Microsoft Working On "Post-Windows" Cloud Computing OS 208
Barence writes "Microsoft is working on a web-based operating system called Midori, as it looks to life beyond Windows. Midori is expected to be a cloud-computing service, and so not as dependent on hardware as current generations of Windows. It's also expected to run with a virtualization layer between the hardware and the OS, and is expected to be a commercial offshoot of the Singularity research project which Microsoft has been working on since 2003." If this story sounds familiar to you, it probably is.
I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
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No, no. Microsoft didn't invent SaaS, so they vehemently deny ever having heard of it.
Instead, they "invented" Software + Service (S+S) [microsoft.com].
Being a multi-billion-dollar megalomaniac seems positively funderful.
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This can only be a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
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Or a dupe generator allowing spammers to sell even more V1agra.
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Do you know what you are talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean a kind of, say, Hardware Abstraction Layer [wikipedia.org]?
Yeah... they've been doing that kind of thing for over ten years.
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Yeah, and operating systems have been around for like, forty. There's nothing new here at all. It's just code that runs on a machine.
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It's just code that runs on a machine.
It's just a payment automatically debited from your account each month!
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They've been repackaging and selling the same ideas for far longer than that.
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I think Midori will have a virtual machine with a custom ISA, it will not only be a HAL.
A HAL does not do that, but a VM can (Score:2)
Best "Cloud Computing OS" name: (Score:5, Funny)
Cloud 9!
too bad it's by definition vaporware.
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At any rate, I greatly appreciated the joke.
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It's not that it's vaporware, it's just that at microsoft the sky is always blue.
Re:Best "Cloud Computing OS" name: (Score:5, Funny)
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No, it's just a gigantic greenhouse ship.
So now (Score:4, Interesting)
The operating system behavior with functions will be even more cloudy.
An application will reside somewhere in the cloud and it will be harder to realize if it is a legitimate application or if it is some malicious program.
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
Or as in the classic SF story with the question of "Does God exist?" - "Yes NOW there is a God" when all the computers in the net got connected. And the man trying to disable the connection got vaporized by a lightning.
who's buying? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
And how many average Joe consumers do you know of that require distributed computing problems?
I mean, I'm sitting on a dual core 3.4 ghz machine with 2 gigs of memory. The hardest stuff I put it through is compiles, games, and the occasional rendering, all of which being handled at the local level perform acceptably and any gain in processing time in the 'cloud' is negated by my 1.5 Mb (cha right!) network connection.
Sure, this is great for companies/facilities that require cloud computing, but for average
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You're missing the point. Local machines are relatively inefficient; so you could have a local machine that's effectively a thin client with all its processing offloaded into the cloud.
A step like this is an attempt to do away with the local machine; software as service, but also computer as service.
Re:who's buying? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares if they are relatively inefficient. Could a thin client browse the web, check email, play youtube videos? Sure! But why should I get my aging mother to buy a new one when her 3 year old PC is still doing just fine? What's the motivating factor? Not only will I have to motivate her to buy a new PC, but I'll also have to convince her to pay for a monthly service so that she can do all the same stuff she currently does for free. And all the documents that she has, many of which are sensitive in nature, are now going to be hosted on the internet. I'm failing to see why any post about cloud computing for consumers is tagged as anything other than "badidea;goodluckwiththat".
And for as 'relatively inefficient' as desktop PC's are, the network connection you rely on is significantly more inefficient. Sure, passing text blocks isn't a problem, even passing low resolution video only requires a few minutes of queuing. But have you ever tried playing a video game over remote desktop where instead of sending the data across the network you are sending full screen images? I'll give you a hint, even if the cloud computing is rendering 9000 frames per second, you'll be getting a max of 1 frame per second on a 19" monitor at a decent resolution.
And there in lies the rub, if you have a system that is powerful enough to play any modern graphics intensive video game, you have a machine that is more than capable of doing everything else the average consumer would do. Buying a new machine, OS, and dealing with all the pain and inconsistencies of depending on SaS is not a worth while investment.
Corporate use? Maybe. But consumer use? no way. This is not going to be the "next Windows".
-Rick
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This is true is you have one right now...But you're going to need a new one in a few years, and a new one a few years after that, etc, etc...
Now a gamer or a hardcore geek would be fine with buying new machines...I personally have enough to heat my house in the winter. But a family that needs three or four machines? Your grandma who doesn't want to have to think about it? That's a powerful demographic that you could sell a virtual machine to, a machine that would be far more reliable, never go obsolete, nev
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Yup, and that platform has already existed, and flopped, over and over and over and over.
I worked a number of PC-sales jobs in my younger years. These SaS machines would pop up, usually one new vendor a year, with ultra cheap web browsing machines. They took arm processors and a 15" TFT screen, or a 13" wide screen and fold out keyboard, or any number of other small designs trying to treat the PC as an appliance with a monthly contract.
It's been done before and it's failed before, many many times. The nitch
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Yea, I'm not really talking about e-machines...More like a virtual machine hosted in some sort of cloud environment (which may or may not involve clustering the client machines back in)...Fully functional, whatever you can do on a local machine, you could do on your virtual machine.
It's got the benefits of the traditional granny machine (idiot proof, low maintenance), without the huge obvious defect of having practically no functionality.
The whole thing depends on a level of bandwidth and processing that do
Re:who's buying? (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree.
The IT world has shifted from centralized to distributed computing and back again a number of times. Neither of which has truly dominated the entirety of the market. It is because each design has its own advantages and disadvantages.
The big disadvantages of the PC are it's price, maintenance, and 3rd party purchases. The price of PC's though, has plummeted over the last few years and longevity is increasing. Sans a monitor and printer, I can build a top end PC for under $500 today that would have been a $1000 endeavor 5 years ago, or a $2500 task in the late 90's. Maintenance is becoming easier and easier as AV software producers and MS have bundled automatic updates into the OS, so there is no more patching process, just click 'OK' and reboot once a month and you're set. 3rd party software is also relatively insignificant. Getting a full office suite is often a really cheap add on for buying a new PC, or if you want to save your pennies, OSS alternatives like Open Office will fulfill all your needs with out dropping a dime.
With those disadvantages largely nullified, it dramatically reduces consumer motivation to look for something new, something different, something that is going to require them to change their behavior or spending habits.
The disadvantages of a thin client granny machine still remain: Security, Contracts, Functionality. Since it's a thin client, all of your documents and data are stored somewhere else, which means at some point in time, someone, somewhere, other than you, is going to have access to them. Whether that person is an admin tech restoring a backup and poking around to make sure things restored correctly, a hacker looking for personal information, or an FBI agent with a warrant, it is a real threat. And depending on SaS, your data and services are only as good as the company behind the contract you signed. It was just last week that Yahoo pulled the plug on their SaS DRM music store, screwing all of their former customers out of the products they paid for. Imagine what would happen if your provider went bankrupt and downed the servers before you had a chance to get all of your tax documents stored locally? And there is still the existing limitation on functionality, because as you pointed out, there is no existing solution, nor is there any realistic solution on the horizon, to solve the bandwidth issue.
Cloud computing can work, but it is not for average consumers, nor wide spread use on the internet. There is no need for it there.
Software as a Service does have some basis for distribution to consumers, but largely it is just a way for incumbent software developers to lock in consumers so that they don't wind up running into issues like MS has with Office.
-Rick
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I think this is becoming less true over time - local machines are becoming more cost effective. For $259, I can get a Dell 350N dual-core processor. The freaking warranty use to cost more than that. More and more of the total cost is in the I/O systems - the Dell 350N is advertised with a $200 flat-panel monitor, and if you add a printer, it the actual computer becomes a minority of the cost.
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I think this is becoming less true over time - local machines are becoming more cost effective. For $259, I can get a Dell 350N dual-core processor. The freaking warranty use to cost more than that. More and more of the total cost is in the I/O systems - the Dell 350N is advertised with a $200 flat-panel monitor, and if you add a printer, it the actual computer becomes a minority of the cost.
Yes, already today, the computer is the cheap part, and the biggest issue driving upgrades is windows rot. People buy
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Downsides (from the company perspective):
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Upsides #1 and #3 already exist for MMOs.
Upside #2 isn't necessarily true -- if the game is a typical (repetitive) MMO, it's entirely possible one could write a bot for it which doesn't need to see what's going on, only to send preset keystrokes in a preset combination.
Downsides #1 and #2 could be outsourced, though the economic implications still apply. Depending on how much more powerful computers get, these could be offset by Upside #1 -- though it still wouldn't be as profitable as the same scheme with
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Of course - there will be advantages too with an OS like that, especially for distributed computing problems.
And how many of those are there, for the average home or business user?
Distributed data has obvious potential advantages, but even then only for probably a minority of people, and it comes with several pretty major caveats.
But distributed processing? What can't you do on an entry level home or office system today, which already costs very little for the power and flexibility it offers compared to other devices? The only things where many home users would want more power are applications like gaming and mult
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Re:Not as dependent on hardware... (Score:5, Insightful)
I, personally, think they are digging their own grave with this one.
There just isn't enough bandwidth everywhere for there to be a totally online OS.
Re:Not as dependent on hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about that. (Score:2)
MS absolutely can write a good program, when they need to. I would argue that the biggest problem here isn't the capability of the developers, but mismanagement and twisted priorities.
That is: Vista sucks because it is in Microsoft's best interest to have it suck in exactly the way it does. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out exactly why this benefits Microsoft.
small team of hackers (Score:3, Interesting)
jnode.org :-)
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50Mbps? Hah. I bet with all the throttling going around, it will take forever to open notepad.exe...
Ah. So it'll work just like Vista?
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"There just isn't enough bandwidth everywhere for there to be a totally online OS."
And there never will be if Microsoft creates it.
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They should be working on "post-cloud computing Windows" instead.
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MS Cloud Computing? (Score:2)
Sounds like a whole new type of 'vaporware'.
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I, personally, think that if I don't ever, personally, think something, I,personally, will not say that I thought it.
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Have you ever try to watch a video over todays current internet connections (via VNC or even NX)?
I have. It doesn't work so well... and it was of low resolution. Today's Multimedia Whores would never find their place. I, myself, am included in this group of people - I backup all of my movies & music... even my BluRay collection.
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horrible article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:horrible article (Score:4, Informative)
You must be new here. Notice also that it's not only a dupe, but the summary says it's a dupe!
The "abortion of an article" was selected so it could be slashdotted, setting its host server on fire, and creating true cloud computing; clouds of smoke.
Which is what Microsoft's "cloud computing" vaporware is. They used to call these things "thin clients." Our mainframe at work served these workstations, which were dog slow, as many companies did. Departments bought "microcomputers" (PCs) to get away from the slow speed of the terminals and the stodgy IT people who didn't realise that their toys were tools that staff needed to get their jobs done.
It seems to have gone full circle.
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My comment sucked; I meant to say "dumb terminals".
Over and out? (Score:2, Funny)
No Gates, now no more Windows. Can someone please show Microsoft the Door!
Old News? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Old News? - AFAIK, yes - a dupe... (Score:2)
Slashdot editors working on the steam powered interweb...
RS
cloud? (Score:2)
Cloud computing is just a buzzword for rented VMs at someone else's datacenter?
Wouldn't the popularity of such a service destroy the demand for systems administrators at independent datacenters?
If so, where do I go to get a job working on these clouds?
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They need a buzzword to replace WinFS.
Cloud Computing (Score:2, Funny)
A Better Title... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is working on a new OS that will never see the light of day because it will risk the monopolistic platform to which they now enjoy...
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Microsoft is working on a new OS that will never see the light of day because it will risk the monopolistic platform to which they now enjoy...
No, they are working on a new OS in order to continue the monopoly they now enjoy. If the paradigm of cloud computing becomes the reality, then they are fucked if they continue with their current business model.
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Or that Microsoft will be owned by Dell because of the use of Cloud Computing.
another bad idea for consumers (Score:4, Interesting)
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And probably this is caused by an over-consumption of Midori [midori-world.com].
No no no NO!!!! (Score:2)
This has NOTHING to do with software as a service, NOTHING to do with thin clients, and this was made clear in several of the posts when this article came around the first time [slashdot.org]. Yet everyone blindly parrots an article that is almost totally devoid of facts.
Midori is an offshoot of a micro-kernel OS that aims to make development in a distributed environment much easier. Call it "cloud computing" if you wish (a term I hate, but at least it's on the right track).
I don't know how we got from network IPC to "O
The meaning of "Midori" (Score:5, Insightful)
So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be? And is it time for anybody using the word in the US to get in a trademark application, just in case?
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So: did someone in Microsoft just like the name, or is it a cunning way to express that they themselves don't quite know what this operating system is actually going to be?
Maybe it's named after the popular melon liqueur, and indicates that the product will be bright, candylike, and cause nausea in those that overindulge in it?
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If you hit google images, you'll find out that Microsoft named their OS after a porn star.
And it will have WinFS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't tell me, let me guess. It will have all the stuff Microsoft that was going to be in every version of Windows since Windows 95.
As the release date approaches, Microsoft will suddenly start echoing all the knocks critics have been making on Vista, saying it is insecure, difficult to use, presents a bad user experience and is generally a piece of junk which only fools would ever have purchased... but, fortunately, Midori will solve all these problems, and will include a Web-standards-compliant browser, an animated character that will pop up and give you only helpful advice and only when you actually need it, WinFS, and Duke Nukem Forever.
And if you believe them, then you'd believe that Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football.
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Grrrr. (Score:2)
and, no it has no real innovation I can see. Abstraction layers, distributed systems, "cloud" systems are nothing new - this seems to be a stitch together of lots of buzz words and an attempt to steal thunder and market share from Google.
but there are greater risks to this style of system that I am *utterly* philosophically opposed to.
it paves the way for SW as a service to rent by the usage or monthly/weekly charge. I really *hate* that idea - if I buy a computer and SW I want to
A fundamental assumption of such an OS must be... (Score:2, Insightful)
... that hardware is expensive and bandwidth is cheap. So far this has very much not been the case. It is still a pain running remote X-applications over most household broadband connections. In fact I find the lag time annoying even on a LAN.
When do they figure that we will be able to run a "web-based" OS? 'cause it sure isn't anytime soon.
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... that hardware is expensive and bandwidth is cheap.
No, the fundamental assumption is that bandwidth is cheap, and hardware is cheaper -- but local admin is expensive. This would mean the local machine could be locked down hard, which means much less chance for spyware -- though phishing would still be problematic.
WOW (Score:2)
De-MarketSpeak translation of Microsoft"'s" "SIP" (Score:5, Informative)
"SIP", or "Software isolated processes" is just MS marketing hype speak for what is known as a Language-based system [wikipedia.org] in which seperate processes can be isolated from one another without paging or other hardware protection mechanisms. This is done using the semantics of the language in which the processes are programmed which excludes any possibility of one process intruding into the address space of another.
One example of a similar OS would be Bell Labs' Inferno. ( thanks to Knots for pointing this out ) Also, there's JX, which is an open-source microkernel based operating system in which the (micro)kernel and the applications are written in Java and run under a modified version of the JVM.
jdb2
Real Innovation, from MS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Real Innovation, from MS? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference. Apple had a visionary at the helm when it turned around, in particular the second coming of Steve Jobs (love or hate the guy, you have to admit he has vision). Having a visionary is important for turning around a big company because they have to fight off the corporate goons that drown every decent idea in marketing nonsense and bureacracy. For Microsoft, Bill Gates has been decreasing his role at MS for some time now. Do you see any other visionaries at Microsoft?
That said, to point out a counter-example,IBM seems to have changed its tune as well without some sort of outspoken visionary.
Missing word: "Mushroom" (Score:2)
n/t
Plan 9 (Score:2)
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If I could run my own servers without paying extra a popular OS based on Plan 9 would actually be a good thing.
It's official... (Score:4, Insightful)
Old school Microsoft bashers will, of course, recognize this as Microsoft's tried-and-true strategy of preannouncing vaporware in order to freeze the market. Buyers put their plans on hold and wait for Microsoft's product to emerge, effectively killing the competition, even though the competition has non-vapor products on the market today.
Does anyone even remotely think that the vaporware strategy will work this time? Cloud computing is all about the elasticity of computing resources. It's a natural fit for unlicensed operating systems. Microsoft's entire business is built around per-unit software licensing. Anyone who's been around an IT shop that uses Microsoft products knows that keeping track of licenses is practically a full time job. Add in the elasticity of cloud computing and it becomes pretty much impossible.
I'd even go as far as saying that cloud computing is fundamentally incompatible with Windows.
Vibrant in-text advertising (Score:2)
It appears that "Vibrant in-text advertising" does not allow end-users to opt out of their pop-ups any more. I would like to encourage story submitters to stop providing links to sites (like the one referenced here) that use Vibrant and other in-page popups.
So. (Score:2)
I guess slashdot is now posting dupes even when they are aware of it.
Microsoft's wierd mania for virtual machines (Score:5, Interesting)
First .NET, now this. Why Microsoft's mania for virtual machines, considering they only support x86 targets? Microsoft at one point supported NT for PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and x86, and that was with hard-compiled code. So it's not about portability. It seemed to be more like Microsoft's answer to Java - if Sun was succeeding in that market, Microsoft had to go there too.
Rather than trying to use software-separated processes, it would be more useful to improve message passing so that hardware-separated processes could talk to each other better. This, by the way, is one of the big weaknesses of the UNIX/Linux world. In UNIX/Linux, interprocess communication sucks. What you usually want is an interprocess subroutine call, or "synchronous message-oriented interprocess communication". What UNIX and Linux give you are pipes (one way, stream-oriented, asynchronous), sockets (two way, stream oriented, excessive overhead, asynchronous), System V IPC (used by nobody, message oriented, two way, asynchronous), and shared memory (unsafe, one process can crash another). There's no safe, synchronous message passing system. You can build one atop the existing mechanism, but there's a big performance penalty. The result is huge, monolithic applications, or systems that use "plug-ins" that can crash the entire application (i.e. Apache). Fast message passing has a bad history in the UNIX world, due to the Mach debacle, but it works fine in QNX, IBM VM, and hypervisors like Xen. (Windows has fast message passing, although for historical reasons in the 16-bit era it's somewhat clunky and too tied to the windowing system.)
Windows at least has a standardized approach to message passing. The UNIX/Linux world does not. This leads to a proliferation of mechanisms for doing the same thing. Both KDE and OpenOffice use CORBA for message passing, but they don't use compatible versions of it.
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While I don't want to discount your entire post due to one problem, I had to comment on this one. I hear this all the time from people who don't understand that shared memory isn't the same thing as two processing having a totally shared address space. Almost all (if not all) modern operating systems will allow one to share memory in units of pages. Process 1 and Process 2 can both read and write to page A, for example, but Process 2 cannot
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Shared memory is very fast, easy to use, and very safe (as long as the programmer isn't an idiot).
The problem is that the programmers on either side of the interface can't be idiots. Or hostile. [securityfocus.com] You probably don't want to talk to a secure database via shared memory [microsoft.com].
Shared memory requires that both sides cooperate on locking. If one side doesn't obey the locking rules, the data can change while the other side is reading it. (There have been schemes where only one side at a time had write permission;
microsoft's weird mania for messages (Score:2)
Windows at least has a standardized approach to message passing.
Windows doesn't have anything remotely standardized when it comes to message passing. Let's see, I can rattle off at least a dozen ways back to Windows 3.1 that a message can be passed and all of which are implemented.
a) The trusty Windows message. You know, register a private message id and Send/PostMessage between applications.
b) The clipboard. Yep, people stuff all sorts of stuff into the clipboard. Even worse, there's different kinds of
Implement from scratch, new bugs unfold (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't they realize that implementing something from scratch, much less something this complex, undoes all of the security and other bug fixes found by hundreds of people over more than a decade (not to mention invalidating the experience of thousands of people with established systems)? They're guaranteed to end up with something that has unknown quirks, and that's after it's released to market years later than it's supposed to be.
I'll allow that Microsoft is capable of good ideas. But they'd be much smarter to build on solid foundations and just bring the good ideas to market.
I'm not going to pay a monthly/yearly charge (Score:2)
to use my computer, period
oh yea, the only connection I can get here 1.5/384 for $30/month. hardware is cheap, bandwidth is expensive.
Buy, buy! (Score:2)
- Cloud - 100% vaporware
- "Microsoft working on" - 100% vaporware
- Microsoft saying "something post-windows"- 300% vaporware
I almost can see the announcement in Microsoft web site:
Preorder Midori now! With 500% more vaporware!
Haven't we learned? (Score:2)
Closed proprietary operating systems should be a part of our past by now. We've learned how it has been used to prop up a monopolist. We've learned about the activities that were ultimately deemed criminal by our own court system (not just the federal but in many States as well) and others in other countries. We've learned how they use the OS to prop up other technologies and to create monopolies in those areas as well.
We would be so much better off to have learned our lesson and learn not to support Mi
How do you... (Score:2)
Embrace and extend clouds?
Insert Obligatory ... (Score:2)
... reference to vaporware here.
What the f**k is a web based O.S. anyway? (Score:2)
To my probably old-fashioned mind an operating system is something that sits between user-space programs and hardware, that deals with things like scheduling, timing, hardware sharing, filesystems, and all the other interesting stuff you find under /proc on a Linux system.
So you can have all the web stuff you want, but it's still going to have to run on a real operating system. I have this feeling that these marketroids will probably call MS-Office an operating system...
Greetings
Bart
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[CITATION NEEDED]
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That is an excellent point, and I believe it to be quite valid.
However, I think that part of the issue lies not in the "cloud" itself but in the hardware that is used to access the cloud. This looks like a variation on the old "network computer" theme that was making the rounds about 8-10 years ago.
It is one thing to access applications on a distant server, it is entirely different to be dependent on those distant servers for all computer functionality (other than the obvious booting into the "cloud" OS, th
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Didn't you know that Midori is ancient Sumerian for "He who lies dead but dreaming?
Seriously, are you going to overlook that? What are you, some kind of Cthulhu apologist?
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No.
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Like microsoft would dream of such a dastardly idea?
Yeah, Microsoft's a little behind the curve on that concept. There's already life beyond Windows. It comes in too many forms to list, but some prime examples are called "Mac OS X", "Ubuntu", "OpenSolaris" and "Fedora."
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