Vista the Last of Its Kind

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a TechWorld story about Windows Vista. According to the Gartner Group, Windows Vista is likely to be the last of its kind. "The problem is that the operating system's increasing complexity is making it ever more difficult for enterprises to implement migrations, and impossible for Microsoft to release regular updates. This, in turn, stands in the way of Microsoft's efforts to push companies to subscription licensing. The answer, according to Gartner, is virtualization, which is built into newer chips from Intel and AMD, and has become mainstream for x86 servers through the efforts of VMware." Speaking of Vista, C|Net reports that a new release candidate is on the way. The average tester should expect it by the end of September.

Last of its kind?

There'll never be another ridiculously late, overhyped, massively over budget, features touted then dropped software project again? ;-p

Re:Last of its kind? I hope so...

I am rather thankful about all the dropped "features" as they tend not to be so good until v3.0 and tend to be less than standard implementations (Internet Explorer) of technology that simply displaces 3rd party functional products.

As for being late I am hoping that they are taking he time to debug them more than previous products that were shipped to schedule with major problems. Anyhow the longer they take the longer my win2000 will remain viable.



Drop a curse on Microsoft. [i-curse.com]

And Linux ?

I'll let you in on a little secret - Linux (OSS in general) is the poor mans porn downloading system, and porn has driven its development. No one prints porn, so forget printer drivers. A few people want to upload pictures of themselves naked, so there are a few camera drivers. Scanners, forget it. USAB keys ? Handy for trading PORN. I don't know how to do it, but if some sort of survey could be done I think you would find that 90% of all Linux systems are used for porn excusively. The other 10% are scientists Latexing their papers, and downloading porn. And don't forget, these are the biggest cheapskates in the world. They don't want to pay for porn or software.

Re:And Linux ?

I always thought that porn is what drove the latest & greatest in internet technology, unfortunatley in recent years that technology has been classified as spy/mal-ware. I wonder if there are any web 2.0 porn sites out there? Then again, wouldn't one of those "hot or not" sites be considered web 2.0? I guess porn is the true pioneer of the internet!

MS Windows != Every OS

Just because windows is bloated it doesn't mean that all other OSes are. This sounds awfully much like the "Mainframes are dead" and later on the "Unix is dead" (no, not the BSD-troll) predictions.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

True, the fact that windows is bloated does not imply that all other operating systems are bloated. But the fact remains that they are.

I've seen OSs and apps like word processors and databases grow from things that a handful of people could put together in a few months into things that require 1,000s of engineers years to create millions of lines of code, and each new feature or bug fix seems to require an exponential number of new engineers to add. Nobody can comprehend the whole system any more, except at a very high level. Eventually some sort of event horizon is passed and it's impossible to add anything new because every new engineer gets sucked into fixing bugs ...

The isn't a new phenomenon (remember "The Mythical Man Month"?) but the change is that it seems to have become ubiquitous -- more and more software projects are growing past the manageable size. Hopefully there's another Fred Brooks out there, who will tell us how to deal with all this...

I have a theory; call it "Pedantic Bore's Law": The number of lines of code in a typical release doubles every two years.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

I don't think you understood his argument. He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process. This is in contrast to Linux, where all kinds of stuff are included on the disk but are separate programs using well-defined interfaces.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with shipping a kernel and a firewall on the same disk, but the firewall shouldn't be in the kernel!

To phrase it another way ...

In other words, there's nothing wrong with shipping a kernel and a firewall on the same disk, but the firewall shouldn't be in the kernel!

To phrase it another way ... There is a problem when the firewall software causes the kernel development to be delayed.

Which is what is happening at Microsoft.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

there's nothing wrong with shipping a kernel and a firewall on the same disk, but the firewall shouldn't be in the kernel!

The firewall is in the linux kernel.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

iptables is a part of the Linux kernel. There is a userspace program called 'iptables' that acts as a front end, but all packet filtering, rule traversing, etc. happens in kernel space.

Linux does not have well-defined interfaces, particularly not at the kernel level. Just ask any driver writer.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

I don't think you understood his argument.

I did, but his argument is stupid. It essentially boils down to "if Microsoft only included the things *I* think are necessary in Windows, it wouldn't be bloated. But since they include functionality X, Y and Z that I don't have any personal interest in, it's bloated".

He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process.

So is everyone else selling to the same market Windows is. Why ? Because that's what the customers in that market want.

This is in contrast to Linux, where all kinds of stuff are included on the disk but are separate programs using well-defined interfaces.

"Bloated" Linux distros like Ubuntu that are catering to the same market as Windows are *exactly* the same.

Just because Microsoft don't pander to the miniscule percentage of their customers who want to do what some Linux users do, does not mean Windows is not componentised. Hell, Microsoft got in trouble (with IE) precisely because the went down the path of componentising Windows.

Likewise, just because distro maintainers and OSS developers put mountains of effort into reducing the impact of dependency hell, doesn't mean you can just add and remove arbitrary parts of a Linux system without breaking things.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with shipping a kernel and a firewall on the same disk, but the firewall shouldn't be in the kernel!

The Linux firewall *is* in the kernel. I think you need to try and come up with a better example that I can refute.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

Many people have pointed out that Linux's firewall is in its kernel. That is true, and parent post gets off the mark trying to describe Windows as a technical monolith without clean interfaces between components when most other OSes are the same way.

But there still is a difference, it's just not technical: Windows as a product is a monolith, without divisions even where users would really appreciate them. You want one part, you get it all. One part is delayed, the whole thing is delayed. With, say, Ubuntu they'll still put out a new release if some of the major software included has major upcoming releases, and just allow users to upgrade later. This is possible because they're distributing free (the "beer" and "speech" aspects of this help equally) software, and largely distributing to people that are willing to go through these upgrades. And even if the distro won't package them most of the projects are independent enough in their development that you can upgrade them yourself. A 3d desktop for X may or may not be ready for the general public (ever), but you can find out whether it's ready for your system and use it today. With Windows you have to wait for all the other Vista features. ACLs in Linux may be a hassle for most people to set up, but if you want 'em you've got 'em. On Windows, to get Vista's account management abilities you have to wait for the rest of Vista to be done.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

Can you point out the built-in to the OS equivalent of IE in Linux? You can't, because it doesn't exist.

Sure can. Check out KDE's konqueror and KHTML. It integrates very nicely into kwin (the window manager), is embeddable, providing the help engine, integrates with various services/daemons via plugins and extensions, provides integrated and seamless web, help, and file browsing, can also act as a media player (through plugins and extensions), a smarter "search/find" feature than Microsoft will ever deliver in Windows, and if elevated permissions are required for a task, you will either be prompted for the password or the action is simply disallowed (depending on the plugin or extension) unless you specifically start konqueror with su/kdesu. Also, an integrated terminal window is provided so you can run tasks on files in a directory without having to clutter your desktop with separate Xterm windows.

In summary: konqueror in KDE is what MSIE/Explorer tried to be in Windows, and more.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

See the sad thing is they don't need a new operating system. They pretty much hit the nail on the head with 2k. If they adjusted the configuration to give it an "everyman" account, where you can play your games (a lot can't be played without being in an admin account these days), surf the web and check your email without hindrance (but thats all) and a technical account where people like us can get under the hood and fiddle, they would have an all time winner.

Of course thats never going to happen, because M$ needs to keep turning profits, so they add bloat and useless features and eye candy which isn't really sweet at all, which because of their coding practices and beaurocratic structure are full of bugs and in extreme cases just don't work (like vista), in order to sell the same tarted up OS back to corporate customers.

This guy proclaiming the end of OSs like vista is attempting to fix the sociological, organisational, and economic issues of one megacorp with technology.

Re:MS Windows != Every OS

I used to think that XP was the cats meow, until I installed Windows Server 2003. Using a few simple tweaks to turn it into a workstation class install, with DirectX acceleration and everything else that you would expect.

I could not be happier. My FPS has gone up in games that I play, I barely ever have to reboot to change anything and all my hardware is very well supported. Its very easy to disable services and processes you don't need, and in the end my 2003 install boots faster, and uses less RAM at idle than my XP install did.

Everyone with a copy of Server 2003 (MSDN, ActionPack Owners, Pirates!) should make a go of installing it on your main workstation. It really is very, very good.

New release candidate?

Speaking of Vista, C|Net reports that a new release candidate is on the way. The average tester should expect it by the end of September.

Well - you can wait until September if you like, or you can just download the torrent [isohunt.com].

If you're an Apple employee - this is OK, but make sure you dont download something from Apple - they will fire you.

Microsoft forgot the KISS philosophy

KISS = Keep It Simple Steve (ballmer) and leave the chairs alone

Speaking of that

After many years of excellent service, it's almost time to retire the BillGatesBorg icon for Microsoft stories. Esp. since he won't be with them any more, sorta. I vote for a chair icon. It can be a borg chair, I guess.

Its a word procssor

Most of the time Windows provides few simple file, display and input services to MS word and excel. I can see why you would want to rewrite it to cut down on exploits, improve scalablity, etc. But why would MS need to create so much additional complexity? Other than the obvious reason that they already have windows built to do what they need and may as well rewrite it since they have all that revenue.

My advice is for Microsoft to spend the next 20 years rewriting windows to run on future quantum computing devices. Word will keep working in the mean time. Should make a killing.

Re:Its a word procssor

. . .why would MS need to create so much additional complexity?

"Trusted" computing.

KFG

Quantum computers

Quantum computing units will probably be an addon, like the GPU or the math coprocessor. You only need them to do some semi-specialised stuff like search, I don't think they'd help in displaying graphics and the like. It's scary how they can search an entire space at once though.

Summary of article

Gartner analysts: We predict Microsoft will start making OS'es like this.
Microsoft: Umm, no - there are a ton of problems with doing things that way (even more than with the way we do things now!!!11)
Gartner analysts: Pffft, what would you know.

Seriously, speculation can be fun, but I find it hard to take these guys seriously.

Set Computing Back 10 Years?!

Yeah, cus EVERYONE had a computer back before Windows 95.

Cheap, ubiquitous computers largely coincide with Microsoft's support for cheap 3rd party hardware combined with a good-enough operating system.

Someone else MIGHT have come along to fill the void if they hadn't been there, but there's no proof that it would have happened, and certainly no proof that they set computers BACK 10 years. (Do you even REMEMBER what computing was like 10 years ago?!)

>>"But Microsoft tends to keep backwards compatibility for a long time"

Yeah--mass market kind of appreciates that. I suppose you'd prefer that the techno-elite (who have large budgets for new hardware AND software) have their own technology platform with no way to connect to, or pass files to the rest of the world? I mean, it'd be HORRIBLE if the guy using a 3 year old computer at home could bring his documents to work and use them on his brand new computer. (?!)

Linux?

So, when's Linux going to take advantage of the hardware virtualization?

Good point.

So, when's Linux going to take advantage of the hardware virtualization?

Sarcasm duly noted. Still, I think it should be mentioned that the problems Gartner claim will be solved by this use of virtualization can be solved in other ways than virtualization, and in Linux sometimes are. For example, the kernel and GNOME (or KDE) are separate entities, developed separately, and runnable separately - you can use different kernels with GNOME - e.g. BSD, and you can use KDE/Xfce/etc. instead of GNOME. Perhaps Windows would be easier to maintain and improve if things weren't tied-in as they are, the most famous case of which is perhaps IE.

I really don't see where hardware virtualization used to compartmentalize an OS is a better idea than correct modularization of the OS (which includes choosing the runlevel for the various parts, i.e. it may use 'virtualization', in a sense). Am I missing Gartner's point somehow?

This..this..its not even wrong..

What does this article mean anyway? Its a bunch of buzz words mixed together in an apparently random order.

Re:This..this..its not even wrong..

That's called sales.

Don't make me vertically align your solutions platform recovery strategy!

Tom

Too much complexity?

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to start with a core operating system unit that could then have additional modules and applications bolted on as necessary? You'd have full control over exactly what functions the machine will and will not have. Too bad such a beast will never exist...

How is this news?

The slashdot group think have known this since before XP came out and now a research firm predicts what we already knew, 6 years later. Microsoft haven't commented on this so its not worth discussing further (as we already have for years) until some announcement at some MS developer conference mentions it. Oh shit its saturday, slow news day.

More than 50 layer stack for future Windows?

That ought to be fun to work with. What will this stack do?

However what is not understandable is how virtualization will be helpful. Sure, you can make a virtual machine run only one process (services), but these services need to interact with each other through some mechanism to do useful work. Will the Windows kernel just do this interaction?

This seems to be oversolving the problem. Service isolation is good, but do you have to go overboard on that?

By what means?! (and spoiler

It's obvious that Gartner doesn't understand computers at all...well, at least Microsoft.

They said Microsoft doesn't agree with this vision, saying it's identified problems with integrating data across partitions and creating a consistent user experience.

And Microsoft's absolutely right on this point. I don't typically defend them, but when groups like Gartner with no experience in computers makes up such ridiculous ideas, I think it's justifiable.

"Upper layers could have dependencies on lower layers, but lower layers could not be dependent on upper ones," the analysts wrote. "This would allow it to lockdown lower layers when complete and worry less about compatibility changes as it worked up the stack." But this redesign is not enough to ease Microsoft's ongoing development and delivery problems, or the deployment difficulties of enterprises, Gartner said.

There's no reason they need to resort to using virtualization to accomplish this task. They could do it now with the current NT code, but it works now so there's no need to fix it for the time being.

It just seems like a waste of resources to completely re-engineer Windows to make efficient use of virtualization that still presents a consistent user interface.

frustratingly painful to watch

The OS should just allow one to run perl scripts or binaries. We don't need the shell to be so complex that it becomes unfeasible to maintain it. MS should take a long hard look at the likes of WindowMaker and XFCE, or even geoshell etc. From what I can see the 2003/NT5.1 kernel is reasonably stable, which is a first, so this vista release to me is just a cosmetic on (RICE indeed), those improvements to the three year old kernel should be just driver, and possibly performance upgrades.

Garter Press Release not last of its kind

Slashdot today released a report showing that stupid Garter Group releases will never come to an end.

Instead of critical evaluation or even serious research, the respected organisation will stick by its tried-and-true method of spatial-temporal probability matrix randomisation (marketed under the trademark Making Shit Up, Even If Obviously Stupid).

At a recent demonstration of this technique, Garter Group analysts showed releases on their drawing boards for next week's bullshit sessions, including:

* IBM to buy Apple and force the line back to PowerPC, in order to cripple Microsoft's XBox.
* Sun will no longer release any hardware products, pending a buyout offer from SCO.
* George Lucas will admit he's a dud and bankroll a new new trilogy written and directed by competent artists, such as Britney Spears.

At the time of writing, no Garter analysts were available to comment; being too busy trying to find where the crack pipe got to.

Re:Garter Press Release not last of its kind

Gartner is a classic troll. Did you know that every year, 20% of the GNAA's elite is promoted over to Gartner? They are not really open about it, but Gartner is nothing more than the for-profit branch of the GNAA.

It's a classic troll career: with 16, you perambulate the Usenet. With 19, you get your GNAA membership, and work yourself up the organisation. At approximately 25, just having completed a technology-unrelated degree, you are wellcomed to Gartner.

Oh, and, in case you've wondered how to become a member of Gartner's: yes, you have to make a first-article in techworld, mentioning "Gartner". Then you have to join a conference call and are tested about the details of the movie "Bullshit Analysts from Outerspace".

Latest BS from Gartner

And it's late as well. I don't believe so much in virtualization on this level to create security. I mean, how are the components going to communicate? Sockets? Sockets are their own security problem. Microsoft clearly thinks in the same direction. What we need is a more fine-grained security model, in which applications only get the resources they need. Applications themselves also must be able apply the same security directives to their internal components. Just assigning a user per application won't work either, I mean, I would like to continue to work with my text editor as myself.

Currently, applications can install themselves anywhere they want. They can destroy everything I own, including most things in the registry. They can take every bit of CPU power they like. Any amount of memory. Any amount of threads. Any amount of desktop space (including the whole lot through DirectX). They can even take away my keyboard. I don't think you can solve this by just giving every application it's own CPU and operating system. You can do this by restricting access, and by letting the OS take care of the installation and access conditions (maybe not configuration).

The way to do this is to create dependencies with modules, and create security managers to handle access. This is e.g. part of the Java security model, which is sadly hardly ever used. Microsoft has it's own copy of that of course. It's in .net and works with assemblies. Where Microsoft has an advantage is that it owns the Windows operating system, and can therefore easily use a centralized Virtual Machine (as in MSIL virtual machine), installation procedures etc.

I've little doubt that this is the direction Microsoft is thinking for the long run. Unfortunately they don't seem to grasp it on the same abstraction level that Sun can, so it will probably take time. No doubt it will take double that time for Gartner to understand it. Just running every app in its own OS is much easier to grasp, especially when it is already there.

Gartner Group Writing Plan

1. Collect Buzzwords
2. ???
3. Publish Report

I assume they use a Bot to trawl the internet collecting the latest buzz words, and then another to automatically assemble the report... but after reading that piffle I don't think they would have the compitence to turn on the computer.

umm, wait

The problem is that the operating system's increasing complexity is making it ever more difficult for enterprises to implement migrations, and impossible for Microsoft to release regular updates

I know I'll probably get moderatad as troll/flamebait, but... Well, if we look at Linux (Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu), there's no problem to upgrade to a next release / release updates.
Another thing. I don't think Vista's gonna be "the last of its kind" - it's like 640K should be enough for everybody :)

Dash?

Mr.Editor, but wouldn't it be much more simple to read and understand the title if it was

Vista - the Last of Its Kind

The dash wasn't invented for no reason you know

About freaking time

Kevin Kelly's Out of Control got me thinking about this a while back. Although the book is a little dated, it is all about network economies and their similarities to ecological systems, and I realized that evolution is at work when it comes to platform adoption. Greater than 90% of desktops run Windows, so there's no variety in the PC platform genepool. Just like inbred populations, this PC pool is unhealthy: it can't adapt and infections run rampant because all specimens are susceptible to the same illnesses.

Of course, who's going to change to another platform when there's no software out there? (No flames please - try to remember perception is everything, and ask yourself whether an average user realizes alternatives exist.) Virtualization, I think, is a good answer to this. I like the idea of "booting" to an application like in the pre-DOS days, and if your games run no x86/x64 architecture, you could bypass the OS altogether to get the most out of games by just booting straight into Halo 4 or HalfLife 3. I also like the end of the API: we can go back to the days of static linked libraries (no version conflicts, ever!) and headers and just build our own OSes from scratch to run in a VM. Since you can virtualize anything, even VMs, you can get cross-platform apps and cross-platform platforms (Java, .NET, etc.) and consumers don't have to worry about physical hardware or their underlying OS components, apart from cost and performance considerations. As far as their apps go, everything could, theoretically, work the same on any system (whether business decisions will allow this to happen, we'll just have to see). In fact, my only worry about this is how to allow for a standard GUI on such a system (but since nobody, not even Microsoft, follows GUI principles these days anyway, it probably doesn't matter).

This is, IMO, a far superior way to do things than how they're done now. So, okay, then, OSS community, please get to work so you will be finished before MS is. Thank you.

Awsome.

"Upper layers could have dependencies on lower layers, but lower layers could not be dependent on upper ones," the analysts wrote. "This would allow it to lockdown lower layers when complete and worry less about compatibility changes as it worked up the stack."

Trying to figure out what this means....

divide the Windows client into a "service partition", controlling system functions such as management and security, and one or more application partitions.

I get it! It is like a Virtual Anti-Trust System!

Seriously, just because Microsoft is having such a difficult time releasing an updated operating system they feel like they can charge money for on the x86 platform, doesn't mean there aren't other companies who are selling updates annually to another operating system.

I thought that Microsoft had a lot of marketing power. Why are they so flaky on delivering an operating system which has no competition. They could sell a service pack to XP and make a fortune.

Given Microsoft's history of progression, I guarantee that this will be the most unstable, insecure, unusual, and unnecessarily complex operating system in it's history. Yes more so than Bob and WinMe.