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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?"
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.
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Sort of like what Apple did with OS 9/OS X?
If so, the trouble with that might be that the legacy OS (Win XP or Vista) is so large that the legacy OS portion would double the size of the installation. If I recall correctly, the OS 9 support in OS X only added 400 MB to the installation, as OS 9 itself wasn't that large. What was really nice about it was that it could easily be removed if you didn't need the legacy support.
(I may be wrong in my size estimates or misunderstand the OS 9 legacy support, as I moved from Windows XP to OS X when Tiger was released and have little experience with OS 9.)
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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.
Yeah, indeed ;)
Or they could, like, ditch all their work done so far, fork wine and make the new OS run on top of linux+wine, possibly off a sqlite-based WinFS ;)
Then just port their platform libraries onto that, redo their visual tools as eclipse plugins -- and presto, you have best of both worlds.
And fast ;)
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
Everything on your list sans the last one, and much more could fit on a fucking LiveCD, and expand to a couple of gigabytes. Even Windows XP had all that and it fit onto a 3 gig partition easily. Microsoft has no excuse for Vista's size, other than sheer incompetence.
But the entry that totally shows how clueless your post is happens to be this one:
Multiple filesystem support
Oh please. NTFS, FAT, ISO+Joilet, UDF, a couple of network "filesystems" perhaps? The Linux kernel contains many times as many filesystems, and even if you enable all of them, your kernel image will hardly ever be more than 20-30 megabytes when you compile it. You just needed to put something on what is a short list, didn't you?
As for Most extensive driver library in existence, it's not true. Most drivers come either through Windows Update (network) or via the vendor (install CD or website). Out of the box, Windows support the bare minimum it needs to run with terrible performance.
Last but not least, all the stuff falling under monster domain features is functionality. Lots of source code which gets compiled into tiny binaries. Since when does implementing "ACLs on every resource" or "domain controls enforced" on clients require gigabytes of data?
I'm definitely a big fan of Apple stuff and am likely more tolerant of the small bugs that come out from Cupertino, but I think many people here are missing the big picture: Windows is all about compatibility. That's why a business might spend millions of dollars developing apps on Windows, because they can milk that cow for a long time afterwards. Vista is a significant enough break from Windows XP that many businesses don't want to switch because it means a potentially lower bottom line. Windows has incredible software inertia, while the Mac really doesn't. Comparing Mac OS and Windows is, well, comparing apples to oranges.
Basically, if your bottom line depends upon a very slowly moving software architecture, then Vista is probably a bad thing. Making big changes, on the other hand, makes things potentially easier for Microsoft as there is less legacy and code can be refactored given years of experience.
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...
I'm not sure I understand your questions.
The DOS emulator on Unix was faster than native DOS on the same machine.
I can't recall the Win 3.1 emulator on unix having any performance issues, to the contrary.
Don't some of the Windows games that currently run under WINE have more FPS than natively under Windows ?
So, yes, running Microsoft originated OS on Unix can result in a faster and more stable experience.
Surprisingly, you're wrong.
Sandboxing an unstable app or OS is a good way of improving the overall stability of the system. Check this out, for example;
Vx32 is a user-mode library that can be linked into arbitrary applications that wish to create secure, isolated execution environments in which to run untrusted extensions or plug-ins implemented as native x86 code. Vx32 is similar in purpose to the Java or .NET virtual machines, but it runs native x86 code, so plug-ins can be written in ANY language, not just Java or C#.
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Technically, "Windows 2000 Professional" was something you could call a merge, as it brought up-to-date DirectX and USB support to the NT line. It did, however, NOT support all existing DOS programs, unlike Win98.
But for whatever reason Microsoft was not ready to sell a "home" version of Windows 2000. So they released Windows Millennium instead. Yes, that was another DOS based system "after the merge".
Millennium was a major disaster and Microsoft soon followed up with XP Home. XP Home was the first NT-based Windows marketed to the home user, so it looks like the successor to Windows Millennium. But technology-wise, it is Windows 2000 with more eyecandy and crippled user accounts (the non-crippled version is called XP Professional and the direct successor to Windows 2000 Professional).
C - the footgun of programming languages
Microsoft people have openly said that they want fewer hardware manufacturers. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a major reason in changing things the way they did.