Windows 8: More early clues start to emerge
Summary: As soon as Microsoft releases the final bits of a new Windows release to manufacturing -- and often before -- many users' thoughts turn to what's next. Windows 7 was released to manufacturing in late July. By late August, Microsoft's Windows client unit already was turning the crank on Windows 8 client and server.
As soon as Microsoft releases the final bits of a new Windows release to manufacturing -- and often before -- many users' thoughts turn to what's next.
Windows 7 and its server complement, Windows Server 2008 R2, were released to manufacturing in late July. By late August, Microsoft's Windows client unit already was turning the crank on Windows 8 client and server.
Anders Vindberg, a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Microsoft's Management and Services division -- a "Big Brains" interview with whom I'll be posting soon -- acknowledged that planning sessions were well underway for Windows 8. And of the 12 working groups created, "eight or nine revolve around management." (Back in April of this year, Microsoft was seeking developers interested in working on some of these management features and enhancements to Distributed File System Replication for Windows 8.)
Stephen Chapman, a tech enthusiast who runs the UX Evangelist site, has been beating the bushes for a few months now for Windows 8 information. He recently unearthed a number of job profiles of folks who have worked on and are working on various elements which may or may not make it into the final Windows 8 release.
Chapman found listings regarding tweaks being made to the Hibernate/Resume/Integration programming interface "that can integrate and utilize the new TLZ file compression engine." (I'm not really sure what TLZ means here. I found a reference to TLZ as a file extension for Tar (.TAR) file compressed with LZMA (.LZMA) file compression "most commonly used on Unix systems.")
He also found a reference to more tweaks that Microsoft is making around kernel patch protection, via PatchGuard. Chapman blogged that, based on what he unearthed, "PatchGuard is apparently going to make life even a little more difficult for hackers (and anti-virus companies as well, perhaps)."
Things are happening on the Windows 8 Server front, too. It seems that the Dublin application server that Microsoft has been readying might find its way into Windows 8 Server, based on another online resume Chapman found. (Microsoft officials said last year that the grand plan for Dublin was to integrate it into Windows Server, but never said when.)
I've seen a few Windows 8 references out there focused around the server version that mention new functionality Microsoft is working on to make Windows 8 Server an even stronger datacenter operating system. That dovetails with Microsoft's slow but steady push toward offering customers not just a public-cloud hosting capability, but also a private one. For Microsoft, a private cloud will revolve around Windows Server. Some of the features/functionality developed by the Windows Azure operating system (Red Dog) team will undoubtedly find their way back into future iterations of Windows Server.
It's still early. Windows 8 is unlikely to debut until 2011, at the earliest, given the way Microsoft is delivering Windows releases these days. I'll be interested as to how Microsoft execs characterize Windows 8, given they decided to deem Windows 7 a "major" release and Windows Server 2008 R2 a "minor" one.
Anyone else hearing any scuttlebutt yet on Windows 8? What are you hoping gets included in the next Windows client and server releases?
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
Here's something for the developers to do:
Also for the next Win, don't change the UI again. Please.
pray do tell
Interesting...
False Choice Fallacy...
Do you develop software? If so then you are familiar with the process of triaging bugs, weighing their severity against the cost to fix.
A threashold must be set because if it was at 100% as you suggest the software would NEVER SHIP.
However...
There are plenty of mind numbingly complex things that people build out there that aren't software that give far less problems and work for far longer, so software people should really step up rather than pushing the "So what? All software has issues" barrow as is the (modern) tendency.
It's not fatalistic...
If you want software to be more stable you should make that your top requirement. Say, "I don't want a GUI. That abstraction itself is rather complex. Pure command line. Lets get rid of memory management. For storage, I'll read the sectors off the disk myself... I don't need a complex file system." You can have a great circa 1960 system with basic wordprocessing (no spell checking and word wrap, but you can type and delete) and a solid calculator.
But I think most people would prefer Halo 3 or HalfLife 2, or Firefox, or Visual Studio... bugs and all.
Nice try...
@zkiwi...
If you think that it's simple to write an operating system, I invite you to apply for a job at Microsoft and show them how to do it because I'm quite that you'll be able to show them just how easy it is and that the thousands of engineers they've employed over the years were nothing more than hacks.
Yeah, try telling Raymond Chen or Larry Osterman that they're hacks. Go ahead, prove them wrong, make it as simple as, oh, breathing.
re "it's not fantastic"
its "developer" arrogance like this, that has given us this problem.
"you'll get what you are given, even if it does not work, because , WE, know that's what you want!
I would agree if the products were free. you would put up with it. as they are not, should they not work? everything else we buy, is expected too.
I think medicine IS more complex...
have side effects falling off the label! Isn't
that a bug? The worst part about medicine is we're
debugging code we didn't write and our interface
is a sledge hammer. Next gen medicine is bringing
gene reprogramming. Thing of the bugs we'll have
then!
re: firemouth
breaks soon after you buy it? At least you can
reinstall your OS. I went through 12 DVD
Players under a hundred dollars in less than a
year before I bought a $300 one. My friends buy
brand new cars cause they hate paying more than
the value of the car to have it fixed. Almost
all of them have had their cars in the shop for
some issue within the first year, guess what,
it costs more to fix new cars. The world trade
center was designed to withstand impacts from
planes... hmmm must have been a bug there!
There really ISN'T many things as complex. I
ALWAYS think something I am going to code is
going to be easy. It never is, and I rarely
work with code more than a few thousand lines
long. Windows is more than 50 MILLION lines of
code. There is not a single developer in all of
Microsoft that knows every single line of code.
There probably isn't a developer that knows
every subroutine or function call, and a bug
can span many. You can read over a bug hundreds
of times and not see it. Your debugging
software can be mislocating the bug. And a bug
might not crop up unless you happen to type '0'
into a box your supposed to type your annual
salary, while listening to bon jovi and
repeatedly clicking the mouse in rhythm. And
even though it's pretty much impossible for
that to crop up under testing, you'd be surprised how often it happens when you have
100million people using your software whenever
their computer is on.
@zkiwi... has a point
An entire OS loaded with software is many thousands, if not millions of lines of code interacting with each other in ways that are so complex that is almost impossible to predict exactly how they will interact with each other.
If we run a system this this complex then the law of averages states there's always going to be a certain percentage of flawed code.
The more complexity there is to a machine the more there is to go wrong.
Another reason its impossible to not have flawed code is that at the speed that technology is currently moving new software needs to be built and shipped out quickly or risk becoming obsolete before it reaches consumers. If we wanted perfect software the entire IT industry would have to slow down to accommodate. This is inconceivable since the growth of IT is exponential.
Perhaps this means that as technology grows faster there will be even less time for developers and software will get worse.
Software IS a special case zkiwi
The partial answer is that a bridge is a much simpler problem, and it is one that has been solved many many times before so there is a great deal of prior art to look at. A great deal of money still goes into bridge design though, because the cost of a "bug" is very high. A bridge going down could cost hundreds or thousands of lives.
In most cases of software the problem is the opposite. It is a very complex problem, that has probably not been solved before (that you can look at anyway), and the cost of a bug is vastly smaller.
There are examples of near-perfect code out there. The computers that run car engines or stealth bombers for example. But the cost per line of code is very high and the problem domain fairly small.
As a general rule, the cost per line of code increases exponentially once you start closing in on perfection. The development cost of making a truly bug-free windows 7 would probably the in the same ball park as the GDP of the entire US. How much are you willing to pay? Not that much? Now you know why there are bugs in code.
Software like bridges is a fundamentally wrong argument
assumes a deep over-simplification of the problem of building
software.
The question falls in a basic assumption. Physics laws.
Construction of bridges have them, have always have them, and they
have always been the same (2000+ years of accumulated knowledge).
Further more, the users experience them inside and outside the
bridges.
Software does not have to comply with physics laws. Sure there are
performance and constrains imposed by the hardware. But in the
strict software sense, one can put a menu bar on top of a window
and it will not fall down, nor need to be hold by any other
element. And only 50+ years of knowledge.
This is so simple and basic that we think of it as a ridiculous
reason to look at, and we ignore it. But it is a huge wedge in
between bridges and software construction methodologies.
User requirements:
Bridges: We better let a qualified engineer to tell us what can be
done. He knows how to calculate the structure so it works.
Software: We better tell the guy that read "Programming C++ in 24
hours." exactly what we dreamed last night, most of the time even
ignoring technically embarrassing requests (recently I read about
a guy that was worry that the printer will print hyper links
because the user might want to click them)
Design:
Bridges: This is what can be done, this is were can be done, and
these are the exact materials that will need. And we might be able
to negotiate some aspects of it, but you cannot negotiate nature
laws. Period. (Sorry, cannot put the foundation on sand and expect
it to support tons of weight for the next 100 years)
Software: Design??? You mean the sketches of requirements that you
gave me, which are incomplete? And no point to complete them,
because as you go using the system, you will discover new
requirements that you didn't think before. Better yet, lets go
agile! (try to build a bridge with agile methodologies)
Development:
Bridges: Well planned, knows exactly how the foundation has to
work and were to put it, everything was measure before hand. And
there is no expectation to try to use the bridge yet, because it
does not makes sense. Construction crew is working, leave them
alone.
Software: Well... I would like to see a mock up of the screen, to
have a feeling of how it will work... since the mock up is already
working, why you want to spend my money tossing it away and
creating a "real system". I'll just use this one that already
works. Or better yet, you really don't need a database server, I
have been doing my calculations in excel all these years, just
look how well organized my folder structures are. You see? it
works! Just make it work with more data, that is all. What do you
mean it can't be done? I though you were the expert!
And of course I can keep going...
The fact that there are physical constrains in bridge building
known by everybody, forces construction projects to work within
those constrains.
The fact that there are no physical constrains (beyond hardware
limitations) in software construction, and the constrains of
software development are very little known even by programmers,
allows all parties to ignore them.
Asking "Why you cannot build software like we build bridges?" is
such gross oversimplification.
I have a friend that is a construction engineer, and he was
looking down to my programmer career because he had write a few
excel macros. Then I showed him how I change the flooring in my
bedroom all by my self, and that I was going to take on commercial
buildings designs (his trade), because after all it is the same
thing only with more materials, right? He felt offended, but got
the point.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worste
What Windows really needs is some feature cuts and backwards compatibility cuts. With that, more bugs could be addressed and fewer would arise. Windows as is, is too complex for Microsoft to manage as their poor results with bugs demonstrates.
As for the cuts, there are plenty of features that no one will miss.
Pithy statements
So you admit that saying you are striving for bug free code is just a pithy statement meant only to drive developers. The moment you brought up "time and budget constraints", you admitted that writing bug free code was [b]not[/b] the goal. It would be like saying [i]my goal is to win the Boston marathon but my training constraints are that I don't want to train more than once a week.[/i]
Saying that you are striving for bug free code while admitting that you won't actually do it due to time and budget constraints makes your statement nothing more than a "feel good" statement with nothing behind it and only the most naive would fall for it.
Thats like saying we should end world hunger while typing on your computer.
idealistic YOU should be doing more. If the
problem isn't fixed yet YOU should go fix it
instead of complaining.
Of course as soon as you actually tried to do
it instead of bitching you would realize just
how steep the uphill battle is. You have to
draw the line somewhere, whether its
healthcare, world hunger or source code.
NOTHING is perfect.
I fell for it!
yes but!
compatibility cuts. But problems with
compatibility was one of the reasons Vista
flopped so bad. (not the only reason, but I
remember there being quite a few complaints) To
cut compatibility Microsoft is going to have to
cut them one by one a release at a time.
I really don't know why windows doesnt just
make every previous version of windows
available to virtualize in the case of
incompatibility. A couple of months ago I
downloaded every major release of windows since
1.0 just for nostalgia sake and I gotta say
it's awesome to be able to go back and play
some of those 16bit windows games. Just cause I
can. Of course this is technically illegal,
which REALLY is stupid. Is Microsoft really
going to lose money on declaring XP
abandonware? Its not like just cause they're
stopping support people can't use it. And
imagine the improvement in windows image! That
would get a LOT of smiles and forgiveness.
So your saying...