Microsoft UI Paradigm Comes Full Circle

Hmmm... back to basics.. process management, scheduler, memory management and synch, system calls, threading, file systems, security... woops, that's not really needed, scrap that. Write another goddamn DLL, boys.

I'm curious - who does debugging and coding better than, say, Microsoft .NET? I'm curious as to what you are comparing the features or issues to exactly?

I've been programming in Microsoft for long time, mainly VB until about 6 years ago, then now completely .NET with C# and frankly, its pretty dang easy. Debugging is very simple with VS.Net and quite a bit above other IDEs that I've tried. (Granted, I have a lot of experience with VS.Net now, so I've overcome the learning curve.)

I haven't found a ton of redundancy in .NET libraries, though I haven't really sat down and looked. But compared to some languages / libraries like PHP, or Java, .NET is a LOT clearer to me. I remember trying to learn PHP 4 a few years back and a) not having ANY debugging tools to speak of and b) finding 5 or 6 different ways to perform the exact same function, but with different inputs or results. (And I'm not just talking about a bunch of overloads.)

Also, what do you mean when you say "virtualizing anything"? I'm confused on what you are speaking to. MS has had the HAL and other abstraction layers since Windows NT. MS supports pretty good PC virtualization with Virtual PC and Virtual Server and supports some of the advanced virtualization techniques in the newer Intel processors.

And on your second post, I'm not sure how rewriting all of those kernel and O/S systems is going to help anything? I mean, I know its good to shake out the code and start over, but its a VERY big deal to do that - and then people would be complaining that all of the other windows software that's out there suddenly doesn't work exactly right because the underlying O/S changed. Literally billions of hours of software development over the past 12 years would be at risk.

Even Linus and the Linux kernel devs don't just rewrite parts of the kernel on a whim. Its a very, very well thought out process, that requires a lot of time, deprecating functions and waiting several months or years for developers to stop using them, warning people their code is going to break, etc.

Sounds more like you are just doing random Microsoft bashing.

Oh, puh-leeze. Dot Net is neither architecture nor protocol. C# is nothing but a barstardized version of Java, written by and for people who wouldn't know a virtual machine if it bit them in the ass. The old Vee Bee hacks. Downright ugly code, lashed to the OS like a bunch of suitcases tied to the top of Uncle Bill's station wagon on its way to Cape May, every so often a suitcase flies off... woops! Better upgrade that pesky OS ! Darn!

There's no magic to an OS, fella. It's just a program like anything else which loads from the boot process. If Microsoft paid its OS architects half as well as it paid those goddamn lawyers chasing down patents in Linux, they might have a real OS on their hands. Vista is an enormous bust, the largest bust in software history. Had Microsoft bitten the bullet and rewritten its kernel, instead of first playing little games with making a SuperXP or a Super Windows Server 2003 and virtualized all those goddamn Win32 calls, Vista would look less like Jabba the Hutt.

As it is, Craig Mundie and all those marketing weasels are going to drag MSFT down the same path those weasels dragged Apple down until Steve Jobs got back in the saddle.

Vulgrin, just like you I spent a long time programming on Windows with VB and then .NET. So you must know that .NET is nothing but a thick layer on top of Win32. Most of Microsoft's own programs are still not written in .NET, but C++. If .NET's that great why is it still largely not adopted by its creator after more than 5 years?

Debugging in Windows programs has been a nightmare for quite a long time and will continue to be so. Once you get to the DLL levels you're stuck with proprietary compiled code. And thorough use of .NET can show you the bugs in the underlying DLLs. In .NET 1.0 I recall a few troublesome bugs that Microsoft simply refused to fix, even with our extremely expensive support contract, which caused me a lot of trouble for a small server I was writing.

Now I develop full time in PHP. While there's no great debugging tools that I enjoy using, debugging overall is pretty easy with simple error logging and trapping. It doesn't bother me at all that there may be 10 ways of doing something because I can simply choose what works best for me. It's all so easy that the learning curve is minimal.

Yes, exactly, as OS/2 ran all the old DOS-based apps with virtual interrupt handlers. If an old app needed support, they'd get a nice clean wrapper with all the old signatures in place. The old DLL calls would be politely ignored: the relevant code loaded and executed on an as-needed basis.

Having done a lot of fresh installs, I could easily implement a non-backwards compatible version of Windows in around 80% of the cases. That includes data center scenarios as well.

I would like the option of a non-bloated OS that I could provide to clients, using code optimised for modern hardware that maximises the full potential of the PC.

If Microsoft could be convinced, then we could also get hardware manufacturer involved too. This way we could give hardware designs a significant boost that would lay the foundations for the next generation of computers.

It needs to happen at some point, phasing legacy code out is killing innovation and productivity.

As the games people and the video card industry pushed for reforms in the OS, (basicially telling MSFT to get the hell out of the way) so should applications drive out better security and simplified interfaces in the rest of the OS. Microsoft really needs to be slapped down, and hard. IBM has a bolt-on hardware Java for their mainframes, zAPP , but Microsoft continues to bind its applications ever-closer to its operating system, e.g. .NET, which only pretends to be open software.

There is a good arguement for applications being integrated with the OS. From an administration and security point of view, it means that given the proper backend tools, I can implement a domain-wide security policy very rapidly. An additional benefit is that it prevents overlapping technologies competing to do the same thing using incompatible standards.

From a development point of view, there is nothing worse than trying to get various technologies to function together. From a security perspective, it can become a nightmare.

.NET is open, in the sense that the specification is provided to create abstracted interfaces that can be implemented on any OS. In practice, however, .NET's specifications have been designed to abstract certain key features that only exist within Windows. This makes portability a problem.

I certainly cannot write one application and have it run under both .NET and Mono, unless it is a simple console application. In one respect, it is missing features in the Mono API and in another it is the Widget toolkits such as Gtk# and Qt#. That's not to mention ASP.NET support.

So, in the cross-OS environment, Java can make a lot of sense.

The games, movie and video card industries have leverage over Microsoft, because if they abandon the system for Linux, Microsoft on the desktop is finished. That's why Microsoft has been pushing DRM and encrypted HD platforms. As Linux is open-source, it cannot really deploy these technologies which eliminates the OS from the domestic market.

Take a look at AACS and you will see the companies that were involved in carving up the market to assist in Microsoft's continued monopoly.

http://www.aacsla.com/founders/

Well, let's take that argument at face value, yes, there is a need for controlling app security. But under whose terms?

From a developer and architect's perspective, implementing a MSFT solution is a nightmare, doesn't matter how you look at it. Trying to get technologies to work together from Microsoft to anywhere else is nigh-on impossible. Oh, MSFT has done some interesting things with XML based formats, but look at the mess created by carriage-return linefeed versus mere carriage-return. I've watched that problem break everything in an SOA application, literally everything, all at once, ever last bit of the parsing died horribly. MSFT simply does not play well with others, and it's always something. Within the MSFT Happy Valley, sure, your point is valid, but don't try to go any further, there are some Bad Nasties out there.

The games industry will probably begin writing its own OS, anyway. They're sick of MSFT's screwing around.

The games industry will probably begin writing its own OS, anyway. They're sick of MSFT's screwing around.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. A striped down OS dedicated to games that could run from CD, or USB.

A hardware feature that suspends the current OS and boots the game OS would allow quick switching back and forth. I wouldn't really mind if I were to get max performance out of my hardware as a result.

Yeah, some variant of an RTOS, teeny little thing, geared to the gamer, where the video card runs most of the cycles.

A live linux distro would work well. I run Knoppix or DSL from a USB stick, with a little modification, it could support the addition of updated drivers quit easily. On first boot it could detect the machine type and download the necessary drivers.

Providing a live distro to act as a base OS for games would be quite straight forward. That could be downloaded to a 2GB USB key and the CD/DVD would carry the game data and engine. A 2GB USB drive costs around $20-$30 and it would be a one off cost. The drives could be sold in game stores, or you could roll your own.

Game manufactures would gain OS independence and full control over the development of the base OS.

As everything runs in RAM with a read-only main partition, isolated from the rest of the system, it would be very secure.

my bad, "Spotlight" not "Searchlight" I never claimed to own a Mac. :)

You complain that you have to know what you are searching for to find something - the way to solve that is by adding more metadata to the items you are searching, so that people can find them with alternative terms. That is possible with some items in Vista, by adding more information to the properties of the object. I don't know if OSX has something similar - I would imagine it does.

Right- or ctrl-clicking an item in OS X 10.4 allows you to add 'Spotlight comments.' I've never used this feature myself though I do use Spotlight from time to time. I'd like to see more applications that allow you to add these right within the Save dialog, right now I don't bother because I try to keep things as organized as possible and just don't feel like saving a document, finding it through the Finder, and then adding comments to it.

The machine should do more remembering. Google Desktop works now, Microsoft's search is just more copycat nonsense. Linux has virtual desktops, why can't Microsoft do the same? What are those brains at Microsoft Research doing with all that money? The one thing we've always wanted from a computer is to handle rules. Take it from a linguist, language processing obeys Chomsky's Laws of endless fractal exceptions, diversions and recursions from a theme. the very stupidest thing computer science could ever tackle. You can put a hog in a tuxedo and put him onstage at La Scala, but he will not sing Mozart. He will sing what pigs sing.

Until the computer resembles the brain, not only in numbers of neurons, but glial cells and neurochemistry, not to mention the infinitude of the skin, the eye, the ear, the mouth, in short, until a computer can weep or love or cry out in pain will language ever be necessary, and they will speak on their own. Until then, we will obey Von Neumann and his Paradox, and work to improve the computer to handle the repetitive tasks for which it serves admirably.

I didn't mean voice recognition - a typed question in plain english, like "I want to edit the video I captured last week" and PC opens the right video editing program, and loads right video file.

That's what we call 'natural language processing' and it is bloatware. I have almost half a Terabyte of disk space and I never use search features. It would be another piece of junk that would make my new PC feel like a 386.

That type of search may have a place in a corporation. As such, the search should be a centralised system running from a dedicated server that tracks the corporations documents. A search server if you will.

As most companies use Lotus notes, sharepoint or something similar to manage documents, search facilities of this nature are both a little redundant and rather intrusive.

Again, these are silly ideas by people stuck in the past. People want simplistic, fast, operating systems that play games, music and DVDs. XP was as much complexity as the market requires, Vista is overkill and quite annoying to use (both visually and functionally). I have a lot of companies complaining about Vista's user interface.