First Details of Windows 7 Emerge 615
Some small but significant details of the next major release of Windows have emerged via a presentation at the University of Illinois by Microsoft engineer Eric Traut. His presentation focuses on an internal project called "MinWin," designed to optimize the Windows kernel to a minimum footprint, and for which will be the basis for the Windows 7 kernel.
Good intentions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good intentions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good intentions (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is the middle-management clusterfuck. The direct result of which is the bizarro world of Windows the platform and its zillion libraries and APIs that have subtle (and not so subtle, but probably undocumented) incompatibilities.
Microsoft's own devs can't figure that shit out and they've been trying since XP. It has only become worse since they shoved all the digital restrictions management into the system.
ah! just in time (Score:5, Insightful)
looks like Mistersoftie is up to their old hype the vaporware [wikipedia.org] tricks to dissuade buyers from going with attractive alternatives.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good intentions (Score:4, Insightful)
Comparing the situation of Apple and Microsoft is dangerously wrong. Microsoft would most likely bankrupt if they did what Apple did with the three CPU architectures.
I agree with you MS have good intentions and think big. Where I don't agree is that having a product after 5 years of development is just some "things a behemoth like Microsoft always thinks they have to do".
What else are they supposed to do? Sit on it?
They made mistakes with Vista. First mistake was they started developing Vista on post-XP beta code. It created a huge mess, so they dropped it, took the more modular Windows 2003 codebase, further analyzed it, modularized it, and in the span of 2 years, ported their old code over to end with what's Vista.
They just thought they'd be done too soon. The vision of Vista is great, but they had to carry it out in 2-3 quicker releases, each with lesser more incremental upgrades.
What Microsoft learned from Vista is they need to get their code in order. The new kernel design is part of this effort. I think they're on a good track, I pray like hell they take their time with it, and finish it properly, versus rush it like Vista.
What about the hardware vendors? (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, they have backed themselves into a corner. They must either continue down the path of slowness for their "partners" benefit or they must respond to the newer, faster systems that Apple and Linux offer people. More bang for the buck is what customers will want.
They have a real uphill battle because their two main market drivers were the variety applications that were available and the control of hardware vendors, which includes drivers, discounts, or whatever other "agreements" they have.
With Vista, there are driver and application compatibility issues just like there are with Linux (which is *much* less of an issue today). They are trying to toss away XP ecosystem and it puts them on a level playing field with other competitors. Suddenly, all the reasons for choosing Windows over Mac or Linux have disappeared!
These are interesting times. Microsoft is having to compete with themselves as well as others
Ouch. Don't do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Virtualised Legacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, legacy apps will run marginally slower, but new apps will be free of the built-up cruft.
Re:Rinse, Repeat (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft are the kings of targeted vapourware.
They spent most of the '90s poisoning the well [madisonavenuejournal.com] for their competitors with this tactic. What makes you think they're not doing the same thing again?
why troll parent (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This time will be different! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good intentions (Score:5, Insightful)
If the application is sixteen years old, it should have system requirements that would be considered trivial by today's standards, so virtualization or emulation shouldn't cause as much of a performance hit. Instead, the application would perform as if it had been written today.
Re:Lesson in MS Counting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's just sooo not gonna fly (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that always amazes me about Windows is not how half-assed it is, but how half-assed it is given the amount of resources that Microsoft has to throw at the problem. You'd think that they'd have the money to fund tons of cool pieces of software to go with a Windows installation. I mean Windows Paint is a pathetic application that does almost nothing, a team of open source developers could better it in a week. But Microsoft doesn't improve it, or any of the utilities that come with Windows, nor does it ever add any really good or useful ones.
That's just the start. Why didn't Microsoft implement some really awesome tools to assist with driver and hardware management? What they have is so basic! They have BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars and this is the best that they can do?
Honestly, Windows XP isn't terrible as an operating system; if you stick to simple stuff and don't expect too much, it can serve you well. But in terms of bang-for-the-buck, it must be the worst piece of software *ever*. Because if it's the best that a company can do with more money than most countries, well that just says that the company in question is pathetic.
With the amount of money they have, I would think they could afford to fund 10 separate teams in parallel, each developing the next generation of Windows from scratch, and pick the best of the 10 when they're done. And yet they can't even muster enough skill to produce *one* decent next-generation product? What a bunch of losers!
Re:Good intentions (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit.
Slap it in an DOS VM and be done with it. Hell, that's basically what NT does anyway. Backwards compatibility is a great excuse for a crummy security model and a requirement of the marketing department which can't really give a satisfactory answer to "...but why shouldn't I run my DOS VM on Linux and save $200?" It's not actually a technical requirement. In a world where you can buy a quad-core CPU for a couple hundred bucks, with each core as fast as the fastest x86 chip you could buy a couple years ago, there's really no reason not to cordon off all that nasty old Windows code in a VM or two and let it munch on one of the cores.
Wow? (Score:2, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've booted Windows without a gui and a minimalist http server in only 33 megs of ram.
Re:The operating system family tree (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldnt have said loosly but I agree that they are not the same.. Is that why OSX has only now gained the true UNIX certification rather than always conforming?
Saying OSX is loosly based on Next is like saying Windows 2000 is loosly based on Windows 98... I'd say that the comparison between 2k and XP would be more apt taking Rhapsody, Blue Box and Yellow Box into account.
talking about pulling stuff out of your ass.... I'm going to quote wikipedia here and say:
"Mach is an operating system microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. It is one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, and still the standard by which similar projects are measured.
The project at Carnegie Mellon ran from 1985 to 1994, ending with Mach 3.0. A number of other efforts have continued Mach research, including the University of Utah's Mach 4. Mach was developed as a replacement for the kernel in the BSD version of Unix, so no new operating system would have to be designed around it. Today further experimental research on Mach appears ended, although Mach and its derivatives are in use in a number of commercial operating systems, such as NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, and most notably Mac OS X (using the XNU kernel). The Mach VM system was also adopted by the BSD developers at CSRG, and appears in modern BSD-derived UNIX systems, such as FreeBSD. Neither Mac OS X nor FreeBSD maintain the microkernel structure pioneered in Mach, although Mac OS X continues to offer microkernel Inter-Process Communication and control primitives for use directly by applications.
Mach is the logical successor to Carnegie Mellon's Accent kernel. The lead developer on the Mach project, Richard Rashid, has been working at Microsoft since 1991 in various top-level positions revolving around the Microsoft Research division. Another of the original Mach developers, Avie Tevanian, was formerly head of software at NeXT, then Chief Software Technology Officer at Apple Computer until March 2006.[1]"
I'll just grab my coat and leave now
Re:The operating system family tree (Score:4, Insightful)
"Darwin is built around XNU, a hybrid kernel that combines the Mach 3 microkernel, various elements of FreeBSD 5 (including the process model, network stack, and virtual file system), and an object-oriented device driver API called I/O Kit.[1]
Some of the benefits of this choice of kernel are the Mach-O binary format, which allows a single executable file (including the kernel itself) to support multiple CPU architectures, and the mature support for symmetric multiprocessing in Mach. The hybrid kernel design compromises between the flexibility of a microkernel and the performance of a monolithic kernel."
Re:The operating system family tree (Score:4, Insightful)
OSX was loosly based on NeXT.
Indeed. In the same way Windows Vista is "loosely" based on Windows 2000.
It's kernel is Darwin which is based on NetBSD.
Darwin is "based on" Mach, with a bunch of code welded in from the various BSD projects (mostly FreeBSD).
Oh God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Small kernel, only for now (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that all it does is check encryption keys and decrypt data - i would wager it could be done in the equivalent of 1-2 lines of Perl. I've noticed no real speed difference between XP and vista on an old 2.4ghz non-ht PC. That machine is 5 years old.
The "bloat" in windows is things like:
I like linux/bsd as much as the next guy, but you'll notice that as they begin to get feature parity with windows, the "bloat" is going up in them as well.
When putting out an OS you have a choice: do you provide just the bare minimum of services (useful for embedded apps), or do you provide a complete OS including graphics libraries, 3d graphics libraries, various programming widgets, etc?
Is Windows bloat free? Of course not. However, when RAM costs I'd much rather be running FreeBSD full time, but it's not because of the bloat - it's because of the user environment - windows treats you like a fucking retard, and it's irritating... but for the apps most people want to run/develop, it's a fairly usable platform.
Re:Virtualised Legacy (Score:1, Insightful)
- Legacy systems requiring serial dongles as a means of copy protection which for some reason isnt working during virtualization. This was for a fire maintenance company (the software was modified from a boat maintenance company). The original installer charged them 10 grand to retrofit and setup the initial software. They've built 10 years of customer records on it. Legacy support is thier lifeblood.
- I've seen legacy systems which control hardware devices that use proprietary cards which interop in ways that baffle me. Think ISA cards....virtualization just isn't possible.
- Networking systems running proprietary protocols over token ring. Maybe this can be worked around, thing sure weren't looking good though..
If you're in a software only world, then sure, the guy using access 97 or whatnot can be virtualized and move on. But I've seen some pretty hairy setups. Whenever you see 'decades old systems', think about everything else thats probably not had IT budget to get updated...printers, networks, even scanners.
I'm not saying any of this is smart/dumb/right/wrong. Just providing some insight to the greater problem at hand. Of course, any customer that's been on these systems that long is probably not caring about what windows 7 brings, so I kinda mod this entire post as -1 offtopic
Re:That's just sooo not gonna fly (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if an organization is flat. And everybody had their shit together and really knew their code.
2 people have 1 path of communication
3 people have 3 paths of communication
4 people have 6 paths of communication
5 people have 10 paths of communication
Every person you have that needs to be in the know, adds to the complexity of communicating. Soon there is so much overhead nothing gets done but trying to stay up to date.
Every "group" at Microsoft has this problem. The vista start button had one programmer working on it. This programmer had a beta tester, meetings with his manager. The manager had meetings with the UI manager, who had to share and work with his staff about how the button looked. The mananger also met with the systems manager, because his team actually had to plug the "shutdown" button into the code that did the shutdown, or hibernate. When it was all said and done. The programmer would make a change, and it would have to go through like 9 or 13 other people before it could be Ok'ed.
All we are talking about here is ONE LITTLE BUTTON on a menu.
Parkinson's Law "Work Expands To Fill The Time Available To Complete It"
Parkinson correctly predicted that the British Navy would have more Admirals one day than they had ships. Due to people being promoted to fill all available space.
Microsoft is so big. It can't trim back down to being lean and mean. Everything is done to much by committee to get anything important of quality done in a timely matter.
As someone once said "God so loved the world, that he did not send a committee"
Microsoft is it's own biggest competitor (Windows 2000 and XP competing against Vista and 7)
Microsoft is it's own biggest enemy (death by committee)
Re:That's just sooo not gonna fly (Score:1, Insightful)
They update paint to be very good almost as much features as paint shop pro or even photoshop, and it comes free with windows. What do you think Adobe will say? I bet it goes along the lines of 'OH NO THEY ARE BUNDLING SOFTWARE! ANTICOMPETITIVE!'
You can already see it, built in Anti Virus - nope Norton cries foul. Built in Media player - courts cry foul. Built in Internet browser - Netscape and everyone (even slashdot, cries foul).
Microsoft is in between a rock and a hard place, if they add productivity software into windows someone out there is going to cry foul, and if they don't someone will criticize them.
The thing is, if Microsoft adds more software to windows someone out there will cry foul and anticompetitive and the consumers suffer.
Re:Rinse, Repeat (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody was already kind enough to give us a link to the roughlydrafted article. Oh wait -- that was you! [slashdot.org]. Of course that article is still not worth the disk space it's saved on for very obvious reasons.
But wait, we have more evidence here -- the infamous google test. Did you even read some of the nonsense that popped up? The second result from google was that roughly drafted nonsense. Plus, I just googled "slashdot africa" and got 5.4 million results back, which means.. well, I'm not sure what it means other than the fact that your google search is meaningless.
And then you link to some article [slashdot.org] that uses some incredibly convoluted logic to claim that MS is one of the worst oppressors of the African American community?? Have you absolutely no conscience? How do you get to the point where your hatred blinds you to this extent? I'm really curious to know. I mean, there are wars going on that could have been avoided (Iraq springs to mind), pockets of racists getting away with just anything they want to (Jena 6), desperate poverty in the third world, and many more things that are worth this kind of passionate hatred. I'm really curious to know what MS did that pissed you off to this extent.
Re:That's just sooo not gonna fly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's just sooo not gonna fly (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm amazed that windows is as stable as it is, i can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD or similar.
Its easy to criticise microsoft. unless you have developed a similar scale O/S with similar features, you are really in no position to judge. Its like me sitting in my chair at home moaning that NASA are idiots because their shuttles keep breaking. I haven't designed many reusable space vehicles, so I really have no perspective on the challenges involved.