InfoWorld: Top News reports WINHEC – Microsoft slams XP in call for Longhorn support. “SEATTLE – Microsoftæon Tuesday badmouthed its own work on networking and hardware support in Windows XP in order to sell hardware makers on new technologies it has planned for Longhorn, the next version of Windows due late next year.”
Later in the article… “Khaki then called Microsoft employees on stage to demonstrate how Microsoft plans to do better in Longhorn”
Amazing.
A strange article at InfoWorld: Top News titled Microsoft: Let the 64-bit era begin. Microsoft was one of the companies that started the Windows 64-bit era with Windows NT running on the PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha chips in the early 90s. DEC produced the Alpha chip and went on to port UNIX to the chip as Tru64 UNIX. Sun responded with the UltraSPARC in 1995, also 64-bit. For reasons unclear to me, Microsoft dropped all but the Intel 32-bit version of their Windows products in 1999, effectively ceding the 64-bit market to to Sun, DEC, Compaq and HP. Linux has run on 64-bit chips since they were available. A recent post on the GNHLUG board indicates that Linux will run on an AMD64 laptop as well. Wow, 64 bits on a laptop!
The article mentions the 64-bit release of Windows XP, but seems focused on the long-promised “Longhorn” release of Windows, and has a couple of strange paragraphs claiming that the Longhorn flavor Windows Explorer can provide much of the search capabilities of the oft-promised (but not included in Longhorn) WinFS database-as-file-system:
The various transparencies, shading, and richer animation capabilities of Longhorn’s graphical interface that will be featured in the demo are not glitz for glitz’s sake, because these improvements are designed to help users to “collect, organize, and visualize data in a way that is not possible today,”
Uh, hunh.
I don’t think this column is coincidentally timed with the release this Friday of “Tiger,” Apple’s latest OS X version 10.4, including the built-in “Spotlight” desktop search feature. Can’t wait to see how Tiger delivers!
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Windows 2000 Users: The Clock Is Ticking. June 30 marks the end of mainstream support for both the client and server Windows 2000 releases. A Windows 2000 rollup pack is still due by midyear.”
Time to start evaluating your options for your next operating system. There are lots of good choices out there. Me? I’m thinking Tiger, Ubuntu, Fedora and perhaps a little SuSE ought to do me.
OSNews also points to Linux Insider: How Linux Saved Microsoft. “Rob Enderle has an commentary at LinuxInsider discussing the effect Linux has had on Microsoft. An excerpt: “As I look at how Microsoft is changing to address the Linux threat, one that may actually turn out to be no more real then Netscape’s was, I can’t help but see how Microsoft has dramatically benefited from it — and much more broadly so than they did from the rise of Netscape.”
I think Enderle is right on when he talks about the effect that Open Source is having with Microsoft. “Competition breeds Innovation.” However, I think he falls off the deep end in his last section “False Threat?” where he tries to explain what Open Source is.
… “open source” which, in turn, is based on a false concept. This concept is that people actually want to look at source code. No, it’s that people want the security of knowing that the code is there for a community to maintain, support and enhance, that a monopolistic code owner can’t take away the freedom to run the code they have.
Finally, we know that what is largely holding the open-source community together is a dislike for Microsoft. Little holds the community together! 🙂 But the individuals who choose Open Source each choose it for their own reasons, often freedom of choice, freedom to experiment, freedom to extend, integrate, modify and hack together the solution to their own problem. It’s not about Microsoft, nor Computer Associates, nor IBM, nor any other one target.
… unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we’ll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Perhaps, Rob. See you in 2015 and we can compare notes.
OSNews points to a Fortune magazine story Microsoft’s New Mantra: ‘It Just Works’. “Microsoft’s Jim Allchin says that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: “it just works.” In other words, a lot of the fiddly, annoying tasks that computer users have become accustomed to (or never quite got the hang of) such as searching for files, defragmenting, changing network configurations, and tweaking security settings, will happen automatically.”
It’s an interesting piece, especially reading between the lines on the marketing message Allchin is trying to deliver. Microsoft has at least another year before they deliver the OS they have been talking about for a long, long time. Watch how the message changes.
Computerworld News reports Microsoft releases patches for 18 separate flaws. “Microsoft today released eight security bulletins detailing fixes for 18 separate vulnerabilities affecting a wide range of its software products.”
Youch! Patch quick, patch often. This RSS Feed (readable in a browser) points out updates for Exchange Server, MSN Messenger, Windows, and Office (Word 2000, 2002, 2003, Works – a Critical Update). You’ll also want to review http://www.microsoft.com/security. Regularly.
The security bulletins seem to be numbered MS05-016 through -023. It’s only week 16 of 2005. Looks like it could be a rough year for Microsoft.
OSNews speculates Longhorn Delayed Again – Who Wins?. “In the last few weeks, the tech industry has been buzzing with speculation that Microsoft’s next OS release, Longhorn, will not be ready for its planned 2006 unveiling. If the OS is put off until 2007, some competitors could win more profits, but many analysts say that software and hardware partners will face the most serious challenges and could end up losing more than they anticipated.”
The folks who coined the nickname “LongWait” might be proven right. If true, it could have good and bad effects. SysAdmins in the middle of a WinXP rollout will breathe a sigh of relief that they might get a break. OTOH, the claim that using a proprietary operating system gives you any more secure and reliable a roadmap than using free products might finally be put to a well-deserved rest. Planning based on vaporware, free or not, is risky. And buying one-year subscriptions with “guaranteed” upgrades is just a fool’s game.
From Paul Thurrott WinInfo Short Takes: Week of April 11:
My guess is that you’re going to hear a lot more about this case in the weeks ahead. The short version goes like this: Microsoft sued an Ohio college student last year for selling two pieces of unused Microsoft software on eBay. Microsoft has won numerous cases like this in the past by default (who wants to square off against Goliath?), but University of Akron student David Zamos decided to fight back. He won– or at least settled after Microsoft realized the danger–but there’s a lesson to be learned from this story. Zamos argued, quite effectively, that he couldn’t agree to Microsoft’s sales and licensing terms because the company wraps its End User License Agreement (EULA) inside the unopened software. I expect this bit of legal chicanery to be tested again in the future. In the meantime, this is a bellwether case that all Microsoft customers should be aware of. The “Cleveland Scene” ran the full, and interesting, story:
http://list.windowsitpro.com/t?ctl=719D:2280B
I’ve always wondered what would happen if I bought a name-brand box for the hardware and tried to sell of the pieces I didn’t want. What kind of obligations are you under for the physical parts of your purchase? Can you sell off the sound card? The CD drive? The manuals? How about the CDs for the software you don’t use, don’t start and don’t break the shrink-wrap on?
Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions blogs Windows 2003 SP1 problems continue for others as well. “As a self-employed consultant, I’ve got better things to do with my time than troubleshoot server problems.”
Oliver Rist, in Infoworld’s Enterprise Watch column writes “Now Microsoft releases the much-anticipated Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. SBS 2003 happens to be partially based on Win2K3 code, although much of it also á isn’t. Win2K3 Server SP1 suddenly shows up on your SUS/WSUS update list. You put two and four together, come up with six-point-something, and decide to deploy the patch… Pow! You’ve got problems. A short list includes your fax services failing, your DHCP probably keeling over dead, your Change IP Address tool collapsing in a smoking pile of goo, and any reinstallations of critical components becoming suddenly akin to slamming your forehead into the front grill of a Dodge Ram pickup.”
Sure glad all my servers are running Red Hat and Fedora Core…
OSNews is reporting Fewer permissions are key to Longhorn security. “Software engineers who attend Microsoft’s annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference later this month could get their first taste of a new Windows user permissions model that could change the way thousands of programs are developed and run. But as the company prepares for the final Longhorn development push, questions remain about its plans for a new user privileges model called Least-Privilege User Account, or LUA.”
Man, yet another security model! Systems Engineers struggled mightily with the Windows Domain Model and then Active Directory. I wonder how many more iterations Microsoft will go through before things settle down. Computers are such an infant industry when compared to construction or manufacturing. And even in those industries, its really only in the last century that science and engineering (helped, ironically, by the computer) has brought enough precision to the process to improve the success rate of large building projects and streamline the raw-materials-to-delivered-goods process with JIT and EDI. It will be a long time, I’m afraid, until computers reach that level of maturity. In the meantime, we have to look forward to churn and relearn, new ‘paradigms’ (ugh!) and models.
From Structured Programming and Object-Oriented Programming through Service Oriented Architecture, Extreme Programming and Model Driven Architecture, new models are being tossed around daily. A few rise to the level of popularity to make the buzz, sell a bunch of books and fewer still contribute a bit to the science of computer science, So many appear like last year’s diet craze, embarrassing to recall. Empty promises written by marketeers oversold the software, promising impossible returns on investment. Fred Brooks wrote the definitive conclusion nearly thirty years ago: There are no silver bullets.
What I do see working, out here in the real world, is that evolution works better than revolution. Sure, a few projects achieve amazing success with the latest new whiz-bang tool of the day, but for the vast majority of developers in the trenches, there is a slow accumulation of knowledge and wisdom of best practices that filter out from the few manic successes (and less talked about, but far more common, down-in-flames failures). New tools and techniques work best when introduced into existing systems side-by-side, so practitioners can compare-and-contrast, mastering the new systems at their own pace (while waiting for version 3 or service pack 1), picking up the good parts of “the way we’ve always done things” and matching them with the good parts of the new tools and techniques. Different shops need to evolve at different paces. Shops working in industries with long turnover cycles can take decades, where cutting-edge shops working with highly competitive customers can take months. Revolution means starting over, rewriting all the rules from scratch. No matter how insanely great a new tool, it still takes 5 years to gain the 5 years of experience all the want ads are looking for. It takes a major development effort and a deployment and an update and a redeployment and a wave of new machines and a few major changes before you know how a toolset can handle the entire software development life cycle. A demo with two notebooks on a stage does not a robust system make.
Microsoft wants to start over with a new security model? It took until Windows 95 for the Win31 model to mature, and until WinXP for the WinNT model to be complete. Third time’s the charm?