g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Cartago Delenda Est




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Monday, December 12, 2005
13:56 - Old operating systems never die, they just smell that way
http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/singularity/

(top) link
Here's something I did not know (via Kris):

Though most people don’t know it, Microsoft has, not one, but two new operating systems that it is working on. The first, Vista, many people have heard of. Currently scheduled to ship just after the second coming of Christ, Vista has garnered most of the spotlight. However there is another OS lurking in the basement in Redmond and its name is Singularity. For more information go here: Singularity details. In creating Singularity Microsoft set out to answer this question:

"What would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?" (question found in the MS Singularity research report)

Why, it would look like . . . UNIX.

Creepy. But it could very well be the only way forward for Microsoft. Needing a successful blueprint for a desktop OS built on a UNIX-style foundation, they might just find themselves building a platform along the same model as OS X... and we'd be living 1985 all over again. Lawsuits and all.

So if we're watching Windows wedging itself gradually into a corner, growing faster and faster as more features get added, yet at the same time requiring more and more testing and longer and longer schedules, bloating up more and more to the point where it can no longer escape the clutches of QA... doesn't that make it the "singularity"?

For that matter, if this is where all of Microsoft's best-intentioned efforts have led them, what does that teach us about the dynamics of a software company producing commodity operating systems? Is this an inevitable result for anyone in Microsoft's position? Could they have avoided this situation? What lessons should "the next Microsoft" be absorbing right now?

Seems to me that a morbidly stagnant Windows would leave open an opportunity for Apple to make a play for the larger consumer desktop world—if it wanted it. As we've seen before, I don't think they really want it all that bad... just the people already on the cutting edge, the ones susceptible to the ego-petting of the "Switch" campaign. Apple probably wouldn't want to try to make OS X play in the commodity software/hardware market. ...But maybe they could write a crappier, buggier version of OS X and sell it for generic computers? They could call it "OS Y".

Naahh. That would be silly.

UPDATE: Dylan N. writes:

I stopped reading that white paper when it said that two processes can't access the same object at the same time--everything has to be explicitly passed. That's not an operating system built for "dependability" that's an operating system built for DRM from the ground up. Think Sony's rootkit was disruptive, in that it got between the OS and the CD-ROM device driver? Well, with Black Hole, only Microsoft's DRM'ed device driver can get hold of your media... and don't even bother trying to replace that driver through any sort of system extension; only "verifiably safe" code can run, and only in a separate process and separate memory space. If Microsoft's device driver doesn't "trust" your process, it won't pass the data across. And forget about streaming anything to disc... that's controlled by another Microsoft driver, and you can't bypass it!

Dependability, my ass. This is an OS built for Hollywood. And the day it's officially announced, look for MS to buy up several movie libraries and a studio or two with the cash they've got lying around. Now that media will only be offered in Microsoft's proprietary "PlaysOnlyWhenWESayIt'sOkay(tm)" format, over HDMI to secured sets, and unless you point your video camera at the screen, you're not copying it.

That does seem like a given in any brand-new operating system developed from the ground up by a large corporation these days... I doubt even Apple would be able to avoid building OS X that way if they were starting it now, in the post-iTunes era.


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