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Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS
snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."
Was anyone waiting for this? Or interested in this?
Anyone?
Bueller?
How we know is more important than what we know.
From what they've said so far, Windows Azure is just Microsoft hosting your applications on their distributed network.
They were touting all these "great" things, but really that's all it really is.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Considering the source of this software, one can be pretty sure of this lifecycle:
Phase one: deployment by thousands of small businesses, the poor schmucks.
Phase two: serious security and compatibility problems go exploited and unreported. Those in the know start to advise against use of the software.
Phase three: Patching attempts by Microsoft. Cracking attempts by crackers. Either: Massive advertising campaign by Microsoft OR Microsoft puts out Version 2 with bug fixes and advertises that.
Phase four: more patching by Microsoft. More cracking by crackers. Microsoft comes out a with Service Pack. New Ubuntu does everything this product does, but faster and more securely.
Phase five: fewer and fewer companies use this product, but it enjoys a long half-life as companies fail to stop using it.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
- It's slow(duh, connecting to the internet and such)
- You have no privacy (MS knows all)
- You have no control (MS controls all)
- You have no guarantee (MS decides when you are allowed to use it)
I'm sold
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
...I'm sick of the "cloud". I like the idea of syncing data over the net, but I hate the idea of having to be online to do work. Worse yet, I hate the idea of using web-based interface. They all work differently, they all look different and frankly they suck. It's hard for them to be open source, they're hard to extend and hard to deploy.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
...it's not an OS in my book. It may be an excellent (hmph!) network API, but it is not an operating system of any kind.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Azure will just be a framework for computing how much cpu time and resources an application uses, and deciding how much CPU time to bill the user.
Welcome back to the mainframe era.
Kiss your "personal" computer goodbye.
1. Can turn off access to any application, at will.
2. Can force upgrade$, even when perfectly happy with an older version of an application.
3. Can nickle-and-dime you for every piece of the OS, similar to purchasing your car one bolt at-a-time.
4. Over tax our still not-ready-for-prime-time broadband.
Gosh, how the hell does this benefit me in anyway? I am not an automatic MS-basher like some people here but I'm quickly learning.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
it's also ugly, bloated, and losing market share.
Vuzta.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Does this explain all the bullshit slashdot articles about cloud this and grid that? I hope this turns into microsoft bob 2.0.
If you run a business, you have to know DAMN well that your data is:
1) private and secure
3) available to your apps
4) backed up
How can you do that if your data is "in the cloud"? The SLA isn't worth the paper that it is written on if your business goes down for a week because something went wrong with "the cloud".
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Windows, not walls.
You can look, but you can't touch.
That's not really your data you're downloading from the cloud, it's a copy provided to you by the grace of the service provider.
Windows 7 is losing core applications and replacing them with an installer to download them because doing so appeases the federal regulators who will come down -hard- on Microsoft implementing any program that could be considered, even if twenty years from now, unfair competition.
Microsoft doesn't want the headache and says, fine, we'll take our toys and replace it with an installer that is on the users' desktop or start menu or whatever, and they can choose to use it or not. OEMs can choose to leave it in or not, etc.
I'm OK with that, I don't use the Windows Live apps anyway.
Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad
May? From the moment it was named, it was predestined to become nothing more than a scourge of sane people and a fantastic technological lubricant for the "sexually attracted to techterms" IT managers across the globe.
I record my sleeptalking
How can you do that if your data is "in the cloud"? The SLA isn't worth the paper that it is written on if your business goes down for a week because something went wrong with "the cloud".
Supporting small business I've seen some down right foolish and stupid decisions made on IT, placing cost over their data security.
Most cloud services offer business access to applications and services they could not afford if they put the software on site and I see it as no different to a SMB deciding to spend 5K on a new server and ignore the extra 5K for a backup system to support it.
Some business owners will understand the risks, and some will either not care or go for the bottom line with cost.
From the moment it was named
Don't you mean re-named? It's just the thin-client model being sold under yet another name.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wasn't it some --other-- OS that was supposed to have gone down in flames due to fragmentation and forking? How many flavors of "Windows" are alive in the ecosystem now? CE, "supercomputing", XP, Vista, and now "Cloud"? The next version: "Windows Plethora"...
Agreed. While OLE and the original Windows SDK sucked, that's ancient history. Focus on stuff from the last decade. The .NET API is excellent by and large.
That's because they started from Java.
Given enough time, they will wander into the land of incomprehensibility that users of traditional Microsoft API's are used to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Too bad no one in their right mind is going to leave tried and true LAMP and desktop OS that work. RMS, once again, was right, doubly so in this case, the user surrenders their software freedom and their data when they use Windows 7 in the M$ Vapor.
Of all the reasons to dislike Microsoft, this is not a good one.
It's not like there's going to be any market compulsion as on the desktop where they have to arrange to pay people to use MS Windows (the common argument here is that the fees paid by crapware installed on OEM preinstalls more than covers OS costs charged by Microsoft for the O/S).
Oh, and only an idiot writes stupid things like `M$'.
If you had half a clue, you would realize that the EVUL EVUL EVUL M$ had stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hreused Richard Stallman's only good idea as regards to an Emaacs style architecture but copied it so faithfully that they had reproduced all the same problems (see my historical posts here on Slashdot and journal entries for further documentation), or just fucking google for it.
How will you flame(stalk) me back, a man who refuses to ever do paid work on Microsoft Windows and whose primary workstation at work runs RHEL "Linux", not "GNU/Linux" or "Linux/GNU", and a man who has never owned a machine with a licensed copy of Microsoft anything (proudly Unix and later Linux at home since 1985).
Oh wait, I bought my wife a Microsoft Windows XP notebook in a fit of madness. She hated it because it crashed so much and I quickly had it replaced with a Macbook (which she loves and which sadly was not available at the time we got the Neo XP notebook).
You're an idiot twitter and if anything, I would suspect _you_ of being a Microsoft shill because to anyone with more than half a braincell (sadly as a blonde guy, that's the hand I was dealt), you just provoke the opposite reaction as to what you seem to be trying to promote.
I apologize to everyone except twitter. Mod this the flamebait that it is and move on.
gnutoo linked straight to Twitters own Slashdot Journal. He sometimes forgets to switch accounts and replies quoting "himself" with a different user. How more fucking obvious does it need to be?
So you didn't like Netscape (and yes by the end it was by most accounts a bloated piece of crap), but you don't get to make up your own history. In the beginning Netscape cost money, and IE did not. After a while IE came pre-installed (and of course, Netscape did not). What a bunch of chumps the Netscape guys must have been, right? Trying to sell their product when they should have just been selling an OS and bundling the browser with it.
It's not like Netscape wasn't just as bad at "extending" the nascent standards, but they tended to do it in ways that didn't require a particular OS. And IE didn't win because their table tags were somehow better than Netscape's. The browsers were incompatible in various ways, not the least of which was ActiveX. Microsoft even did their own incompatible Java VM. And seeing as free + bundled got IE the majority share quickly, it wasn't long before certain corners of the internet started to look like an extension of the Microsoft platform.
Technical superiority is not what makes you a success in this market. If anything, there's a magical combination of cheap and easy that does it. The *real* reason we're talking about the fall of IE (if you want to call it that) is that the web is mostly mature now, as a platform. That maturity happened in a lot of ways, some because of MS, some in spite of MS, some having nothing to do with MS. I'm not going to get into specifics, nor would I even say I'm qualified to discuss most of it. The point is, the basic technological foundation for the web has been laid, and the time has come to commodify it. Whatever money or power could have been gained from "innovating" a successful browser has dried up. The best engines for both HTML rendering and ECMAScript will be open source from here on out.
Plus it's not all desktops anymore. There are way too many interests now from established players in other industries, like Nokia and Motorola, that also want a say in the web's future. These companies may get along with MS in certain ways but you can bet that when IE kicks the bucket, Motorola et al will sleep late the day of the funeral.
Repos as in debian-like package management repositories? That would be well overdue. Somehow I think they'll never manage to do that well though.
You, man, got the prize for the best conceptualy correct double sense joke.
Rethinking email
The *real* reason we're talking about the fall of IE (if you want to call it that) is that the web is mostly mature now, as a platform.
No. The real reason IE is no longer the sole dominant force in the browser space is because Firefox managed to match IE on price (free), while surpassing it in features (pop-up blocker, extensions, etc.).
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it