Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Working On "Post-Windows" Cloud Computing OS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-all-up-there-in-the-clouds-or-something dept.

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.

8 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. I, for one... by m3j00 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...welcome our old software-as-a-service overlords.

  2. This can only be a good thing by blowdart · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  3. Do you know what you are talking about? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualisation layer between the hardware and the OS,

    You mean a kind of, say, Hardware Abstraction Layer?

    Yeah... they've been doing that kind of thing for over ten years.

  4. Best "Cloud Computing OS" name: by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cloud 9!

    too bad it's by definition vaporware.

    1. Re:Best "Cloud Computing OS" name: by FlyingSquidStudios · · Score: 5, Funny

      As is the screen.

      --
      http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
  5. horrible article by ianare · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why was this abortion of an article selected, when there is a better ars one here, and BBC here

  6. Re:Not as dependent on hardware... by corychristison · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Microsoft's wierd mania for virtual machines by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.