- Friday, 9 January 2009
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A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something - Harold Coffin
Vista +1 details emerge
DETAILS ARE STARTING to emerge about what MS has planned for the next version of it's OS - possibly called Windows MeIII - but the presentations seen by the INQ refer to it as Vista +1. This particular presentation centered around two new key features of the OS, diskless PCs and ethernet storage.
The presentation from the IHV forum in August is basically looking at getting MS caught up, in three years, maybe, to where Citrix was two years ago, with streaming OSes and storage on the Net. Most of it relies heavily on iSCSI and similar ethernet block storage technologies, probably a big reason why Intel pushed iSCSI on standard NICs during IDF.
The first part is a streaming OS ala what Citrix and a bunch of others have been doing for years. It centers around a diskless workstations for the enterprise, no storage means security in MS terms. I won't point out that you can compromise a whole host of PCs at once by hacking a single box now, at least this idea seems to have distracted them from popups and other window dressing as security.
The point is to use a combination of PXE, WinPE and iSCSI to point a blank diskless PC to a storage array and stream an OS image to it. As I said, the good folk at Citrix have been doing this for a long time, so it is hard to see what they bring to the party.
One quick word of advice to the good folk at MS working on this, PXE doesn't route to well, so unless you want to force things to stay local, really local, you might want to consider something else for this. It would actually be a useful service if you could do it across CAN or WAN links.
The other big pitch MS is making for Vista +1 is home ethernet storage. The IHV presentation gets a little fuzzy here, it isn't much of a plan as a call for ideas from the IHV community. The goal is to more or less be able to plug a drive in to the network and have devices see and use it intelligently.
Once again, if it wasn't for MS pushing this idea, I might be happy about it. With the DRM and malware infecting every iota of Vista, this can't be a good idea. The presentation seems to take the broken idea of media center extenders and apply it to storage. Great, now all your base are belong to us, make your time. Scary stuff, but given how well the last 5 generations of it worked out, this will probably be as useful and worthwhile as its predecessors.
In the end, it seems MS is trying to make Vista +1 more remote storage aware, and is fishing for a reason to sell it to end users. If it can do it, more power to them, it just might work out well.
How serious are they? To quote the presentation, "These features represent proposed plans but should not be considered plan of record for Windows Vista +1 ". Based on this and other presentations we have seen, it looks like MeIII is still gelling, slowly. µ
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PXE doesn't route well but boot forwarding/helpers work just fine... Now forward along...
Yes, of course, let me keep those files very secure for you, right here in my hands so that my agents can check to see if everything you're doing conforms to our rules... by the way, we can keep your wallets very secure for you too, as well as your car keys, and the deed to your house. Like hell i will, you crazy F***** those files are stay in my computer tower, where they are very very secure and away from people that make up crazy rules that hurt their paying customers every other day
Oh, they're on to a winner with this one alright. Convince end users to give up their own storage - but don't worry, big green will "look after" it for you. And pigs might fly.
Windows Me III.. That one just never gets old. Let's see...you hate Windows, you hate Apple, that leaves...Linux? MS-DOS? AmigaDOS? Let's face it...for 99% of end-users who check their e-mail, type letters, browse the net (and try to beat up George Bush in thoes wacky flash-based ads to win a free ringtone!!) and chuckle at You-Tube videos, Windows 95 is more power than they need...or Windows Me, for that matter. I pity the fool that don't like Apple and OSX.
Come on, ALL my files play on Vista and XP, where's all this DRM crap that limits me? I haven't seen it yet, ever. All my mp3s, avis, xvids, divxs, everything plays. Who is forcing me to buy hd-dvd? and even if you buy it you can still play them hi def right now. such stupid hatred
Now would be a good time to mention a lame blog giving useless tips for ubuntu also need to mention Ron Paul's name.. wait.. wrong site.
There's good reasons why those Sun machines that booted over networks were derisivly called "Dickless workstations". And in this country with it's slow overpriced unreliable broadband that's usage-capped and increasingly traffic-shaped does anyone really want to contend with a machine that boots off the intertubes?
Nice. Our future of OS and diskless workstations sound like the 1980's when we had dumb terminals connected to powerful mainframes. Re-packaged technology and name of course.
Wouldn't a move like this from MS hurt companies like Western Digital who make hard drives for home users? I really don't know the HDD sales ratio between servers and home consumers but MS dictating these kinds of sales with something like this can't all be good. A company cannot force this kind of trust.
I think MS would be giving the Linux community some quality catch-up time with this kind of thumb-twiddling. By the time they get Windows on track again, Linux would have caught up in the Average Joe consumer space. Microsoft, beware.
l'Histoire se repête.. Though the product is likely better named as Vista -1... This is a back to the mainframe paradigm, a variation on network groupworking, just like the Google Docs solution is such a thing and it will fly only under the presupposition that network connectivity is spotless (Now I come to think of it, this is something MSFT probably hopes to sell to Telcos with half-filled data centers). This sorta thing will also fly in corporate environments where costs of fat client maintenance per workplace are constantly under pressure.
Great, so now a Denial Of Service attack will keep your PC from even booting. Yet another genuine advantage...
Let me know how that works out for you.
To Tony D, The problem with Vista's DRM is that it has huge negative effects even for people who will never play a HD file on their computer. The requirements placed on hardware vendors are quite frankly ridiculous - this translates into higher priced hardware for us. I've always thought NVIDIA had excellent drivers - what do you think caused them so many delays with their Vista Driver? Vista's DRM also effects Speed, System Reliability and Power consumption. You should compare the battery life of a WindowsXP laptop playing a divx to a Vista one. Also - If you were to purchase a HD-DVD drive I severely doubt you could actually play movies in HD. I haven't heard of any computers yet which tick all the DRM boxes, so you would just get a downsampled SD movie on your screen.
I don't see booting an OS image off the network as being of any benefit to a home user, but for businesses I can see a huge benefit. Right now I'm using crappy old PII/PIII diskless machines to boot a small Linux image via PXE, which then runs a RDP client to connect to a 2003 Terminal Server (google Thinstation - it rocks). If the diskless machine dies, I don't need to waste time diagnosing what component died - I just bin the whole thing and chuck in a new one. This way the only thing I need to worry about maintaining is the Terminal Server which purrs along very nicely.
This bad idea has been around for a long time. The only real benefits in this scheme are for the Operating System and Software developers. Great idea if you want to stop piracy and institute a pay as you go basis for operating systems and software applications. Oh wait, what do we call that...rentware? I really like the way fact that the home user will have two points of failure to potentially keep them from accessing their data: internet connectivity and external storage providers. No to mention completely throwing away any illusion of privacy and data security. So we replaced dumb terminals with PC's just to replace PC's with "Smart" terminals? Just image this... your storage server rack goes down or better yet the license database for operating systems or software applications becomes corrupted and now every user on your network is doing their nails, playing with crossword puzzles or calling ET or what ever on company time. Sounds great to me; Businesses will love this one! Shouldn't we be trying to eliminate points of failure instead of creating new ones?
So... would that be Vista++? Or maybe in terms of Microsoft programming languages it should be "Vista#"... a half-step higher then Vista, which would still be "XP flat" ("XPb").
The Citrix technology to which you refer is presumably the same technology that they developed alongside MS, and which already exists in all Windows Servers in the form of Terminal Server. I'm also surprised that so many of the comments are so negative about the idea of internet and network storage. The boom of ultra-mobile-PCs is an indicator that MS are thinking along the right tracks. Such devices require steady state disks (to keep the physical size down) which are necessarily of lower capacity than traditional spinning disks. They therefore require external storage of some form. Moreover, what of the emergence of online apps such as Google Docs and Zoho? Companies such as Box.net and Humyo are making money of nothing but online storage. It's true that we've been hearing these stories for aeons, but personal online storage might actually have arrived this time. It seems only sensible that MS consider putting support for such technology into their OS.
I use diskless systems with Linux/BSD and NAS's a lot, it's quite handy, and keeps staffing costs and lost work time low. I imagine that's the point of what they want to do here. I seriously doubt they want to force you to keep your data in Redmond. I consider it encouraging that they are at very least offering the option to work diskless, fat, or via terminal. (even if they are a little behind the Unix/Linux/BSD guys)