Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Working On "Post-Windows" Cloud Computing OS
Barence writes "Microsoft is working on a web-based operating system called Midori, as it looks to life beyond Windows. Midori is expected to be a cloud-computing service, and so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualization layer between the hardware and the OS, and is expected to be a commercial offshoot of the Singularity research project which Microsoft has been working on since 2003." If this story sounds familiar to you, it probably is.
...welcome our old software-as-a-service overlords.
As apparently it comes with a dupe detector built in. Well if "well respected" journalists can claim things based on supposition and hope then surely I can as well?
You mean a kind of, say, Hardware Abstraction Layer?
Yeah... they've been doing that kind of thing for over ten years.
Cloud 9!
too bad it's by definition vaporware.
The operating system behavior with functions will be even more cloudy.
An application will reside somewhere in the cloud and it will be harder to realize if it is a legitimate application or if it is some malicious program.
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
Or as in the classic SF story with the question of "Does God exist?" - "Yes NOW there is a God" when all the computers in the net got connected. And the man trying to disable the connection got vaporized by a lightning.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why was this abortion of an article selected, when there is a better ars one here, and BBC here
No Gates, now no more Windows. Can someone please show Microsoft the Door!
Smivs on the intertubes!
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/30/1714249
remembering how many stuff they pulled and were able to get away with, i cant imagine microsoft in a cloud computing setting.
Read radical news here
I saw an article just like this one just a few days ago... If I could just remember where...
Oh yes, it was on a site called Slashdot. Maybe you've heard of it!
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/30/1714249
Dupe of http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/30/1714249
Cloud computing is just a buzzword for rented VMs at someone else's datacenter?
Wouldn't the popularity of such a service destroy the demand for systems administrators at independent datacenters?
If so, where do I go to get a job working on these clouds?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If only someone could utilize the power of cloud computing to get rid of dupes.
Microsoft is working on a new OS that will never see the light of day because it will risk the monopolistic platform to which they now enjoy...
va chier !!
Slashdot editors working on the steam powered interweb...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well, can't wait to pay for midori monthly, then office monthly, VS monthly, maybe media services monthly. MS will make 10 times the money they do now off software that you probably already have. Best part is every version that comes out we rush to get because we think it is going to be better.We haven't learned to use most of the functionality of the software version you are replacing.
So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be? And is it time for anybody using the word in the US to get in a trademark application, just in case?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Who else than Microsoft could invent a web-based operating system?
hahaha... i think i just got an erection...
It's quite sad that Microsoft feels the need to steal the name of an existing browser for their new browser-based project. A simple Google search reveals there's already a Midori browser. The company Steve wants to buy reveals the same thing. Even MSN knows about it, so Live Search isn't left out.
Transmeta even had a Linux distribution meant for Internet appliances called -- you guessed it -- Midori.
How about a little due diligence, Microsoft? Or is the plan to just lie, cheat, steal, and discredit credit-worthy opponents in the eyes of CIOs and the press? What about the new, nicer, more open Microsoft we keep hearing about? Is that just more underhanded marketing building on the goodwill of truly open companies?
Like microsoft would dream of such a dastardly idea? It will be called the "Windows Clouds 2010" And have a default background of ...gasp..clouds. And then there will be all kinds of cloud related monikers like stormy storage, lightning load speeds, thunder media player etc. Then we will all galavant around in our happy cloud-filled windows certified lives saying stuff like "Microsoft will save us from evil data thieves!" Maybe we should just pull our heads out of the clouds? I want to ride away on a cloud of despair and doom! ....../snaps out of strange behaver/......where am I? i dont have blue curtains...why am I on the bathroom floor?
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
For some reason or another, the idea of cloud computing just terrifies me. Its my feeling that cloud computing, if it were to become the standard, will completely destroy any third party software company. You will have to deal with the big providers out there to be able to do anything and all software companies would have to sign up for contracts with Microsoft, Google or whoever to allow, your software to run on someone elses computer. Am I just being stupid here or is there a real concern for anyone in the software business here?
I, personally, think they are digging their own grave with this one.
There just isn't enough bandwidth everywhere for there to be a totally online OS.
Don't tell me, let me guess. It will have all the stuff Microsoft that was going to be in every version of Windows since Windows 95.
As the release date approaches, Microsoft will suddenly start echoing all the knocks critics have been making on Vista, saying it is insecure, difficult to use, presents a bad user experience and is generally a piece of junk which only fools would ever have purchased... but, fortunately, Midori will solve all these problems, and will include a Web-standards-compliant browser, an animated character that will pop up and give you only helpful advice and only when you actually need it, WinFS, and Duke Nukem Forever.
And if you believe them, then you'd believe that Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
yes it is a dupe.
and, no it has no real innovation I can see. Abstraction layers, distributed systems, "cloud" systems are nothing new - this seems to be a stitch together of lots of buzz words and an attempt to steal thunder and market share from Google.
but there are greater risks to this style of system that I am *utterly* philosophically opposed to.
it paves the way for SW as a service to rent by the usage or monthly/weekly charge. I really *hate* that idea - if I buy a computer and SW I want to own it and never have to pay again. I want to be able to run it off the net totally free from virus and hacking and I want to have complete control over what I do on it.
from my point of view MS can take Midori and shove it up their ass, I suspect that I am not alone in these sentiments.
Jesus christ, infactual buzzing in this blogosphere. Someone must have let the bees' out again.
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
This isn't going to happen. By the time that Windows has lost most marketshare, MS will be regarded as dying if not dead. It is then that MS will release this, and assuming it is pay to use, with a subscription, a lot of people will wonder if MS will go bankrupt and not use it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... that hardware is expensive and bandwidth is cheap. So far this has very much not been the case. It is still a pain running remote X-applications over most household broadband connections. In fact I find the lag time annoying even on a LAN.
When do they figure that we will be able to run a "web-based" OS? 'cause it sure isn't anytime soon.
Yes there is, the difference is, it can't be written by MS. A small team of hackers could probably code a decent OS that is web based, but as MS has shown us, they are incapable of coding for the present generation of hardware, so the OS they make won't be usable until everyone has 50 MB/Second connections.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Holy cow, what a great idea. In the complete originality and freshness of the idea, I think there should be an equally original and fresh idea for it's name. How about "dump terminal"?
The following is copied from my journal. It's a comment concerning the microkernel protection mechanisms of Midori which was intended to be posted in the previous story, but unfortunately I modded that one. This time, dupes actually help ;) :
"SIP", or "Software isolated processes" is just MS marketing hype speak for what is known as a Language-based system in which seperate processes can be isolated from one another without paging or other hardware protection mechanisms. This is done using the semantics of the language in which the processes are programmed which excludes any possibility of one process intruding into the address space of another.
One example of a similar OS would be Bell Labs' Inferno. ( thanks to Knots for pointing this out ) Also, there's JX, which is an open-source microkernel based operating system in which the (micro)kernel and the applications are written in Java and run under a modified version of the JVM.
jdb2
It's been great! I'm free and never going back!
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
And how many average Joe consumers do you know of that require distributed computing problems?
I mean, I'm sitting on a dual core 3.4 ghz machine with 2 gigs of memory. The hardest stuff I put it through is compiles, games, and the occasional rendering, all of which being handled at the local level perform acceptably and any gain in processing time in the 'cloud' is negated by my 1.5 Mb (cha right!) network connection.
Sure, this is great for companies/facilities that require cloud computing, but for average consumers, there is absolutely no reason to buy it. Heck, if it weren't for the security concerns and drivers, most consumers could survive quite well on Windows 98.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Yeah, it's MS, but before jumping completely on the stomp-it-dead bandwagon, I'd say this: We thought Apple was dead once too. If MS can do some real innovation here, and bring a new paradigm to an operating system, we'll be lucky. Innovation never hurt anyone, and it may come when you least expect it. If Apple can pull off a 180, so can Microsoft.
This is the greatest News! There will be free hardware for all!
You will receive a [very] basic PC.
There will be no local storage, you will pay google/microsoft/etc a "small monthly fee" for storage.
There will be no CD/OS, you will pay google/microsoft/etc a "small monthly fee" for applications.
There will be no need for maintenance or upgrades, your "small monthly fee" will pay for that.
Larger applications can be run on your "XBox-360-II" which you will rent for a "small monthly fee".
Think it won't work? It already works for cellphones. Enjoy paying your "small monthly fees".
50Mbps? Hah. I bet with all the throttling going around, it will take forever to open notepad.exe... An online OS would probably work with a REAL 1Mbps unthrottled symmetric link...ah...one can dream.
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
n/t
--- What?
I guess Microsoft have finally learnt it takes more than one average desktop computer to run Vista.
It's quite sad that Apple feels the need to steal the name of animals for their company. A simple Google search reveals there's already a Leopard. The company Steve wants to buy reveals the same thing. Even MSN knows about it, so Live Search isn't left out.
How about a little due diligence, Apple? Or is the plan to just lie, cheat, steal, and discredit mammal opponents in the eyes of CIOs and the press? What about the new, nicer, more open Apple we keep hearing about? Is that just more underhanded marketing building on the goodwill of truly open companies?
Why not? All you are transferring is an X session.
Web-based, huh? Will it run under Linux?
Sounds like MS just wants to "create new ideas" by "borrowing heavily" from Plan 9.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...Microsoft now officially has its head in the clouds.
Old school Microsoft bashers will, of course, recognize this as Microsoft's tried-and-true strategy of preannouncing vaporware in order to freeze the market. Buyers put their plans on hold and wait for Microsoft's product to emerge, effectively killing the competition, even though the competition has non-vapor products on the market today.
Does anyone even remotely think that the vaporware strategy will work this time? Cloud computing is all about the elasticity of computing resources. It's a natural fit for unlicensed operating systems. Microsoft's entire business is built around per-unit software licensing. Anyone who's been around an IT shop that uses Microsoft products knows that keeping track of licenses is practically a full time job. Add in the elasticity of cloud computing and it becomes pretty much impossible.
I'd even go as far as saying that cloud computing is fundamentally incompatible with Windows.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
"There just isn't enough bandwidth everywhere for there to be a totally online OS."
And there never will be if Microsoft creates it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
[CITATION NEEDED]
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
It appears that "Vibrant in-text advertising" does not allow end-users to opt out of their pop-ups any more. I would like to encourage story submitters to stop providing links to sites (like the one referenced here) that use Vibrant and other in-page popups.
This story has taken more twists and turns than the Longhorn release cycle. For the FIRST, ORIGINAL, MOST DETAILED story on the Midori release, how Microsoft has considered migrating folks from Windows and a lot on concurrency, here's the link to the SD Times story that broke all this news: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32627
They should be working on "post-cloud computing Windows" instead.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I guess slashdot is now posting dupes even when they are aware of it.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"Midori" is probably going to end as a C# rewrite of Windows Explorer. Nothing wrong with that, of course, because when it finally hits the shelves, standard PCs will ship with several times the amount of RAM as they do today.
Another approach involves running Windows alongside Midori, and the last alternative would be a standalone Midori implementation that could run traditional Windows applications.
Also it says one solution would be to run windows alongside midori. what would be the point of having midori if you have to run windows anyway. If another solution would be to have a standalone version of midori what would be the difference between that and just another version of windows?
now you can have a blue screen inside a blue screen
First .NET, now this. Why Microsoft's mania for virtual machines, considering they only support x86 targets? Microsoft at one point supported NT for PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and x86, and that was with hard-compiled code. So it's not about portability. It seemed to be more like Microsoft's answer to Java - if Sun was succeeding in that market, Microsoft had to go there too.
Rather than trying to use software-separated processes, it would be more useful to improve message passing so that hardware-separated processes could talk to each other better. This, by the way, is one of the big weaknesses of the UNIX/Linux world. In UNIX/Linux, interprocess communication sucks. What you usually want is an interprocess subroutine call, or "synchronous message-oriented interprocess communication". What UNIX and Linux give you are pipes (one way, stream-oriented, asynchronous), sockets (two way, stream oriented, excessive overhead, asynchronous), System V IPC (used by nobody, message oriented, two way, asynchronous), and shared memory (unsafe, one process can crash another). There's no safe, synchronous message passing system. You can build one atop the existing mechanism, but there's a big performance penalty. The result is huge, monolithic applications, or systems that use "plug-ins" that can crash the entire application (i.e. Apache). Fast message passing has a bad history in the UNIX world, due to the Mach debacle, but it works fine in QNX, IBM VM, and hypervisors like Xen. (Windows has fast message passing, although for historical reasons in the 16-bit era it's somewhat clunky and too tied to the windowing system.)
Windows at least has a standardized approach to message passing. The UNIX/Linux world does not. This leads to a proliferation of mechanisms for doing the same thing. Both KDE and OpenOffice use CORBA for message passing, but they don't use compatible versions of it.
640MB/month should be enough for everyone.
Don't they realize that implementing something from scratch, much less something this complex, undoes all of the security and other bug fixes found by hundreds of people over more than a decade (not to mention invalidating the experience of thousands of people with established systems)? They're guaranteed to end up with something that has unknown quirks, and that's after it's released to market years later than it's supposed to be.
I'll allow that Microsoft is capable of good ideas. But they'd be much smarter to build on solid foundations and just bring the good ideas to market.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
"Post Window" ? Did that erea start when they released Vista, or just when they ended the sale of XP ?
The resources that required at their launch time Windows 95, NT, Windows XP, and Vista werent not so common, and they still went forward. Probably with touchscreens will happen next too. Give enough demand, and market will provide, in a way or another. Probably this is the kind of extra push needed to rush ipv6, deploying more bandwidth.... and make more people security aware.
to use my computer, period
oh yea, the only connection I can get here 1.5/384 for $30/month. hardware is cheap, bandwidth is expensive.
Gone!
Lets see:
- Cloud - 100% vaporware
- "Microsoft working on" - 100% vaporware
- Microsoft saying "something post-windows"- 300% vaporware
I almost can see the announcement in Microsoft web site:
Preorder Midori now! With 500% more vaporware!
When I discovered cloud computing independently in the early 90ies, I figured that it will always remain a niche market. I bet many people here can tell a similar story.
There are various "brilliant" ideas that aren't accepted by most people. For example, video phones whose image cannot be switched off, paid subscription to music streamed to your computer in a (presumedly) unsavable DRM-protected format, or the idea of turning your computer into a dumb front-end for some software running on a server controlled elsewhere (and perhaps even paying for it).
Admittedly, acceptance may change over time, for example many people nowadays seem to have no problems with "web apps". Given how bad browsers are as a platform, this is kind of bizarre, but anyway I personally believe that this is just a temporary phenomenon and only works in a few domains such as social networking. In the long run, people want to have a piece of software on their machine and entirely under their control. At least, that's what I want.
Have you ever try to watch a video over todays current internet connections (via VNC or even NX)?
I have. It doesn't work so well... and it was of low resolution. Today's Multimedia Whores would never find their place. I, myself, am included in this group of people - I backup all of my movies & music... even my BluRay collection.
I was thinking the same thing. The story says the web-based apps will coexist with your present Windows apps. And that they'll be more architecture-independent. It sounds to me like the new Windows is really the same old Windows with a bunch of Silverlight/Flash/Java/ActiveX sort of stuff running in environments like Mozilla Prism and Google Gears. So maybe Microsoft will finally get IE8 to be standards-compliant, but it won't matter anymore because this platform will be the new customer lock-in for web stuff.
Prepare for a whole new world of security flaws, user spying, monopolizing ad revenue and more such Microsoft greed. They can't possibly get it right and they will never do it with the best interests of the user in mind. This may possibly be their complete downfall. Vista is bad, but its not bad enough to topple their big market share. This, however, will be their death knell. Only Apple and Linux (and users as a whole) will stand to gain. Which, I suppose, is for the best.
MS absolutely can write a good program, when they need to. I would argue that the biggest problem here isn't the capability of the developers, but mismanagement and twisted priorities.
That is: Vista sucks because it is in Microsoft's best interest to have it suck in exactly the way it does. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out exactly why this benefits Microsoft.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... that hardware is expensive and bandwidth is cheap.
No, the fundamental assumption is that bandwidth is cheap, and hardware is cheaper -- but local admin is expensive. This would mean the local machine could be locked down hard, which means much less chance for spyware -- though phishing would still be problematic.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Closed proprietary operating systems should be a part of our past by now. We've learned how it has been used to prop up a monopolist. We've learned about the activities that were ultimately deemed criminal by our own court system (not just the federal but in many States as well) and others in other countries. We've learned how they use the OS to prop up other technologies and to create monopolies in those areas as well.
We would be so much better off to have learned our lesson and learn not to support Microsoft's technologies nor their products. I'm being serious. I'm stating the obvious. We should not be taken so easily by new products from Microsoft. Most of those were taken from others. Microsoft is able to deliver them because of their cash on hand. But in reality where did that cash come from? It came from funds collected during their criminal monopolistic activities.
As bad as all this sounds we should have learned. Haven't we learned?
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Embrace and extend clouds?
Something like The Upgrade Threadmill ?
50Mbps? Hah. I bet with all the throttling going around, it will take forever to open notepad.exe...
Ah. So it'll work just like Vista?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Do they realize there is an entire industry of audio/video editing applications that will essentially be buried?? This is why I don't sell my analog synthesizers to replace them w/ virtual synthesizers. Digital software and technologies come and go, but my old Arp still sounds great.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
jnode.org :-)
The Internet doesn't have enough BW for it, but what about the Intranet?
It could be good for large companies that have lots of employees who don't use too many resources. For example, I know of a company with 200+ employees that fill forms every day. Why buy 200+ computers for that? Think of how much electricity they use, how much heat they all produce that is actually wasted because the CPU is rarely used.
When do they figure that we will be able to run a "web-based" OS? 'cause it sure isn't anytime soon.
:)
But they'll be the only ones who'll be prepared
If you were at all informed about Midori, you'd know that it is currently being developed by a small group of (apparently) highly skilled MS programmers, with a minimum of beauracracy.
Think the opposite of the Vista development process.
Keep this in mind; for now, the development model they are using is a throwback to the old Microsoft days, before the bloat set-in. So, in a way, it's exactly what you said, a "small team of hackers".
Seriously, someone with that much time on their hands really needs to stop and take a good look at their life.
Who says the OS is stored on Microsoft's centralized über server? What if my ISP decided to host the OS for their customers, or my employer for the stations at work?
Just speculating, didn't bother with TFA.
Don't be crazy anymore!
...Sacrebleu.
A fool and his lamb are worth two in the bush.
This has NOTHING to do with software as a service, NOTHING to do with thin clients, and this was made clear in several of the posts when this article came around the first time. Yet everyone blindly parrots an article that is almost totally devoid of facts.
Midori is an offshoot of a micro-kernel OS that aims to make development in a distributed environment much easier. Call it "cloud computing" if you wish (a term I hate, but at least it's on the right track).
I don't know how we got from network IPC to "OS on a browser that I have to pay a monthly fee for? OMFGWTF!!!1one!". Honestly.
Windows at least has a standardized approach to message passing.
Windows doesn't have anything remotely standardized when it comes to message passing. Let's see, I can rattle off at least a dozen ways back to Windows 3.1 that a message can be passed and all of which are implemented.
a) The trusty Windows message. You know, register a private message id and Send/PostMessage between applications.
b) The clipboard. Yep, people stuff all sorts of stuff into the clipboard. Even worse, there's different kinds of things you can put on the clipboard.
c) Funky injection outlined by Richter.
d) COM, which is, internally, actually a bunch of junky Message passing as per a, coupled with a standardized binary format... well, actually -two- standardized binary formats of which the 2nd is a subset of the first.
e) Then there's always the database IPC trick. For databases, Windows has, um, at least a couple of different ways to standardly talk to databases. There's ODBC, OLEDB, ADODB (an VB friendly OLEDB), then there's the new ADO.NET
f) And then there's your preferred mix of sockets, files, shared memory and the like
g) COM+ is a special case of sockets.
In the case of .NET, there's .NET, which actually does not pass messages between applications at all except via remoting and SOAP, but .NET does not actually add a new mechanism for passing messages as much as it buries it into either sockets (SOAP), or, sockets...
So no, there's no standardized messaging in Windows.
This is my sig.
...it's the only way to be sure.
This sounds like what John Gage from Sun has been talking about for ages.
... reference to vaporware here.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sounds like a whole new type of 'vaporware'.
Yes, those assholes with their FREE TIME to PURSUE INTERESTS! They should just be miserable drones instead!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
With a HAL you still need to recompile the code. With something like a Java Virtual Machine you can. Likely MS would be pushing their own byte code VMs.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
To my probably old-fashioned mind an operating system is something that sits between user-space programs and hardware, that deals with things like scheduling, timing, hardware sharing, filesystems, and all the other interesting stuff you find under /proc on a Linux system.
So you can have all the web stuff you want, but it's still going to have to run on a real operating system. I have this feeling that these marketroids will probably call MS-Office an operating system...
Greetings
Bart
Dell has submitted an intellectual property claim on 'cloud computing'. I'd love to see a MS-Dell war over the idea of 'cloud computing'. While they're busy, the rest of the world can just leave them both behind!
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Codename FART
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Desktop operating systems are going to be hard to replace. There's really no substitute to having all your resources locally accessible on your computer. I like the web for access to information, transfer of information and communication, online applications (that make sense to have online - i.e., stuff that I'll want to access anywhere, like email, facebook, etc), and maybe the odd multiplayer game. I just really don't have much interest in paying someone else to take the most important software and data that I use out of my hands. I guess I'm old-fashioned that way.
I, personally, think you may not have read the article. I, personally, also think the headline writer should be fired, or possibly promoted as he has generated large about of buzz from a bad headline, but few people seem to have actually read it.
I, personally, think that if I don't ever, personally, think something, I,personally, will not say that I thought it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
While I agree with you that isolation based on language feature isn't a particulary new concept, Microsoft's SIP have their own twist: the channel they're using for messaging must repect some kind of FSM for the communication state, which helps in case of error for assigning the blame.
I thought plan9 was Lucent?
You mean except for the fact that it predates the founding of Lucent by a decade? Secondly, Bell Labs and Lucent are the same company.
Yeah, yeah... Minor details. Other than the two details you mentioned, it was Lucent. I'm sticking to my guns on this one!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Or you could have spent your money on a pretty screen and paid for your OS bundle with your ISP charge. You could easily equal your computing power for less money averaged over three years and at the end of the three years you would still have a powerful cutting edge system instead of an outdated one. Obviously you aren't using most of your computing power most of the time, so shared systems might not just equal your PC power, they might easily double it or more since the same resources in place for 1000 customers would equate to essentially 900 times the processing power available on average, and with careful prioritizing, you would never notice when three of your neighbors decided to compile the Duke Nukedom pre-release beta module at the same time.
Ahh, security. Imagine a computer where you never, ever had to worry about security. I probably still would, and you probably still would, but most people would be glad to make it Somebody Else's Problem. If your OS is managed by a third party, responsible for managing the same image for a couple thousand people, then they'll probably keep it much more secure, at least on average and probably more secure than 99% of us bother to anyway. Bye-bye to zombies.
It really does come down to price. If the mid to high end business workstation right now runs around $1,500.00 and you take $200 off for the monitor, then amortize over three years, you could be paying to rent a thin client box for $33/month. If an ISP offered one with similar performance to my desktop, with a warranty, with guaranteed uptime and real security at $15/mo then it would be very tempting.
There are some real challenges, but they're not something that is impossible to overcome. I use Slax, a live CD based OS, and run it from memory a lot of the time for convenience. When I want to add software, I just plug in a module which puts the software I like in place overlaid on the base OS. The modules are saved to hard disk, and require pretty minimal storage requirements. If the OS image were stored at the ISP instead of on a CD, and it was kept constantly updated, it would be a boost over even what I use much of the time now. To improve performance, rather than downloading the full OS, the bootloader and kernel should be based off of an iSCSI lun so I'm only downloading the blocks I need rather than the full files.
That scenario assumes I want to store things locally, but if I only stored a key, I could use the disk space of the ISP with LUKS volumes encrypted and accessed via iSCSI as well at the ISP with a pretty good privacy expectation.
All of that is available now, with development effort and OSS, but the really significant benefits should be even more dazzling as the workload is offloaded into the cloud rather than requiring my machine to do the work. I come pretty close to that when I use a remote desktop from a slow machine to a fast one. The local machine can be a really old one and as long as the hosting machine is spiffy, then all the local machine needs do is display my graphics and exchange ip traffic quickly.
Who's buying? The people who are buying are the ones who are offered more power, better security and more software at a lower price than they could get buying a regular PC. Of course that's assuming that it isn't hosted at MS, but MS does have a pretty good track record of getting other companies to sell and service their products.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Uh, OSX is based on a mach kernel, IIRC, and Ubuntu is based on Linux.
One uses Aqua and the other X.
I don't know enough about OS/2 to opine on its innards.
Hey, it's all morally equivalent if it uses electricity, right?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
While I agree with you that isolation based on language feature isn't a particulary new concept, Microsoft's SIP have their own twist: the channel they're using for messaging must repect some kind of FSM for the communication state, which helps in case of error for assigning the blame.
This is just Design by Contract "embraced and extended" from Eiffel. There are a number of concurrent programming languages that have this capability.
jdb2
There are a number of concurrent programming languages that have this capability.
Oops. That should be "many programming languages that support concurrency combined with this capability."
jdb2
Really, as far as first posts go, this is rather original.
how can MS make a web-based OS if there's no such thing as the web?
Disclaimer: I myself am a UNIX lover, with all its problems and quirks
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
Ga zelf kakken jong.
That's not even in the same ballpark as my point. It's an operating system. You claim MS was somehow "ripping off" everyone else... but I don't see what there is to "rip off", since they are all operating systems and do operating system type things.
By your logic, Teh Lunix is nothing more than a really bad rehash of Windows. Not that I disagree with that fact, but the point is that all operating systems are going to (or should, anyway) perform similar functions. One big innovation Windows brought to the mainstream table first was Plug and Play... a feature Teh Lunix STILL can't duplicate, despite spending over a decade chasing MS's tail lights.