we called them 16-bit processors.
As I have been pointing out for years now, ECMA publishes documents that contain unlicensed patented technology of member companies. So despite your unknowledgeable remark about not needing MS or the sanctity of MONO, The ECMA standards belong to Microsoft and they can kill MONO any time they want. If you spent even one hour reading the ECMA web site you would see that the ECMA is a troll trap. They don't even try to hide it. Lock-in is the name of the game with .NET. It is the face of the Trusted Computing Initiative where only Intel and Microsoft are trusted. The people that write the runtime are the trusted ones. I have serious and unhealthy hatred for what Microsoft has done to the software industry, and .NET is the tool by which they destroy third party development.
Having worked at Autodesk in a lab with twenty kinds of risc workstations, I knew what I wanted in a computer. When I think about ninety percent of the users in the world suffering with Microcrap, it makes me cry. For all the money7, the energy wated building PCs, for all the rare earths in the landfill... So few people got their money's worth from the standard formula.
It sort of works or it runs, but slowly is a lousy way to spend time using computers. Looking back on my life and the percentage of my life I spent sitting in front of computers waiting for them to complete the task at hand, I feel like Microsoft wasted a portion of my life counted in years, despite my best efforts to build up the right hardware and software to do the job. So laugh at the Apple fanboi and his Mac Pro, but for the next five years at least I will be very happy getting things done rapidly, and considering what my remaining time on earth is worth to me, the money was worth it.
I am posting AC because I don't want my friends to know how bitter I am. You know, maybe it wasn't Microsoft corporate that settled for the mediocre systems we have been using. Maybe it was poor decisions on the part of a thousand Microsoft engineering as they made a thousand separate decisions. It's ok to use that old 4k library here. It's ok that this code will load those old DLLs over there. This bit could be written faster but there are plenty of cycles, it doesn't matter.. But when you add it all up, the Vista is a lousy experience. And the four Vista Capable PCs I bought were a lousy investment of eight thousand dollars. The whole Vista experience is one of getting fsck'd.
As I have been pointing out for years now, ECMA publishes documents that contain unlicensed patented technology of member companies.
That's because the member companies agree to allow those patents to be used to implement the standards. Microsoft statement:
So yes, they're patented, but everyone is free to use those technologies.
So despite your unknowledgeable remark about not needing MS or the sanctity of MONO, The ECMA standards belong to Microsoft and they can kill MONO any time they want.
No, they can't. It's a shame that you've been misleading people "for years now" by spreading this FUD.
.NET is the tool by which they destroy third party development.
Only in your imagination, sir.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
This paragrph you quoted: "But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C# and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis for this purpose." Is a recent development. I have not been misleading people for years.
While that statement may have appeared in a blog, it was not posted on the ECMA site where the condition of usage for the documents were described.
I don't think the problem of Windows only is its old code base. It's also it's concept that forms a problem.
The name already marks the problem directly: it works with windows. Small moveable frames, so you can do a lot of things at the same time. But the problem is it doesn't work anymore. With constant popups of windows, and questions and error messages, it doesn't work. Instead have multiple desktops, or something. That would allow better productivity. So you're not interrupted while working. Or have a special virtual desktop that catches all popups or pending questions and requests (such as updates, and stuff) - where they will line up in a que or deal with theirselves (it would be awesome if you would have a 'remember me' box on all popups). The way windows practically work are just not productive and natural. Frames or multiple virtual desktops would work way better.
I honestly think that Microsoft should pull out of the operating system game for a bit. Carry on supporting their existing user base and develop applications for Windows, Mac & Linux.
I have been a Linux kiddie since 1999 but I still think MS' applications are great, most far superior in usability to stuff on Linux. Maybe they could produce another windowing system to give Xorg, KDE and Gnome a run for their money.
Linux is a great platform, but what's the point in having a nice platform if you don't have nice apps to support it? Before you burn me in the flames of /. I just want someone to show me a .... er I don't know.... an IDE as smooth and usable as Visual Studio for example. If you tell me Eclipse, I'll take you to an office furniture factory with Bulmer....
Are you kidding me? Get DosBox 64 bit version. It runs flawlessly on Vista 64bit. I can run more programs thru dosbox 64bit on vista than I could on XP interestingly enough. I can even play Terminal Velocity again (Yay).
The simple truth of the matter is that unlike mac or linux, windows is an OS with faults, but is easy as hell to use even for my 91 year old grandfather. There is a reason that only geeks and wannabe geeks use linux, and that is the fact that linux devs SUCK at making things intuitive and easy to use for the average idiot.
Would you like to explain to a person in an office that needs to use word how to run wine and get it all going? Or photoshop? etc?
Developers are horrible frontend designers, and that has made itself readily apparent in linux. You don't even have one common distro of linux, you have 100 different denominations of it based upon whimsical views of random developers. At this current time, linux has no future in a corporate environment UNLESS a halfway decent frontend comes along.
Seriously, having to compile each app for your distro? Fail much? How are companies supposed to market their software to linux when it needs to be compiled again and again depending on which distro the poor unsuspecting user happens to have? Linux kicked itself in the balls with lack of long term vision. Not to mention that when developers design frontends, it is generally a disaster (Obviously, some are better than others, but none are any good for the average PC user besides possibly ubuntu, but still that has it's own issues when stacked vs average pc user).
Computer users should not be required to have a bachelors in CS or even any long term technical knowledge to use a PC.
Microsoft has done ONE thing right through the years, and that is to unite almost all peoples in the world under one branding of operating system, where they don't have to worry about compiling new programs, etc etc etc. They just double click, hit next and it JUST WORKS.
How do you miss the glaring market share of linux vs windows and not realize that there are a LOT of reasons WHY linux has such a small market share.
Insert "Plan Ahead" image here.
Linux could have revolutionized the PC industry, and in many ways is still capable of doing so. I for one was hoping that google would design and release a linux OS because we would have unity from a company so revered as google, and google also understands how to create innovative and intuitive software. Instead, we have a crapload of linux devs that instead of forming a REAL and SUBSTANTIAL standard, go off and create and entirely new distro. As such, linux is in the laughable (in the sense that the usability of software on linux compared to winblows is total lulz... lolcompile???) state that it is today.
Moral of the story? Plan Ahead. Short term goals get you where you want to be fairly quickly, but leave you out in the cold when you get there. Long term goals provide strength, security, stability, AND usability.
It's useless...
Every single decent feature of Windows will be denied and refuted by Linux zealots.
The shoe used to be on the other foot, and Linux advocates had to prove Linux was good enough (as Windows on servers).
Now, Windows, Solaris, Mac users/professionals, and anyone else the Linux camp deems a threat have to battle a constant onslaught of ignorance, and intentional FUD even!
Windows to some degree had this coming, if for nothing else simply because it was/is a the most popular choice in IT circles and homes, and that caused many to completely ignore past or present alternatives. I even practiced some Windows hate in my day :) Until I moved on from Linux to Solaris at work, and Macs at home...
When it started to spill over into debates of Linux vs. Solaris on servers, and Linux vs. Macs on desktops, well... having used all of these platforms, and based on the contents of the debates, I think the Linux community is largely composed of ignorant, unprofessional kids at this point. That would be fine, if I didn't have to work with them eventually.
Linux users are as bad as Windows users now. They don't really want choice, Linux is the answer to everything! To hell with how poor the desktop integration is, it's good enough to replace Windows, Mac OS X, you name it. Lets overlook how horrible managing SAN devices is, or how the other OSs have advanced ten fold, and leapt from 'just ahead' to years ahead of Linux in the past few years in this area, Linux is just fine!
Where commercial OS vendors make advancements, it's met with "Why didn't they just use the Linux stuff/way", and "Oh, they have Not Invented Here syndrome".
Poo poo on Sun and Apple's new init systems, we want plain old Sys V init scripts here. Pfft, ZFS.. who needs it, they should have kept volume management and filesystems separate, unintegrated and complex, stupid Sun. Patches that require reboots? Gah, so arcane, nothing like the power of our magical package management systems that will overwrite system files just like any other patch system without even HINTING at the possible need for rebooting. That's my personal favorite, the notion that after switching from Solaris to Linux, we wont have to reboot after patching, EVER, unless it's a kernel patch, and it's so immediately obvious which applications we need to restart after patching to keep the system stable. You can tell I just can't wait for this to happen at work, right?
Oh, and Expose is just eye candy, look, my windows wobble when I move them, I'm as cool as a Mac.
All they've gotta do is realease a DX10 compatible XP, but completely the same as SP3 otherwise, rebrand it as XP-SE and make a big wad of cash for relatively little expense whilst pleasing your entire user-base.
I was using the GP's signature as a point of parody. (s/Scientology/Microsoft/)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well, it was dated 2003, which isn't all that recent: .NET has only been around since 2001 or so.
In any case, I'm glad we got this cleared up, and if you honestly weren't aware of their patent grant, I apologize for the hostile tone of my comment.
This information wasn't hard to find, by the way. It's in the Mono FAQ section about patents.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Microsoft has just done the same thing. OS + database + proprietary networking.
Would you care to explain what you're talking about? Because I have no idea.
SQL Server doesnt come bundled with the system, or are you talking about ESE/JetBlue?
If the latter, its just a C library that is very well documented. It's what Exchange and AD run off of.
And what with the proprietary networking? Exchange uses MAPI which was reasonably well documented before, and much more so now. SMB/SMB2/CIFS is all well documented nowadays, though for many years it wasnt. Maybe thats what you're talking about.
In any case, all that stuff runs on top of TCP/IP.
If they did a better job on the kernel and drivers, they could continue to sell operating systems.
This also doesnt make much sense to me. The NT kernel is very reasonable. Most of things people complain about are in win32 and associated libraries, not the NT kernel.
And MS doesnt make drivers. They include drivers in their OS, but they generally dont write many drivers.
On the other hand, Apple managed to rehost their gui on top of bsd userland on a microkernel. Why can't Microsoft do the same.
Two reasons.
1. It would take 10 years.
2. The problems most people encounter with Windows arent kernel problems, its stuff in win32 and similar. So re-hosting win32 on top of BSD would solve precisely nothing.
Oh, and whoever decided to toss the menu in favor of the ribbon should be canned right now.
Thats very much a personal opinion and not a generally shared sentiment. Nearly everybody I've seen use it who didnt make a drama-event/emotional-issue out of it liked the ribbon once they got over the change curve, which only takes a couple hours of use for most folks.
The first time I confronted the menu-less "word", I couldn't figure out how to save a file with a name.
Thats extraordinarily rare, in my experience. Most people find the office button fairly quickly, either because it sits there and throbs at you, or because the startup orientation/training stuff told them about it.
Now they have their cake, they toss the menu because they don't care about the comfort of the user.
Now thats just silly. You may not personally like it, but the ribbon change was quite clearly a result of a tremendous amount of user-testing. Companies dont make random changes to their cash-cow (and invest huge amounts of money on that change) just to make things difficult for people. They make changes because they have very strong belief that it will make things better for the majority of the users.
What most folks at /. seem to forget is that they are very very different from the other 80% of the user base of software products. The way you respond to things is NOT representative of the general population.
As I always point out, the computers today are 1000 times faster than the IBM-PC, memory is 1000 times larger, and the disk is 1000 times larger. Why is the machine sluggish?
Well, I dont know, maybe because the current gen of things is either: 1) doing 1000x more things, or 2) written in a higher level language that trades performance/memory-footprint for developer productivity, or 3) both.
If they are so smart, why can't they answer this question in the form of an operating environment where they don't use the majority of the cycles and there is something left for the users programs.
You mean like just about every windows operating system ever made when running on recommended hardware? An XP Pro install on current gen hardware is insanely fast. Vista on current gen runs quite nice.
On the box I'm typing this from (Vista Business x64), the only thing using any processing po
As for the Menu versus the Ribbon... Back when IBM and MS wanted what Apple had, they got together and created the CUA specification that stated that users were more comfortable and productive when they recognized the gui components and knew what to do. The menu with its standard "File" pull down containing a print and quit option were considered mandatory. The CUA standard did its job and made the users comfortable switching between vendors. I noticed that Microsoft didn't try to gain any community support for the switch away from CUA. IF they had I might feel differently. Your experience is different than mine, for the people I have spoken to about the loss of the menu all (without exception) dislike the new IE and Office GUI. What it is for Microsoft is a chance to sell more books and training courses, instead of leveraging off many years of experience that existing users have in the CUA environment. It is not about drama or emotion. It is about how the users expect applications to work. The world uses menus, Microsoft uses the ribbon. The only reason they even try this is because they are the 800 pound gorilla.
I cannot say for sure whether it is the kernel or the win 32 that makes Windows subject to all thee viruses and worms, but Unix has a long reputation for robustness. Microsoft has more money than anyone and I have no sympathy if they might have to pay money to rehost their OS. I certainly cannot see why it would take ten years.
Years ago I worked for Teradata. They had a proprietary database they wrote for the NSA that was written in assembler and was just over one megabyte in size. At that time it was the largest piece of software I had ever encountered. It is really hard for me to relate to MS needing two billion bytes of ram to perform the functions of an operating system.
When Unix with X Window system needed 16MB of ram, I thought that was a lot, but I understood. Why we need 250 times that much today is the result of poor engineering practices.
You said maybe we are doing 1000 times more these days. How many of these 1000 things did the user ask for. The ISO protocol failed to compete with TCP/IP mostly because the ISO stack took at least a megabyte of ram and that was thought to be too much. If they were competing today, that meg would be a drop in the bucket.
What users today want is reliable, efficient operation. They want straightforward user interfaces. They want file formats that allow for interoperation between system. Microsoft has had their way with OS design, GUI design, file formats, and what do we have. The country's systems still have trouble interoperating, people still have a hard time knowing what to do at the computer. The reason alternative operating systems and open source software exist today is because Microsoft's products are not s