I really don't see how breaking up would change much. At least not in the next ten years? You break them into Applications and Systems. This from the company who called a browser part of Systems, who called ActiveX (nee OLE) part of Systems. Spliting Microsoft would be like modularizng spaghetti code. They mix system and application DLL's. Every version of Word comes out will six or more DLL's that should have been distributed in an OS patch kit. Of course it can be done, but it's not pretty.
I think it's getting real silly the names these companies are putting on their chips. You and I both know that sledgehammer is a cool name, but the Marketoids will never let it appear on the the packaging it comes in.
I work for an airline. As such I've been neck deep in the issue. The planes are fine. The aircraft manufacture has guarenteed them. About the only company we've delt with that has. Most airlines work in mutiple time zones. Therefore the systems work in UTC and have some of the most sophisticated date handling routines I've seen. Many airlines have been accepting reservations from the year 2000 for over 200 days now. In our reservation system you don't even type in the year. The critical behind-the-scenes systems of any airline are the Crew Scheduling and Aircraft Maintenance systems. For an airline to continue to operate, the airline must be sure that the crew members don't exceed their flying time limits or violate rest requirements and aircraft parts that have to be replaced after a specific amount of flying time are replaced. An airline can put up with almost any kind of failure but these systems. I quite fond of a quote from the FAA chairman. I don't remember it word for word, so to paraphrase, "I don't think we'll have any problems from Y2K, but since our system break down so often if we do have a Y2K problem, the air traffic controlers are used to it." For those wondering, I'd climb on an aircraft on Jan 1, 2000.
While reading the article I thought of one paragraph: Anticipating a world in which software will be sold as a service instead of a packaged good, the company said it would re-introduce MSN, shifting its focus to online communications, improved information searching and electronic commerce. I was thinking how several PC vendors on my area had "free" PCs with three year MSN voucher.
I don't know if I should pity those people for getting locked in with MSN services which will likely face "upgrade fees" or if I should pity those people for not realising that it us happening to them.
Anybody remember Stacker? They sued MS over patent infringement in the dblspace technology; MS lost with its arm way up to the elbow in the proverbial cookie jar; MS solves litigation problem by buying Stacker.
Remember Citrix? Citrix licences NT3.x code and develops a multi-user version of Windows NT with clients on DOS, Unix, Windows, Macintosh, and just about anything else. In Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft denys Citrix the right to run in this space. MS creates it's one version called Terminal Server Edition with a license that makes no financial sense to deploy to a client that only runs on Windows. Citrix is not dead yet, but I've seen plenty of obituaries for it.
I think Microsoft is buying this company because they don't want anybody else tinkering in the low level backend layers. Anybody can write an application for Windows; but, try to write a back-end layer that might be portable and watch out. They push DCOM+ and Network Named Pipes because those don't run on anything but a Windows front-end.
Prediction: MS will rape and pillage this Interix POSIX sub-system and assimilate both technology and employees into the MS collective where there is no danger of this growing into a platform for NT to encourage any flavor of UNIX.
As my daddy once said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." First, let's separate 80%+ of the population who don't know Jack about computers. They blindly join the hoard of lemmings anyway. Focus on the small group that most of us can identify with: the CS major. UNIX has some really excellent features that lends itself to teaching operating system theory. The UNIX system, in all of its forms including Linux and xxxBSD, provides clear understanding of how multi-user systems work. You can see the other processes (ps). You can see disks (df / bdf). You can limit the resources of processes (ulimit). NT, while truely worthy of the name Operating System, is extremely poor when it comes to multi-user simutanous logins. My guess it the True-CS-Professor (tm) will not drink from water brokers by accountants.
I work in a typical networked environment where all PC's (running Win95) log into one or more Novell 4.x servers using NDS. Obviously, by default, the Novell client tries to run a login script which is typically used to assign default drive mappings and the like. The login script can be enhanced to upgrade software, start default processes and anything else that can be done with a standard MS-DOS batch file. If I disable the login script, is there anything else the sysadmin is capable of running on my PC? FYI: Microsoft's NT client won't allow you to disable login script processing.
but I fojar on a regular basis; it's a perfectly cromulent activity
It's Okay, a quick visit to your neighborhood medical clinic will take care that. Those modern treatments are wonderful. You'll know you ever fojared in a cromulent way. Or even in a non-cromulent way.
Splitting it into two group would not automaticly make MS Office available on another platform. The Windows platform is so unique that applications written to the spec are hard to port to other platforms.
The epitome of this is MS Access. It is so tightly bound to to Intel Windows that it isn't even available on Alpha Windows NT.
Now, imagine you are the Harvard MBA alumnus/alumna running the MS Application Division. You are only accountable to shareholders who want a steady stream of dividends every quater. No one in that position would authorize the expenditure of remediating years of legacy code to anything with less that twenty percent market share.
I think there should also be a third group: the tools group. If you have ever tried to port any MFC based application to any other platform, it is not pretty. The tools group needs to create a portable toolset for platforms other than Windows. This would minimize the expenditure for that MS Office executive.
Now, how to we the Tools Division bean counter to build the tools?
Put your imagination caps on. Suppose Y2K shuts down electricy, causes stock market crashes arround the world, planes fall out of the air, rebels topple faililng governments, yadda, yadda, yadda...
In all this chaos, I think the worst thing about this scenario is that humans allowed themselvs to be dominated and controled by machines that we couldn't recover from the Y2K miscalculations. Nothing so dramatic as Hollywood created, but perhaps more sinister because we turned out lives over to computers slowly, silently and freely.
As long as we still control the machines, Y2K will be nothing more than a blip in the steady noise of BSOD's, crashes, bugs, transfer errors, lost backups, curruptions, failures, etc that happen in our computerized lives every day.
I can't let all these readers who are bashing this story go unchalanged. Every day, I watch a living example of high-functional autisim right in front of me.
I have a four year old who is all but a poster child for this. At one year of age, he knew his alphabet; by three, he could write words and phrases in his choice of three or four fonts; now, he can spell phoneticly and a wide variety of interesting typograpohy (ie: substituting a cookie for the letter "o" - with the Nabisco logo faithfully reproduced with the painstaking detail described). Testers have rated his visual spacial skills off the chart. His motor skills are another story. He can button any button on his shirt as long as he can see it. He can't button the top shirt button because he can't see it. He still can't conduct a decent verbal conversation or catch a ball. Don't even talk to me about the washroom. *sigh* He uses phrase fragments clipped out of everyday life, TV, movies, commericals to express what he wants and doesn't always adjust the phrase to match the tense, gender or person.
The only thing I'll challange is the issue of musically ability. Both by wife and I are musically inclined; each of us are from musical parents. My son can sing quite well. I think there is a whold branch of autism that has outstanding musical ability, but that is another posting. (I guess that's because "Normals" in journalism don't go into enough detail:) )
On the humorous side I guess that what happens when geeks breed - I married a math major.
Having a label attached to this "condition" has empowered us a parents to direct our public school system to address my son's education. It also helps everyone who evaluates him know what to expect. I dislike labels, catagories, and pigeon-holing as much as anybody; but, as long as I can use a label to benefit him, I'm willing to live with it. A label gives educators a reference to see everything that is good in him and strategies to deal with his compulsive need to finish the twenty-seventh drawing of the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" logo (Using the correct fonts and shaded letters, of course). The last thing I want is to see his special abilities homoginized by educators who don't understand it.
As an interesting side note, most of the literature we've read indicates that this affects boys far more than girls. This is probably a leading reason why our profession is so male dominated.
There are several toolkit libraries that allow for this already. There are experimental and not so experimental OS's that shift a process among multiple nodes of a cluster. I see some of the claims akin to Ford putting out a release saying, "Hi, we building cars now."
The holy grail of parallel programming is a compiler or run-time that can detect a highly iterative task with little or no depencies on the results of previous iterations and farm those tasks to other CPU's without the use of tags in the code or special function calls. The best I can imagine is start with specially designed compilers to emit code that attempts to parallelize every loop and assume the loop will be non-dependent unless it fails a dependency at run-time or something obvious at run-time.
As far as networking the task goes, given some of today's easily available technology (Beowolf) we've really seen that it maks little difference if the CPU is on the same motherboard or in another case attached by a network. In fact, networks are getting fast enough I predict it won't be long until the CPU bus residing on a network becomes useful in some applications.
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I really don't see how breaking up would change much. At least not in the next ten years?
You break them into Applications and Systems. This from the company who called a browser part of Systems, who called ActiveX (nee OLE) part of Systems.
Spliting Microsoft would be like modularizng spaghetti code.
They mix system and application DLL's. Every version of Word comes out will six or more DLL's that should have been distributed in an OS patch kit. Of course it can be done, but it's not pretty.
I think it's getting real silly the names these companies are putting on their chips. You and I both know that sledgehammer is a cool name, but the Marketoids will never let it appear on the the packaging it comes in.
I work for an airline. As such I've been neck deep in the issue. The planes are fine. The aircraft manufacture has guarenteed them. About the only company we've delt with that has.
Most airlines work in mutiple time zones. Therefore the systems work in UTC and have some of the most sophisticated date handling routines I've seen. Many airlines have been accepting reservations from the year 2000 for over 200 days now. In our reservation system you don't even type in the year.
The critical behind-the-scenes systems of any airline are the Crew Scheduling and Aircraft Maintenance systems. For an airline to continue to operate, the airline must be sure that the crew members don't exceed their flying time limits or violate rest requirements and aircraft parts that have to be replaced after a specific amount of flying time are replaced. An airline can put up with almost any kind of failure but these systems.
I quite fond of a quote from the FAA chairman. I don't remember it word for word, so to paraphrase, "I don't think we'll have any problems from Y2K, but since our system break down so often if we do have a Y2K problem, the air traffic controlers are used to it."
For those wondering, I'd climb on an aircraft on Jan 1, 2000.
I don't know if I should pity those people for getting locked in with MSN services which will likely face "upgrade fees" or if I should pity those people for not realising that it us happening to them.
Remember Citrix? Citrix licences NT3.x code and develops a multi-user version of Windows NT with clients on DOS, Unix, Windows, Macintosh, and just about anything else. In Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft denys Citrix the right to run in this space. MS creates it's one version called Terminal Server Edition with a license that makes no financial sense to deploy to a client that only runs on Windows. Citrix is not dead yet, but I've seen plenty of obituaries for it.
I think Microsoft is buying this company because they don't want anybody else tinkering in the low level backend layers. Anybody can write an application for Windows; but, try to write a back-end layer that might be portable and watch out. They push DCOM+ and Network Named Pipes because those don't run on anything but a Windows front-end.
Prediction: MS will rape and pillage this Interix POSIX sub-system and assimilate both technology and employees into the MS collective where there is no danger of this growing into a platform for NT to encourage any flavor of UNIX.
Months from now, no one will remember Interix.
As my daddy once said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
First, let's separate 80%+ of the population who don't know Jack about computers. They blindly join the hoard of lemmings anyway. Focus on the small group that most of us can identify with: the CS major.
UNIX has some really excellent features that lends itself to teaching operating system theory. The UNIX system, in all of its forms including Linux and xxxBSD, provides clear understanding of how multi-user systems work. You can see the other processes (ps). You can see disks (df / bdf). You can limit the resources of processes (ulimit).
NT, while truely worthy of the name Operating System, is extremely poor when it comes to multi-user simutanous logins.
My guess it the True-CS-Professor (tm) will not drink from water brokers by accountants.
I work in a typical networked environment where all PC's (running Win95) log into one or more Novell 4.x servers using NDS.
Obviously, by default, the Novell client tries to run a login script which is typically used to assign default drive mappings and the like. The login script can be enhanced to upgrade software, start default processes and anything else that can be done with a standard MS-DOS batch file.
If I disable the login script, is there anything else the sysadmin is capable of running on my PC?
FYI: Microsoft's NT client won't allow you to disable login script processing.
It's Okay, a quick visit to your neighborhood medical clinic will take care that. Those modern treatments are wonderful. You'll know you ever fojared in a cromulent way. Or even in a non-cromulent way.
The epitome of this is MS Access. It is so tightly bound to to Intel Windows that it isn't even available on Alpha Windows NT.
Now, imagine you are the Harvard MBA alumnus/alumna running the MS Application Division. You are only accountable to shareholders who want a steady stream of dividends every quater. No one in that position would authorize the expenditure of remediating years of legacy code to anything with less that twenty percent market share.
I think there should also be a third group: the tools group. If you have ever tried to port any MFC based application to any other platform, it is not pretty. The tools group needs to create a portable toolset for platforms other than Windows. This would minimize the expenditure for that MS Office executive.
Now, how to we the Tools Division bean counter to build the tools?
Put your imagination caps on. Suppose Y2K shuts down electricy, causes stock market crashes arround the world, planes fall out of the air, rebels topple faililng governments, yadda, yadda, yadda ...
In all this chaos, I think the worst thing about this scenario is that humans allowed themselvs to be dominated and controled by machines that we couldn't recover from the Y2K miscalculations. Nothing so dramatic as Hollywood created, but perhaps more sinister because we turned out lives over to computers slowly, silently and freely.
As long as we still control the machines, Y2K will be nothing more than a blip in the steady noise of BSOD's, crashes, bugs, transfer errors, lost backups, curruptions, failures, etc that happen in our computerized lives every day.
I can't let all these readers who are bashing this story go unchalanged. Every day, I watch a living example of high-functional autisim right in front of me.
:) )
I have a four year old who is all but a poster child for this. At one year of age, he knew his alphabet; by three, he could write words and phrases in his choice of three or four fonts; now, he can spell phoneticly and a wide variety of interesting typograpohy (ie: substituting a cookie for the letter "o" - with the Nabisco logo faithfully reproduced with the painstaking detail described). Testers have rated his visual spacial skills off the chart. His motor skills are another story. He can button any button on his shirt as long as he can see it. He can't button the top shirt button because he can't see it. He still can't conduct a decent verbal conversation or catch a ball. Don't even talk to me about the washroom. *sigh* He uses phrase fragments clipped out of everyday life, TV, movies, commericals to express what he wants and doesn't always adjust the phrase to match the tense, gender or person.
The only thing I'll challange is the issue of musically ability. Both by wife and I are musically inclined; each of us are from musical parents. My son can sing quite well. I think there is a whold branch of autism that has outstanding musical ability, but that is another posting. (I guess that's because "Normals" in journalism don't go into enough detail
On the humorous side I guess that what happens when geeks breed - I married a math major.
Having a label attached to this "condition" has empowered us a parents to direct our public school system to address my son's education. It also helps everyone who evaluates him know what to expect. I dislike labels, catagories, and pigeon-holing as much as anybody; but, as long as I can use a label to benefit him, I'm willing to live with it. A label gives educators a reference to see everything that is good in him and strategies to deal with his compulsive need to finish the twenty-seventh drawing of the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" logo (Using the correct fonts and shaded letters, of course). The last thing I want is to see his special abilities homoginized by educators who don't understand it.
As an interesting side note, most of the literature we've read indicates that this affects boys far more than girls. This is probably a leading reason why our profession is so male dominated.
I believe that's called the month of "Checkuary". I'm Y2K compilant. It's my pencil that has the problem :)
My university co-validictorians were twins that grew up in a house without a television or telephone.
Enouogh said.
There are several toolkit libraries that allow for this already. There are experimental and not so experimental OS's that shift a process among multiple nodes of a cluster. I see some of the claims akin to Ford putting out a release saying, "Hi, we building cars now."
The holy grail of parallel programming is a compiler or run-time that can detect a highly iterative task with little or no depencies on the results of previous iterations and farm those tasks to other CPU's without the use of tags in the code or special function calls. The best I can imagine is start with specially designed compilers to emit code that attempts to parallelize every loop and assume the loop will be non-dependent unless it fails a dependency at run-time or something obvious at run-time.
As far as networking the task goes, given some of today's easily available technology (Beowolf) we've really seen that it maks little difference if the CPU is on the same motherboard or in another case attached by a network. In fact, networks are getting fast enough I predict it won't be long until the CPU bus residing on a network becomes useful in some applications.