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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
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)
WINE just provides a reverse-engineered implementation of the Win32 API. Microsoft has the real original code.
But really, being modular should allow for more flexibility and speed. But for Vista... That didn't really happen. Being modular should have allowed for more compact installs, but still Vista takes up 5 gigs of HD space on a basic install.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
the windows NT kernel is fine. Moving to BSD or linux, or QNX etc won't improve it. OS X wasn't just a move to BSD, it was also a move to OO via Cocoa. The toolbox/Carbon is/was strictly procedural, much like the Win32 api. DotNet is OO, but so was MFC.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Check out ReactOS. Clone of the NT kernel so it can use windows driver. Uses WINE for the windows API. Everything is clean reverse engineered and free as in speech.
I would add that Apple did not do a full rewrite but, instead, adopted a stable, mature and very sophisticated OS from NeXT. Apart from that, OSX is very different from the classic MacOS and deeply incompatible. Any compatibility had to be bolted on its top.
Microsoft has nothing like it and will not buy an OS outside.
Or they could just grab any flavor of BSD, close it, build a Win32 susbsystem on top of it and sell it as Windows 8. They already did that with a TCP/IP stack.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Commercial versions of VMware allow multiple snapshots. The version you refer to is the freeware version.
Yeah... right... 16 processes, right?
CE is Windows done from the ground up, but it's not particularly elegant. And I _did_ write software for it. The 2002 model of the Brazilian electronic voting ballot runs Windows CE.
Writing for it is every bit as ugly as it is for desktop Windows.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Chapter 5: The Second System Effect
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.
The Microsoft Research site has a page on product contributions that have come from MS Research.
Loading large amounts of legacy code that gets run doesn't cause bloat. That's caused by loading huge quantities of legacy code at boot that never gets run because you don't have the hardware it was written to support or none of your software needs the old API it implements. Getting rid of legacy support isn't the best answer to bloat. Better is to load only those parts of the legacy support that are needed at boot, bring in the old APIs as needed then get rid of them when the program exits. This would shorten boot time and cut down the RAM requirements at the expense of a slightly longer load time for legacy apps.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
If by "These two code branches" you are referring to NT and Windows 9x, you are off by a release. They merged with XP, not 2000.
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.
Windows NT was a re-write of OS/2 when Microsoft divorced IBM
You're partly correct. Windows NT was written in response to OS/2, but was not a rewrite of it. Windows NT could be better stated as a GUI-driven rewrite of VMS. Dave Cutler was the architect of both systems, and was the result of a negotiated HR transfer (read "was poached") from Digital Equipment Corporation for that purpose.
For an exact chronology I'd suggest "Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM" by Paul Carroll (it's listed in Amazon) which book was a compendium of Wall Street Journal articles, if I remember correctly. The details on the OS/2 contention make a fascinating read. It's interesting how IBM "then" was so much like Microsoft "now"; bloated and in control of the marketers.
It's also worth mentioning as a cautionary tale, perhaps. IBM managed to re-invent themselves, and after a rather painful process of revolution became a reasonably healthy firm again. Can Microsoft?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
I worked with the code from OS/2 and from the original WinNT SDKs (55 floppies of it). Sorry, but conceptually, Cutler had little choice but to take the OS/2 APIs and turn them into Microsoft analogs. I have the code; Cutler had marching orders to one-up IBM and he did it. No argument except citing anything from the WSJ as a technical history source.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
WinCE done right?
I have written some software on the WinCE platform. It is NOT windows done right. Lets start with the evolution of the platform. It was designed for displays like 600x300. Full menus and dialogs. The OS has no concept of a "current directory". Every file has to be specified from the root of the drive every time. They figured the devices would have a touch display so no need for a mouse. So the standard Windows mouse API was ripped out. Essentially the only thing left was is a click or double click either left or right and where on screen it happened at.
They then "re-imaged" it to compete with Palm. So now it is redesigned to work on a device that is 240x320. The menu is at the top of the device. The pop up keyboard soft-input-device (sip) pops up from the bottom. There are issues with a window getting in the background not being able to be brought to the foreground.
Now we "re-image" again for the smart phone. With an even smaller display. Microsoft decides that a mouse is needed again. So they create a brand new API for dealing with a mouse, instead of using the win32 api
If you think the win95-98 api vs the Win NT code base api wars were a problem. Now kick it up a notch. Take your pick, drawing graphics, initializing windows, dealing with the SIP. What ever fun I had dealing with the Win32 API was ground out of me when I started working on WinCE
You want proof? Why did Microsoft extend the life of Windows XP for 3 more years for UMPC style devices to compete with Linux? Because WinCE in any incarnation is not up to the job. Microsoft is not even trying to pretend anyone will want it on a UMPC style device.
vi +
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.
They merged with XP, not 2000.
No, XP was only a point release of 2000 (i.e. XP = WinNT 5.1, 2000 = WinNT 5.0). Win2K was the merge point. Anyone who was using NT before that remembers the pain of getting DOS/Win3.1 things to run properly under NT 4 (or 3.51!)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
On Ubuntu, wine works just fine. Flash sort of works with nspluginwrapper, which Ubuntu automatically installs and configures when you install the flash plugin.
that's *if* your code is designed for 2 cores in the first place. In such cases, you'd expect it to scale to 4 quite happily (I always use the 80% rule here - 1 core, you get 100% relative performance, 2 cores you get 180% perf, etc).
The problem is that most code is designed for 1 core. Making it work for 2 is a paradigm shift for most developers.
"Don't some of the Windows games that currently run under WINE have more FPS than natively under Windows ?" Well, yeah, but that's because they don't use all the features (read effects, shaders) that the direct x windows version uses.
End to end CRC checking, metadata backups (even on a single disk, and alomst full IO throughput on writes (partly thanks to the fact that there isn't a journal, all metadata changes are atomic).
The filesystem is also very snapshot friendly, which makes backing up data from user mistakes very fast and easy.
Storage pooling/Mirroring/Raid-Z could become a new standard for home users, though, that aspect probably won't catch on in the consumer market
And all WinFS has is search. It doesn't have the ability to watch a hard disk for bitrot, it doesn't know when files get silently corrupted, etc
I fear the Y2038 bug
Same here.
I do consulting for small businesses and the only people that don't complain about vista are the ones that use it to play solitaire and check their email. (not computer literate in the least)
The ones that complain the loudest are those that picked up a brand new computer to replace their old one only to find out the new one runs much slower. I have 'upgraded' many vista laptops and desktops to XP in the last year each charging the same as a virus/rootkit removal plus MS license. Laptops are the worst, especially HP, it is like they are intentionally hiding XP drivers for things as simple as a sound cards. I'm still able to find workarounds but in all my years working with PCs I have never seen support for a predecessor OS being unsupported so quickly. Even with the push for 2k/XP there were several years of support for 9x users.
I still try to keep an open mind, I was skeptical of 2000 and XP when it first came out, but I am finding it very difficult to swallow vista.
My most recent endeavor trying to make vista work for someone was on a brand new state of the art quad core computer. It ran at a decent speed, no complaints other than the printer (brand new HP officejet pro) would intermittently fail to respond. The network card would work for 5 minutes and then go to 'Media Disconnected' status for no reason even after replacing the motherboard (on-board nic), building wiring, HP ProCurve module, patch cords, etc. I could boot a knoppix or ubuntu live CD and have no networking problems at all. Checked the latest Marvell drivers, Bios, etc. The only solution was to install XP.
I have yet to see with my own eyes a power user that is happy with vista. So far I only hear about it on the internet from fanboys. By power user I mean someone that runs multiple applications in a productive environment and are able to do so at the same speed or better than XP without having to know how their computer works.
I keep trying vista myself as it is my business to do so, but I haven't seen any compelling reason yet to recommend it to anyone. To me it is still a downgrade. I'll keep trying it as future updates come out.
Part of me thinks those touting it on the net are shills from MS. Just like aliens, until I see it with my own eyes I'm not going to believe it.
Don't some of the Windows games that currently run under WINE have more FPS than natively under Windows ?
No.
This has been another edition of Short Answers to Stupid Quesitons.