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Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch
- tx 18y agoThey need to hurry up, otherwise there won't be any developers left to try the new thingie out, only 60+ old ex-taxi drivers who position their monitors facing a corner, fire up an anti-virus in "perpetual disk scan mode" and fall asleep in front of "SQL Query Designer" inside of Visual Studio awaiting for 5:00PM to go home.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- kylec 18y agoForgive me if I don't hold my breath. Vista took 6 years starting out as a "complete rewrite" with ambitious features that were pared away one by one to leave little more than a facelift for Windows XP. Don't get me wrong - I hope Microsoft is able to pull this off - but I don't hold out high hopes.
- cypress-hill 18y agowhy do you "hope they pull it off"? their time has passed. none of their own users at home or in business are even interested in products past xp. they don't represent a positive force in the market, they continue to cling to dead ideas like drm...i'm not sure at all why anyone other than employees or shareholders would be cheering for them.
- s3graham 18y agoI'm cheering for them because I enjoy developing on their hardware, and I hate programming for the PS3. Also, relax. It'd be great if an OS team made something that was technically interesting. Everyone, regardless of whether or not you use their implementation, benefits from their research.
- jordyhoyt 18y agoplease stop flame-baiting on news.yc, almost all of your seven posts in this thread have been of that nature. i come here to avoid flamewars. thanks!
- mroman 18y agoWait a minute, why do you accuse the poster of flamebaiting? I just read all his posts - he's speaking his mind using logic. Please quote him on what you consider flamebait within his posts, otherwise YOU are the one flaming now . . .
- shiranaihito 18y agoExactly. I've been confused about why anyone, especially in the (relatively enlightened) programmer crowd, would want Microsoft to succeed at just about anything anymore. Haven't they tried their darndest to prove they really are evil quite a few times already? They've basically held back the development of the Internet for many years now, and were most likely planning some kind of world-wide DRM-enslavement with Vista. If Vista doesn't add much compared to XP, why would you suppose it took such a long time to develop? OOXML? -Bribing countries/companies to let it pass, anyone?
- cturner 18y agoDepends what you mean by enlightened I guess. There was a time when IBM was the evil empire. For all we know it will be Apple next, with some sort of thin client lock-in based on safari and itunes. Genuine innovation is a good thing even when it comes from unpopular origins.
- smakz 18y agoReminds me of a discussion I read a while back about a power struggle in Microsoft between the 'backwards compatible' group mentality and the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' group mentality. It seems to me the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' is winning (and indeed during that discussion they were in the early stages of winning), but that Microsoft's reputation as a whole keeps going down since that time. People used to like windows because it just worked, and ran all their favorite software. The more they make it harder for people to do that, the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch.
- aneesh 18y ago> "...the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch." Apple & Linux have merely started to nibble at their bread crumbs ... maybe if Win7 screws up, then they'll start to eat Microsoft's lunch.
- cypress-hill 18y agolet me know when people stand in line for three hours to get a windows mobile phone. tell me the next time a wall street trading house does a re-architect and move to windows
- moswald 18y agoI think that is more of a cult of personality issue. The iPhone is a great product, but waiting in line for hours for it is more of a super-fan thing to do. I saw the papers and the articles so I know it happened, but I sure don't know anyone who waited in line. A lot of people also wait in lines for video games and movie tickets but they are not the masses, they are the hardcore fringe fans.
- h34t 18y agoI had to wait in line because I'd just gotten back from Asia and wasn't about to sign a 3-year BlackBerry contract when I could wait a couple weeks for the iPhone -- so by the time it arrived, I needed a phone badly. In front of me were a couple of teenyboppers with no idea what the iPhone even cost (and didn't much care, their parents picked up the tab). Behind me was a DJ who knew every tidbit of iPhone gossip imaginable, definitely a hard-core Apple fan. That the teenyboppers showed up tells me that it is something more than just a "cult of personality" that attracts Apple fans. It hits consumer culture in just the right spot to be a mass market hit.
- allenbrunson 18y agoin theory, this sounds pretty good. a from-the-ground-up os rewrite could be really good, taking the realities of the current computing landscape into account. nobody has greater resources to make this happen than microsoft. alas, this is microsoft we're talking about. so the first version will be called "my little operating system" or something, and they'll find plenty of ways to screw it up.
- cypress-hill 18y agobut what is the problem they are solving ?? the network stack of freebsd (for example) is perfectly adequate for saturating any modern outbound connection under heavy concurrent load. unless you grow the pipe bigger than the device can fill it, better networking software is just an academic exercise. and its not like freebsd is standing still. if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on to it, call it mibdori and ship it
- allenbrunson 18y agoc'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them. the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later, but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with something else altogether. look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in the long-term.
- cypress-hill 18y agoc'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them. i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.
- cypress-hill 18y agomusic to my ears as a free software zealot. microsoft is going off to build an os "done right"...where have we heard that before?? wait for the concessions and half-baked reversals. they're obsessing with a whole new kernel, that will likely be the first decision to get dumped as they watch MSFT drift down to 18 with no new product on deck to rally sales. then having ditched the "rewrite" plan, they will spend a year spinning their wheels trying to locate the best two or three ideas from midori to graft on to vista, people might just jump to mobile platforms full-time, or the console market might start seriously eating into pc sales, or everyday people start using ubuntu, etc etc etc. the market just isn't going to stand still for five years while microsoft tries to relearn how to build big systems. microsoft is chasing google, they are chasing apple, they are chasing oracle, they are chasing nintendo, they are chasing linux.... its going to be fun watching this company feign relevance while going the way of DEC
- william42 18y agoOh, this isn't a regular Microsoft product. It's Microsoft Research.
- thebigshane 18y agoI appreciate your admittance to zealotry.
- compay 18y agoPersonally I think it's surprising they haven't decided to build on top of FreeBSD or Linux yet. Apple saved so much time and and resources by doing this with OS X. Of course at some point someone is going to invent something better than Unix. Who knows, maybe it will be Microsoft (haha... you never know). But I think they would ultimately stand to be more successful if they didn't have to keep reinventing TCP/IP stacks and filesystems and could focus on something a little higher level.
- nickb 18y agoWell, the biggest misconception about MacOS X is that it was built on top of FreeBSD. It's actually built on top of Mach that they perfected at NeXT (Avie Tevanian was one of the creators of Mach at CMU). FreeBSD was added as one of the sublayers.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- 13ren 18y agoNote: unix also began as a skunkworks within a monopoly...
- bprater 18y agoNice to see something positive mentioned about the project. As hackers, it's our job to cheer on projects like this and not focus on the parent company. Good luck to the team playing with the concept.
- swombat 18y agoNot only that, I think it's the only way Microsoft can get back in the OS game long-term. The only thing that puzzles me is that they're building it all from scratch instead of at least basing it on an existing O/S OS like Mac OS X did.
- rbanffy 18y agoBasing it on another OS would negate one of the key aspects of their strategy - making it difficult to migrate software from their OS. Microsoft only wins if its body of software is Windows-specific and if porting or making it less-specific is a pain.
- swombat 18y agoTime to change strategy then? You can lock in users via incompatibility and an inferior product... but Apple tried that back in the 90's with not much luck.
- shiranaihito 18y agoUnfortunately for us, Microsoft had way better luck with that.
- mleonhard 18y agoI believe Singularity enforces application security by validating the safety of the application code. This is completely different from the security mechanisms of Windows and Unix, which are based on protecting memory and separating the kernel and applications with a carefully checked interface. I doubt that much existing OS code would be useful for the new OS. Singularity is really exciting. There are some big potential efficiency gains with this kind of OS. The biggest one is in reducing the number of context switches performed by the computer. A context switch is when the OS replaces the CPU's registers, saving the current values and reading in new ones. This takes time and can push application data out of the cache. With current OS's, every kernel call results in two expensive context switches. One to enter kernel mode and another to return to the application. In Singularity, an application's call into the OS shouldn't require a context switch.
- sachinag 18y agoI think they'll do it this time. They'll get the legacy stuff in a "blue box" (or was it yellow box) the same way that Mac OSX did. If they can make Office work, that's game, set, and match. Look, the OSVs only choices are Windows and Ubuntu. Ain't no one going to try to sell Ubuntu to Enterprise Rent A Car (pick your old school, massive install of choice).
- kschrader 18y agoThis is exactly what they're going to do. I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be. Microsoft has a bunch of really smart people sitting in Research working on this stuff. Just think how cool this will be if they make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X, and Apple made that jump with far less resources.
- cypress-hill 18y agoI think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be. whatever will be "game changing" in 2012, my guess is that it won't be a new version of windows, or any other desktop os make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X yeah that was about the time apple nearly went under. how soon people forget
- mtts 18y agoThe jump from OS 9 to OS X did not happen when Apple nearly went under. It happened after sales had picked up again with the release of the iMac and similar hardware. Of course Apple at the time was nowhere near as profitable as it is today, but saying it "nearly went under" is an exaggeration. That happened in the years before Jobs returned and in the first two years or so of his return.
- mtts 18y agoI personally don't see a desktop OS being "game changing" at this point anymore. We've pretty much figured out what we're going to be using desktop and laptop computers for by now. But you're right in so far that Microsoft's all-important "legacy" stuff is by now so old it can easily be run in virtualization or even in emulation, so they're probably on the right track.
- whycombinator 18y agoI live in San Diego! Go... Padres (is it?)
- whycombinator 18y ago... I didn't realize SD could stand for something else.
- mlinsey 18y agoThe article seems to indicate that this is something being done by Microsoft Research (MSR). In that case, there's no telling when it will be done, or if it is, whether it will even be used for a commercial version of Windows. MSR works more or less independently from the business divisions of the company. Of course, if things turn out really well and there is a strong business case then there is every reason to think it would be adopted. But what clearly won't happen is what people are prediction (hoping?) elsewhere in this thread, that work will be poured into this and the ambitiousness of this project will cause Windows to be delayed. If this never sees the light of day than the actual Windows team will just keep on chugging along at whatever their plan A is.
- pragmatic 18y agoIt's easy to think all companies rely on apache on Linix as you do. However, in the "real world" a bazillion companies depend on Windows to run stuff. And a lot of those companies depend on the software that was built for windows 3.1, NT, 2000 and XP. Not the latest and greatest. As such, MSFT has to maintain backward compatibility. If they start screwing with corporate customers and backwards compatibility they're going to have the department of justice so far up their asses...well you get the picture. Windows runs the world. I'm sorry I know the internet is hosted on a lot of Linix servers but in small, medium and large businesses there a LOT of windows servers keeping everything running.
- tornadoteddy 18y agoThe wisdom of the day at MS is as follows. Please keep dreaming happy dreams. In our great nation this is still something that's legal.
- kogir 18y agoSigh... Most of you didn't even read the article. Not one of the "base it on Linux or BSD" comments gets it. This whole thing is MSR saying, "look, we got it wrong, and so did everyone else. It's not just about one computer anymore." Sure, they're fixing up the way system resources are exposed and planning to make the whole OS more fault tolerant, but the key takeaway is that the whole OS is network aware. Apps can discover storage, processors, memory, and other resources on the local trusted network, and use them without caring at all that they might be on different machines. Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster, without writing all of the distribution logic in the application. Sure you could separately configure a local instance on each node, and set up file syncronization or network storage, and... Why federate your database when you could just add another node to the OS cluster, thereby increasing the resources available to the single DB instance? The goal is to get all the infrastucture work for free. I hope someone, anyone, can pull this off. As a developer of a distributed app, let me tell you, the bar right now is WAY too high, and current operating systems, be they Windows or Linux are not up to the task. [Edit: slashes caused unintentional italics]
- ambition 18y agoTo be fair the article wasn't a light read. It sounds to me like they're taking Erlang concepts to the next level and baking them into the fundamental architecture of the OS.
- stcredzero 18y agoNot only that, but Singularity allows fine-grained security along the lines of capabilities. (Arguably Erlang has something like capabilities baked in as well.) This is the way security should have been done for internet-connected end-user controlled computers. What we have now is security meant to be managed by super-knowledgeable super-users.
- mleonhard 18y agoWhat security does Erlang have? Does it have more than a single security mechanism: a shared secret (cookie) for allowing communication between nodes?
- chris_l 18y agoI predict it's going to suck as much as Windows XP (maybe not as much as Windows ME)