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Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection."
"Cloud"?? How innovative!! You missed the boat on THIS one, Microsoft! Hahaha!
Wait...
How many times has a similar story been posted, and NOT been true?
Seriously?
How about instead, "Apple patents cloud booting technology?"
Google, Microsoft, Sony, et al, are also in the same situation. Stop saying they're going to do this. They probably aren't if history's to be believed.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Booting off a network is nothing new. You've been able to buy NICs with ROMs that enable you to boot off the network for decades.
I imagine a tech support nightmare for supporting the Gentle Users. It couid work OK for IT professionals. I don't see this for mobile devices for the unwashed masses however... mqh
FruitBoot. Boot your Mac direct from backend by the Bay. Or, diskless from the data center North Carolina, this is the Toothless FruitBoot. Not as attractive of an experience, but a more streamlined boot.
Has Linux not been able to do this for years using Intel's PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment)?
Anyone got an English translation of this? It's giving me a headache.
I hope they implement some kind of security so Comcast can't give you their 'customized' version...
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
who would want this w/o strong encryption either: Maybe a telephone company, and their vendor locked in phone. "oh i'm sorry, it wont work w/o the net boot OS"
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
Having spent the last decade deploying a very homogeneous collection of hardware around the world, the idea makes some amount of sense as an evolutionary step. I don't see this happening in PC-land (Windows-based or or otherwise) because of huge variations in hardware configuration. I can definitely imagine Apple moving to cloud-booting ipads/iphones/imacs/appleTV's/whatevers. Of course, at that point who really owns (pwns) your hardware? Hmm.
Apple have NetBoot, just simply press 'N' on boot to boot up over a network.
Time Warner Cable.
It's slow as old folks fucking, and yes I've done a personal comparison.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... it will be called borgboot.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In Soviet Russia, booting nets you a pain in the ass.
You know, the one where they stopped putting in floppy drives? What a bonehead move *that* was.
sig not found
Yup, one of my office computers is a diskless iMac that boots from a network server. Works fine.
Apple will spend $50 million in advertising and after 2 years they'll have the majority of the world convinced they invented net-booting. (This article representing the first $20k of that.)
And that's exactly what this continuation of a 1999 patent covers: NetBoot of the original iMac. This is a non-story published by yet another blog that doesn't know how to read patents.
I'll never understand why something that caused so many users so much trouble is heralded by some as innovative.
While most PC makers approached the aging floppy disk situation by first offering to leave the fdd out, then making them optional but not the default, and then making them available on select models, and only then ceasing to offer them, Apple dropped support entirely with no regard for their own users.
This is an example we are to hold in esteem?
-Lod
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
I have quite a few systems that boot from SAN.
And PXE boot is very handy for installing or when you want to boot off of a virtualized floppy.
No need to install aftermarket botnets.
Apple has been offering cloud services since around 1996 when they ditched floppy drives and offered online storage instead. Sure, this is new, but to imply they're playing catch up by "moving slowly" when they offered cloud services before MS or any other consumer OS reseller and are offering new services like this first is a bit retarded.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
From TFS:
This sentence means absolutely nothing. Editors are supposed to edit the content that appears on the site, not just act as gatekeepers. :-/
The last thing we need is more patent FUD. The patent is quite clear on what it's intended for:
2. Description of the Related Art
Most organizations currently employ local area networks (LANs) of thick clients, e.g., personal computers. While this represents an improvement over the disconnected computing environments of a decade earlier, many limitations still exist. In current LAN environments, each client computer has its own local copy of operating system software, application programs, and user customizations to the desktop environment. Typically there is no centralized mechanism for maintaining a consistent system configuration in such a computing environment. Consequently, individual user workstations often get out-of-sync with each other as one or more users upgrade to newer versions of the operating system, upgrade their application programs, or install application programs that were not part of the original system configuration. Additionally, in this type of uncontrolled, decentralized environment, the operating system of a client computer can easily become corrupted. This is especially true with the Microsoft.RTM. Windows.RTM. 95, 98 and NT operating systems where user modification of a single system file can have undesirable consequences and require significant downtime. For example, editing the Windows Registry file could render a client computer unusable thereby requiring reinstallation of the computer's operating system software and all the application programs.
In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that administration and maintenance of current computing environments is complex and time consuming. Therefore, what is needed is a reliable computing environment that can be maintained more easily and at a lower cost.
This has nothing to do with cloud computing. This has everything to do with managing a large net-booted environment, like a large corporation with a few thousand workstations. From reading the patent's claims, it's a design for a net-boot server that maintains separate boot volumes for each client class. Those volumes can be modified on the fly, without the need for carefully creating images.
TFA implies that this may be a technology for Apple to have more control over iPods and other devices, by keeping the OS internal and possibly charging a subscription fee to keep the device booting. With today's systems, that's ridiculous. Downloading a whole working OS is impractical over current residential networks, and it kills one of the best features of handheld devices: they're ready at a moment's notice. It simply doesn't make sense for Apple to expect users to wait for a half an hour every time they turn on an iPod.
The more reasonable in TFA speculation is that this is a push to have a bigger corporate Apple presence, but that's glossed over in favor of more outlandish claims.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netboot
Initial release: January 5, 1999
Sheesh, Slashdot's collective concept of the second-most-used desktop platform seems to consist entirely of making fun of the hipsters that are supposedly the only people who use it.
ISP caps and slow DSL speeds will make this suck.
Also just think how slow a cable node will get then a full block is netbooting / remote desktop.
Do want download 1GB+ to use your system per boot? Apple can even get up dates rights 800MB-1000G just for a mac os update is bad.
As with so many Apple "features", this is about control. It does mean that you can run the main part of the OS on a powerful server somewhere, but in this case it would be Apple's server. Think you didn't own your iDevice before? Hard to jailbreak a device when the OS isn't even local anymore.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
Right, because it was a dumb idea when it was originally developed and hasn't improved with the passage of time.
Bootable USB and MicroSD have rendered it obsolete and only the Control Freaks at Apple would want you to boot over the air from the cloud that they control.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Holy run-on sentence, Batman! Buzzwords aplenty, too.
On-topic: meh. This has existed for ages in local networks, as have the means to secure this over the Internet. I would guess the reason it hasn't been done yet is that it's just not very practical, bandwidth-wise. So, unless Apple has something very novel/unusual up their sleeve, I fail to see why this is particularly interesting.
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=I8V6AAAAEBAJ
The article is wrong with the dates as you can see in the patent described in the article it was filed in 1999 and granted in 2006 but the article stated it was filed in 2006, and granted recently. This gave the author reason to believe that this has something to do with what apple is doing next which seems unlikely since they have had the idea for over 10 years and have done nothing with it.
Also from the article it sounded much like a Net-boot Linux distribution with a NFS shared holding the file system to be used. Something like my school has set up for student computers. This gave me an impression of patent trolling/prior art as it has been in place since 1997 at least. But it does make some alteration to what i have seen in practice, for one there are 2 places where a user can make changes to the OS, first is a network stored diff file system which tracks the changes from the end users system and settings files. So that a user can make changes to the programs installed and OS files (not that they have good reason to do so) this is then compared with a master OS image, this i would assume allow a user to have the same programs and settings across any computer. There is also a Local Shadow Volume which stores larger files which cannot be stored on the server due to quota restraints, caching of regularly used files and server write queues. Possibly also can be used to a disconnected client although they don't appear to state how much of the master FS is transfered to the client to make it usable if the network is disconnected.
That being said it can be seen as similar to what Google is doing in Chrome OS but chrome only boots from the server to restore the OS and not to boot every time. Also Chrome OS uses the local copy as the primary and the network copy as a backup but apples patent seems to imply the opposite.
Given the age of the patent this article appears to be someone trying to make up news during a slow week more than anything else.
Anybody remember Plan9? A not fully developed idea in it was of an anonymous workstation. The workstation would behave like a caching terminal which could run applications. Since it merely cached from the file server, and the same apps ran on all hardware, you could move from station to station without an active sync.
The hierarchical storage mechanism in Plan9 was almost instantly recognizable in TimeMachine. Basically, all data from workstations dribbled towards file servers which snapshotted to optical storage. To go back to where you were yesterday, just involved mounting your workspace with a /yyyymmdd/ in the path.
That would make alot more sense than an internet wide bootp....
What trouble was caused for users? People were already using zip drives and CD-Rs by then, and not to be condescending, but the Mac userbase had likely already shifted away from floppies, being full of creative professionals who dealt with documents larger than 1.44 MB on a regular basis.
And that means a nontrivial bandwidth requirement.
If these do come out, and and get popular, then the ISPs get to decide if they like the bandwidth usage...
Nice. I like being able to boot without a network, thanks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When apple finally left floppy drives out was when I'd already considered them obsolete for 5 years -- maybe your collection of data on floppies was larger than mine so you see the situation differently, but as far as I'm concerned they weren't innovating, they were just holding the industry back the least.
To explain "holding the industry back", consider the modern equivalent of the floppy drive: IE6. There is an awful lot of cool stuff in the world of HTML5 / CSS3, but we aren't allowed to even use HTML4 / CSS2 to its limits because some customers insist on sticking with the obsolete tech. If MS were to end support for it and everyone upgraded, we could take advantage of new tech, our lives would be easier, and our products would be better.
iSCSI operation against a writable snapshot of a lun. Or various nfsroot solutions for linux. Or probably a number of other things...
This patent was filed in 2006, back when Apple was taking enterprise semi-seriously. Expect the validity of this one to be a moot point as Apple ignores it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
No, lots and lots. It's extremely common for OS installs on both servers and clients, and also typical for Citrix/Terminal Services dumb terminals.
Probably 80% of the computers in our organisation have been netbooted at least once.
i personally knew several Mac users who were not pleased by the change. My uncle, a huge Mac guy had trouble with the transition, our high school computer lab who somehow purchased several new machines without realizing their entire "hand in your assignments on a floppy" system was screwed, etc.
i certainly remember much weeping and gnashing of teeth from the mac people i knew, but perhaps my experience was atypical. didn't know any "creative professionals", just normal folks who weren't too pleased with the deal.
-Lod
BOOTP over a Cloud, or an Internet Server via HTTP? Is this truly innovative? LAN cards have been able to do it for years as well. Yes, not a "Cloud" but an Intranet..
Wait, DEC VAX Workstations could boot into a VMS Cluster across a network..
Again, how is this truly innovative other than the image repository is "not on my local network" and the transport "can be unreliable?"
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
very few home systems use it. quite a bit of home systems have had the capability.
tons of enterprise systems have a use for it.
that doesn't mean it adds anything new. if apple has a "cloud capable os" that actually has any traction, it will defeat any reason to even consider mac hardware.
Such as on an airplane? Or when my router needs a reboot? Or when my ISP fails periodically? Why would I want this? Are there no security implications? Consumers might be that stupid, but techs should not be.
They were dead when Apple stopped shipping systems with them. And they merely shifted the burden to the user who had to buy a USB floppy drive. So it went from standard to optional. Note how when I word it that way it turns into the more graceful method you think PC makers used.
Given Slashdot's track record predicting Apple's imminent failures, I'd bet on this being a success based on the number of people in this thread claiming it's nothing new and that no one would want this.
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
Let's set aside for a moment the technical merits of said "cloud strategy" and focus on what the Republican party and telco monopolies want. If net neutrality dies, then Apple, or any other innovator, would have to not just come up with the technology to do such a thing, but also the licensing agreements with the telcos to carry the bandwidth. Apple -- or whomever -- would have to go hat in hand to ATT/Verizon/etc. -- saying "we have this new service, how much do we have to pay you to carry it?"
This will drastically increase costs, squelch competition, and shut small players out of the game entirely.
Sun's SunRay workstation worked the same way. Boot off the net, instant access to your work at a meeting exactly as you left it in your office, including 3D graphics streaming from a GPU server. Ahead of its time in so many ways. I miss Sun.
Unless Apple has in mind to change their OS to a very slim size, you are absolutely right: this is a show-stopper for the patented technology, no matter for which market segments.
And, of course, unless Apple knows something that we don't about how ISP/Telecom will bill their clients and expand their network/bandwidth.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Apple has discovered that they don't like selling hardware. iTunes gets them more profit margin. They kill the Xserve line, and make a virtual product that any computer can use, and which probably requires iTunes microtransactions to run/install software.
not really. there was a huge variety of software that didn't work with USB floppies. maybe not so much on the mac, i wouldn't know.
-Lod
Huh? Netbooting is anything but a dumb idea. Used all the time in enterprise situations. It makes the lives of admins much easier.
I think you hit it right on the nose...
No network saturation at all, I bet. Ummm, I vote no. You can if you want to, but I want a modicum of control over my machine.
I find netbooting incredibly useful. I frequently netboot new virtual machines. Or machines to which I have no physical access other than a network-based KVM.
I was about ask you to name something that didn't work with a USB floppy, and then I noticed you had switched the topic from Macs to PCs. That might be the reason that PCs held onto them for so long. MacOS was able to take advantage of the fact that a floppy was treated similarly to a flash drive or any other virtual drive -- just another storage medium, rather than requiring special handling.
I suppose I should have said that flash drives and other virtual drives (images, for example) were treated the same as a floppy, but the point remains the same. The MacOS file system is handled significantly differently from the CP/M style used by Microsoft.
Why was that such a failed idea? By that point in time 1.44MB was pretty much worthless. Much better to boot from the USB that they popularized. Before you have a fit, read that again - yes, USB had been around for probably years, but no one was really using it. When the first iMac had USB and no floppy, all of a sudden there was a real need for USB, and it got popular. Apple did not invent USB, but they sure as hell made it usable and necessary. After that, USB accessories took off, for both Macs AND Windows. Funny how that worked out. Besides, Apple was the first to use the 3.5" floppy, why not be the first to drop it?
I'd say it's coming soon. Apple isn't going to restrict the success of the iPad by chaining to a PC for that much longer.
Maybe on Apples it wasn't an issue, since you're always booting OS X off the hard drive, but I know when I finally came to grips with the PC's floppyless transition, I was pretty pissed about ditching my trusty GRUB boot disk in favor of a combination of CDs and USB flash drives (because netbooks don't have CD drives (not that they'd have had floppy drives, either) and about a third of desktops won't reliably boot from any given flash drive (capacity limits, partitions vs. wholedisk, etc.).
...that time before the 80's when your files and OS were on the network and you had to use that dumb terminal thing?
Basically it replaces whatever network protocol used to be for TCP/IP over internet.
How can this possibly be worth a new patent?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Isn't this what Microsoft tried to do with their subscription OS scheme and .NET? If so then they already should have a patent on it.
Every running workstation could distribute a fraction of the boot to the starting up ones. Central server (lighter than ever) would be the root distributor for new versions and the validator of the digital signature of each piece for all the running versions. Version upgrade would be forced seamlessly for new runners from central server. The distribution shouldn't be the booting filesystem but the booted memory image to speed it up, or at least most of it. This can apply to applications too.
This idea cannot be patent-trolled. If not patented yet, it is released as (CC) by me and this post is registered in slashdot servers as a proof of previous concept against the troll.
Indeed, Linux has been doing this for years. But PXE is not a correct analogy, since that's only an execution environment, like efi.
boot.kernel.org is what you're looking for. And yes, it can use PXE to netboot your machine directly onto the 'Net.
My Apple IIgs has the ability to boot via an AppleTalk network-hosted boot image. Apple has had this on the Macintosh since the late '90s with Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X has supported it since its introduction. Just hold down 'n' during boot on any Open Firmware or EFI-equipped Mac, and it will try to netboot. And netboot.me provides a minimally-assisted INTERNET-based netboot for any gPXE computer. It is even possible to configure an OpenWRT-compatible WiFi router to send the proper netboot.me assistance, so you don't need any "infrastructure" on your premises at all, just your internet modem and router.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
the problems with USB floppies had nothing to do with the operating system on the hard drive of the computer. the problem was booting the operating system *on the floppy*
again, maybe macs didn't have that problem. all of this is really missing the point, which is that many Mac users felt Apple had abandoned them again when they made the move to drop floppies. It was not met with rejoicing and celebration, it was not considered a great move.
only now looking back have macholes managed to spin something that was not appreciated even amongst their own ranks into some example of apple "leading" the industry. it's ridiculous.
-Lod
... not whether the cloud-booted Apple computer runs Linux, but the real question is this:
So far Apple has built market-share plucking the low hanging fruit among the trees that its fanbois grow on. so now they want to reach higher into the clouds for corporate market share. But if their new cloud-bootable products starts falling off from the sky, will their stratospheric AAPL still defy gravity, or like the Apple Newton did, fall with a thud on Jobs' head?
Those iPads and iPhones and iPods and Macs and Macbooks aren't the hardware devices you are looking for (theatrical wave of hand).
Anyone who felt "abandoned" is an idiot and deserves whatever happens to them.
Apple did not go around and destroy existing Macs when they introduced the iMac. The lack of a floppy was an advertised feature. Only the most stupid people would buy one and not know they needed an external drive.
Dropping floppies may have caused pain, but it was well worth it.
According to Apple fanboys, like multitasking, cloud computing and network booting is a disaster, horrible, awful... until Apple invents it first!
My computer (Fedora 12) already does this. It involves putting a boot strap image onto the harddisk of my laptop. I then boot it up, and it downloads the bits of the OS it needs. It caches these parts to disk, for faster booting next time. Now I come to think of it, even Windows does this. I don't have any Apple computers, so what do they do? ;-)
Centralized network booting is a great idea...as long as you're in control.
All the new "cloud" concepts of centralization are actually really good ideas, the problem is that instead of using these ideas to make things better and easier, vendors use them to lock their customers in.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I spent 45 minutes updating my iPad to OS4.2 last night, the connection to Apple dropped in the middle of the first attempt. An hour earlier, my StarCraft connection to BattleNet went tits up in the middle of a game - it doesn't happen often, maybe one night a month, but do you really want a machine that's useless when the net isn't there for you - I don't, I have a Chumby that is like that and I won't recommend anyone to get one because of that one fatal flaw.
The biggest issue was USB floppy drives couldn't read the Mac 800K GCR formatted DD disks that were still randomly hanging around.
and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.
Right, because it was a dumb idea when it was originally developed and hasn't improved with the passage of time.
Bootable USB and MicroSD have rendered it obsolete and only the Control Freaks at Apple would want you to boot over the air from the cloud that they control.
Yeah because we all know that distributing thousands of USB or other Flash media units is so much easier than booting from a server or servers (not). It's hardly a 'dumb idea' and netbooting is something that has been and will continue to be used by quite a few enterprises.
Maybe it's a dumb idea if you are in Mom's basement, but in the real world having ways to manage images/OSes across many client devices matters a lot in some instances.
Now I'm not saying I think doing it from a third party via 'the cloud' (I hate that term) is necessarily a good idea. That would depend upon the implementation and the specific needs of the user segment(s) being addressed. I'm just saying that your statement is totally false when viewed as a generalization.
Hasn't everyone been trying to guess what the big data center they are building is for? Well, this could be the answer you're looking for... TFTP booting has been around since the days of Xterms, maybe even before then.
It makes perfect sense for user-recovery as well. Imagine this: You've dropped your macbook, and now it won't boot from the HD, but can automatically default to net-booting into a utility that will attempt to repair the HD. It will also allow you to boot into a stripped down OS that allows you to copy all your important files to a USB stick or maybe to a ".mac" cloud destination.
The current Macbook Air doesn't eve have a HD -- it uses flash. Just imagine how much thinner they'll be able to make that computer if all it is, is a screen, keyboard and some wireless networking. Then it really will be a Macbook "Air" -- the whole machine becomes a true "netbook" in that it boots and runs from the internet.
Just wait until Apple figures out how to power it from the network as well. No batteries needed.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
uh, go loko at gtall's comment.
they *have* to sell hardware. They have literally set themselves up to do so. By not selling hardware, there's also less compelling reasons for apple products.
Jobs will finally leverage his synergies to bridge the gap between the mobile and desktop paradigms.
Oh, hell. Three suitspeak buzzwords in one sentence. Be still, my heart. This was once a forum for nerds, not newly-enrolled MBA students...
This has nothing to do with cloud computing.
Apple is discontinuing their enterprise server line. In the absence of a replacement for the Xserve, the only option is a cloud environment hosted inside that shiny new data center. For those that wonder what servers Apple will be running in that data center, the answer is: any server platform they want. Just because Apple customers aren't licensed to run OS X Server on non-Apple hardware or in virtual machines run on non-Apple hardware doesn't mean that Apple, Inc. themselves can't do it.
the FOSS world has comparable initiatives for netbooting: http://netboot.me (a wiki page for each operating system), http://boot.kernel.org
these only work with gpxe, so you need a stick / cd to get started. but then, you can boot anything for which there is a wiki page on netboot.me
... what in the world would make me want to trust an operating system that isn't even located on my computer and is being loaded onto my computer without my at least having had a chance to check it? Am I supposed to just trust Steve Jobs? Ri-i-i-ight.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Sun Systems Sun Ray thin clients will boot across the Internet and through a VPN tunnel. We've used then this way for years.