The breakdown for the various editions of Windows Server 2008 was revealed this morning by Microsoft, and the big news there is the almost total lack of change: Retail server software editions for the next Windows Server will fall right in line with the current Windows Server 2003 R2 editions, including the number of client access licenses provided in the basic package.
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Member since:2005-07-06
MinWin *is* marketing. Microsoft's marketing and HR teams realized that the perception among college-age developers that Windows is huge, bloated, and unwieldy was driving prospective developers away from the platform.
That's pretty much it. Honestly. How many articles and stories have we had over the last eight years or so, especially in the run up to Windows 2000 and beyond, that helpfully told us how Windows was being redesigned, being made more modular, more object oriented and less of an 'all-in-one' pig?
All crap.
Member since:2006-01-02
Geez. Usually I respect your opinion, but what you're saying is absolutely idiotic. MinWin was not public until Eric Traut mentioned it and all the 'marketing' you're seeing is various people in the tech press picking up on this because it looks like a "good story."
I've been working on Windows for a few months now. There are hairy pieces here and there, but it's really not as unmaintainable as you imply.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-08
MinWin *is* marketing. Microsoft's marketing and HR teams realized that the perception among college-age developers that Windows is huge, bloated, and unwieldy was driving prospective developers away from the platform. MinWin is an attempt to demonstrate publicly that, although Windows is large and complex, the codebase is more structured and manageable than one might think.
They try to get away with calling MinWin a microkernel, but in reality it's just a logical subset of their existing monolithic NT-based kernel. They managed to split out the source code, make it separately buildable, and jazz it up for demonstration purposes.
I'm sure it was a somewhat useful engineering exercise internally, but it was primarily targeted at people like us here at OSNews. They need to sell us the idea that Windows development is sustainable, that they have a plan to mitigate code complexity and to combat "Brooksian" communications overhead.
It's a belated response to the success of bazaar-style development models such as Linux and KDE. See, our software is made up of parts, too. Vista was a fluke. We can scale. We can hack on this codebase for decades to come. No dead ends here. It's not a mess, we know what we're doing, and we've got it under control.
That's the message that underlies MinWin.