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Microsoft to dump Windows? Good idea! Here's why | |
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| Time: 10:20 EST/15:20 GMT | News Source: ZDNet | Posted By: Alex Harris | ||
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Whenever I hear Microsoft execs--meaning Bill and Steve--say they'd take Windows off the market if the Nine States prevail in the antitrust case, I want to throw all my support behind the states. Why? As any regular reader of this column could tell you, it's not that I hate Microsoft or Windows. It's just that I like the idea of starting over with a clean slate. Tossing out Windows would give Microsoft a chance to build a real OS for the 21st century, instead of an OS that is still, at its heart, the descendant of MS-DOS. Starting over would let Microsoft get rid of the evil system registry, Windows' heart of darkness. A new operating system could also be designed from the ground up to be trustworthy. (The company would still have to bolt some trustworthiness onto Windows XP and its 2004 successor, code-named Longhorn, to meet Bill's 'trustworthiness' mandate.) More importantly, a new OS would allow Microsoft engineers to show what they are really capable of in a way they can't with Windows XP. | ||
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| #1 By 665 (64.126.91.172) at 4/27/2002 10:39:20 AM |
| Isn't Blackcomb going to be completely new? |
| #2 By 6253 (12.237.192.187) at 4/27/2002 11:46:14 AM |
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It's not that the *nix world hasn't had its share of attempts to move to a registry model. There have been leaders in the FreeBSD, Linux, etc. communities who have talked of the benefits from implementing a central registry, and they have even discussed the considerations of how to move gradually to that model. Those talks have always fallen apart, because there is still so much work to be done on higher priority things in those operating systems and so little solidarity in the applications on those platforms. It would be a huge undertaking with little promise of success, the kind of success Microsoft largely had with moving *.ini files to the Windows registry.
Still, IBM went ahead and implemented a central registry in AIX, one of the leading commercial Unix flavors which is generally recognized for its "smit" menu-driven, consolidated administration tool. Plenty of third-party applications ignore the registry, but it seems to have helped IBM tame some of the complexity of configuring and managing the system itself. |
| #3 By 6253 (12.237.192.187) at 4/27/2002 11:58:26 AM |
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#2, it's a stretch to say the registry is a thing of the past. There are quite a number of situations where Microsoft recommends the use of PInvoke and Interop in .NET applications even when managed classes exist (e.g. ADO instead of ADO.NET when real-time data updates need to be seen).
The .NET framework itself registers a ton of stuff in the Windows registry (watch the status messages carefully while dotnetfx.exe installs, and check the size of your registry before/after). You might say that .NET itself is a huge COM+ application. It just happens that .NET doesn't persists its own metadata in the registry, but Windows already had IIS4 and IIS5 which were MTS/COM+ applications that stored most of their settings in their own metabase. I like .NET and I think it accomplishes a lot of things, including replacing some of the registry's weaknesses, but let's not oversell it. On the other hand, I agree with you that Linux/Unix could stand a great deal more modernization than Windows needs. |
| #4 By 135 (208.50.201.48) at 4/27/2002 1:04:56 PM |
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Many Unix apps read their text config files and build an in-memory registry, essentially. I think Apache is one of the prime examples. Basically they realize it's much faster than trying to pull config variables out of a flat file. It's just unix people aren't smart enough to use anything but vi to edit configurations.
Ohwell, as far as an OS for the future... XP is as close as it gets for now. |
| #5 By 2459 (66.25.124.8) at 4/27/2002 2:22:30 PM |
| The thing is, XP is not a descendant of DOS. It is a descendant of OS/2 and NT. DOS was never in the picture, and is emulated in NT. |
| #6 By 5444 (208.180.245.59) at 4/28/2002 6:48:52 AM |
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#18,
I would contend that it was written from the ground up from the best of both OS2 and VMS. NT5 was a major rewrite of the OS which spanned almost 5 years, and because of inhouse bickering between different devisions. most of what was promised for it didn't occur. Some of the important things did, Acitve Dirctory for one. But several didn't Forms+ (occured in the framework) Storage+, and several others did not occur in the OS. It looks like we will finally get a version of the OFS in Longhorn. although different than what was envisioned in 1992. although I do agree that the comments about the OS being based on a 20 year old technolgy, is bunk, Of course *nix is based on a 30 year technology. on another list, they were talking about how stable the API has become, and that was in 1976. El |
| #7 By 5444 (208.180.245.59) at 4/28/2002 6:49:55 AM |
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#1,
The rumor is that Blackcomb will be a NEW OS. not even a NT v6 type of OS. But that is only the rumor. El. |
| #8 By 135 (208.50.201.48) at 4/28/2002 8:07:57 PM |
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Damnit Alex, I can't believe you wrote this crap. :-)
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