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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.
Why was this abortion of an article selected, when there is a better ars one here, and BBC here
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/30/1714249
If only someone could utilize the power of cloud computing to get rid of dupes.
va chier !!
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."
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.
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...
No, they are working on a new OS in order to continue the monopoly they now enjoy. If the paradigm of cloud computing becomes the reality, then they are fucked if they continue with their current business model.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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!
... 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.
Midori is a code name, meaning it won't be named that when it's released. It's a pretty common word, as it means "Green" in Japanese. It's also the name of a common Melon Liquer. Chill out, not everything they do is evil, it's just a name.
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
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.
...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.
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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.
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
jnode.org :-)