Microsoft has further watered down the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) technology that will ship with its forthcoming Longhorn operating system. Many systems which Microsoft claims are “Longhorn ready” will not be able to support the security technology, vnunet.com has learned, and only part of the original security vision will be ready in time for the operating system’s launch.
Microsoft pulls yet another feature from Longhorn
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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how long until there isn’t anything new in longhorn at all?
This was also known as TCPA (hardware DRM). Glad it won’t be there, however, I won’t be using Longhorn personally anyway.
Well, so far there isn’t anything new at all! it is just old plain Windows XP with built-in StyleXP!!
Given the installed base of sub-GHz PCs is still huge, if Microsoft wants significant upgrades, this is probably the only choice they have. Computers are expensive, and disposable income seems to be shrinking in the USA at least.
yes .. this really is a major drawback … anyway vive linux /bsd/syllable
The problem with Microsoft is that they haev released a “good enough” OS for everyday users (I’m refferring to XP here). People find it convenient and easy to use… The problem is that Microsoft needs to make money… and therefore make something new for these people. But now, these “average-low” users, don’t need a new OS, so Microsoft has to show them they want it (they change the skin), but the new features are useless. I won’t teach my grandma to use the search functionality… just a few users will need it. In the end, M$ doesn’t need to implement them to sell the product. Just make sure it has drivers for new hardware and make it so multimedia experience is better (if you can, increase security). These are good-selling arguments; not WinFS and other acronyms. All they need to do is keep selling copies of their OS, how good it is doesn’t matter. Anyways, to be honest, most people are dumb and shouldn’t use a computer… so why bother about feature that could make computing efficient?
way to go nohorn!
The reason for this is simply that new hardware will not be around to support the stuff Microsoft wants to do. The main reason for being that there’s no demand for hardware companies to do anything with it, and even if they did it’s simply too expensive to integrate. Additionally, the Trusted Computing Group seems to be a closed club for companies like IBM and HP to create future lock-in. White box manufacturers haven’t had a look-in yet.
Microsoft seems to be determined to do this at some point in the future for some reason , but it’s just going to cause a great deal of trouble and totally unanswered questions. Don’t let the word security fool you. It can be used for that, of course, but I think we all know what many companies are angling for. All current systems now will not work with it, and how on Earth do people develop software or hardware of any size and get it registered/signed etc? You’ve also got the scenario of software and content companies having a free-for-all in using it as a basis for DRM systems (multiple stuff like Adobe/Nikon etc. by about ten thousand), and given even the moderate backlash against such systems for online music today it probably isn’t a good idea. We’ll be faced with a situation where absolutely nothing will work together, which of course, is bad enough today.
Put simply, implementing this is the best thing Microsoft can do to eliminate themselves. The relative freedom that allowed Microsoft to come to its current position in the software industry has now come full-circle. Game on.
1) M$ sux.
2) Nothing is new in longhorn!
3) This is the best a multibillion dollar company can do!
4) They’re copying Tiger!!!!!@!!@!@
5) Another reason to use linuxx!@!$!@$
Pick any one of the standard OSnews comment for MS stories. Feel free to add your own as well.
…if one of the most profitable software companies on the planet has to delay their software for years and remove half of the features…..it only can mean that something is working VERY wrong in redmon….
With any luck, and/or hope Longhorn will be a new OS from the ground up. Throwing away all the old code, patches, kludges, that Windows 9x, and now XP had to have in order to keep them running.
That into itself will be a good start for MSFT. Run old windows apps in a wine/vmware enviroment. When an app crashes that enviroment only that enviroment goes down.
The rest can come with longhorn .1 free upgrade. Because we all know MSFT shamelessly rips off Apple, why not the numbering sequence as well?</sarcasm> There are very few orginial, totally new ideas in software. 99% of the work is based off of old ideas, and methods.
There is more to Longhorn than spiffy new features (it has and will have plenty of those). MS is throwing away old cruft, they’re implementing a new display driver model, the UI will be composited (more advanced than OS X from the technical specs I’ve been looking at), etc. etc.
XP may be a bit long in the tooth, but it’s still a reliable and fast workhorse. Given that, Longhorn will be quite an improvement.
Longhorn is based on XP/2000/NT family which doesn’t have anything in common with 3.11/95/98/me.
It has the same FS, the same registry, the same DLL hell that all previous versions of Windows had. A complete OS rewrite seems the only choice. Look at Apple: they completely trashed the old stuff to make something brand-new and modern, and now they’re making stuff every (well, nearly) PC user dreams about but doesn’t afford to buy.
What is this “DLL Hell” that you speak of? Seriously, stop spreading the FUD already. DLL Hell hasn’t been an issue since Windows 2000 was released. NT5.0 and up all have facilities that aid in the use of multiple DLLs of the same name.
While Longhorn currently uses similar OS systems, there is talk of a transactional NTFS. I’ve also heard that MS wants to start moving away from the registry — whether or not this will be incarnated in Longhorn remains to be seen.
The only thing I found useful since Windows 2000 is no-execute stack protection.
if this was implememted you’d all be screaming about how you don’t want it. I certainly don’t. Nobody does. Buncha people jerkin their knees here…
I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft’s problems with getting things out the door have something to do with the incredible complexity of Windows. Just a little time using the thing and seeing what it does and how it does things, and it is obvious to me that the internal structure of the thing must be terribly baroque. I wouldn’t be surprised if the code includes lots of forgotten secret passages and stairways to nowhere, and this mess makes any major modification or installation nearly impossible to debug.
Perchance what they need more than anything else is to stop, look at every feature of Windows, and decide if they really need each feature in the OS. Once that is done, rewrite the whole thing virtually from scratch with the purpose of simplifying everything and reducing the code mass by at least half.
I mean by DLL hell that you have to
1) register dlls (especially microsoft-based) or they won’t work, take a look at .NET Framework – you can’t run it without getting an Administrator account.
2) ActiveX/COM stuff – for example each new version of Office has something incompatible with the previous ones. I had to mantain four versions of my VBA project: for Office 97,2000,XP and 2003 because some functions worked differently or didn’t exist at all. Or do I have to force the user to use a particular version of Office?
3) System-critical DLLs and minor libraries all lie in the same basket. Linux has this too but there isn’t any ‘central’ application. If you delete one library the programs using it will stop working [linux] but in Win usially don’t even know what a particular DLL does. There was a hoax about three years ago about a virus named comething like msdgfss.dll which was in fact a system DLL and loads of users panicked and deleted it.
And about transactional NTFS – ordinary NTFS is complex enough to drive be crazy, especially setting permissions. Now they’re going to make something even more complex like a 50-megabyte database server sitting on port 666 and acting as an NTFS filesystem but with additional calls avaliable through port 75486. Like ActiveSync which uses loads of TCP ports just to sync the data.
That is the entire problem with the NT/XP codebase. it like the 9x codebase before it, has so many patches on top of patches, to plug third party software memory holes. When MSFT developers say they rewrote memory managment so that when specific apps(i remember sim city as one) are loaded they handle memory differently.
That is the bulk of MSFT problems they are an OS company they should of pushed developers to create good software to begin with. Everbody got sloppy and the viruses plague Windows because of it.
As i said before if Longhorn has nothing else, but a new complete rewrite, new api’s, etc to force developers to create better software to start with a lot of problems will fade away.
does this mean they are withdrawing the default limited user account (aka Unix-style permissions), and thus returning to classic WinNT permissions? I hope not.
Transaction filesystem != database file system. Get your terms straight. A transactional file system is basically one that does everything in atomized transactions. This allows for a full roll-back if a change doesn’t go through as expected, and the assurance that a change was made and made correctly when asked for.
DLL Hell refers to overlapping DLLs and various DLL versions on one system. Like I said, modern Windows doesn’t suffer from this, and hasn’t for many years.
You can expect any OS to break if you delete important system files. Fortunately, Windows transparently restores many system executables/DLLs if they are deleted or changed. Go into system32, and delete something like ntoskrnl.exe. Within a few seconds, a new copy will appear.
Sounds to me like you’re looking for reasons to hate MS and stretch a bit. Some of that stuff sounds like technical reasons that in the end don’t really affect much, or are simply how things work elsewhere as well.
—-
You know what I find funny about a lot of people who bitch about MS? Is that MS can’t do anything right in there eyes short of shutting down and giving all their money to charity (I’m sure some would still find a reason to bitch though).
Let’s take a look at a common scenario
A) Microsoft makes a lot of changes in something to try and improve it. They are accused to breaking things, not being consistent, blah blah
B) Microsoft makes minor changes in order to preserve consistency. They are accused of not innovating and just trying to make more money.
WINFS is going to be a combination of MS SQL Server and NTFS (at least MS stated so). So it _has_ to be a database, or it wouldn’t be SQL Server.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t transactioning the same as journaling? Well Reiser has this for a relatively long time (if you power-off your PC, at boot-time a message ‘replaying transactions’ appears and the system looks at the FS logs and replays/rolls back transactions).
As for the restoring stuff, try first killing the dllcache directory quietly and _after that_ ntoskrnl.exe – oops!
Better still, replace the file in dllcache with something bogus and then then delete the file in system32.
And as for multiple DLLs – my system failed to work with both DirectX9.0 and 7.0. One worked but the other was automatically removed.
Or like my mom who installed a win3.11 game and ended up running a crippled WinXP in 16-color mode.
by the time its out they wont hav any features that will be ‘new.’ no matter. from xp to debian. im set.
Well, it’s not exactly a dll, but I’m so annoyed I’m going to complain anyway. I tried to install a MS game last night, and it took me two hours to figure out and fix the problem with the sound. Apparently, an audio codec I installed conflicted with one the game was trying to use.
The main point of producing their products is _making more money_. They can’t be blamed for that, on the other hand, this means that if they make a ‘perfect’ product, noone will buy a new version of Windows after that. So, their preferred strategy is walking around in circles making minor upgrades but never approaching the ideal.
At first, they’ll release Longhorn. Then, they’ll charge money for WinFS (without that you’ll be unable to install the new Office which has a format incompatible with your current version but all your colleagues use it). Then, the same with something else. Even if you don’t want to upgrade, you’ll have to do it because someone else has done it.
And of course, for each new version you’ll have to leave some more money in the Intel/AMD camp.
Personally, I don’t want to be treated in this way. In my country more than 75% of all Windows copies are pirated so this doesn’t really matter, but still being forced to upgrade and the lack of choice (between the Longhorn flavour and the Longhorn flavour) just makes me sick.
Just my two cents.
I wasn’t talking about WinFS, nor was I talking about journaling. I was talking about a transactional NTFS. NTFS has had journaling ever since the beginning. Reiser4 is the first FS I know of that is transactional. NTFS is following step, if these talks turn out to be true.
As for messing around with dllcache … yeah, for sure. But tell me — who is going to be fucking around in system32dllcache, unless they SPECIFICALLY want to murder their Windows installation?
Oh yeah, and WTF are you doing trying to run both DirectX 7.0 and DirectX 9.0 at once? There’s more to DirectX than just a bunch of DLLs. You can only have one installed at the same time.
Then, they’ll charge money for WinFS
No they won’t. They’ve stated it’ll be a free component.
How is what they’re doing than any other business? They CAN’T make the perfect product. No one can. There is always room for improvement and evolution. Anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot.
Excuse them for trying to make money, and excuse them for not making the “perfect” product.
>The original plans required users to purchase new hardware
>and software. Last year at WinHEC Microsoft reversed that
>decision.
>Instead of shielding individual applications, the technology
>would create secure compartments for elements such as the
>operating system, computing tasks and administration and
>management.
That sounds like how UNIX systems do it. Microsoft should take another queue from Apple and base their system on FreeBSD (or something like that).
That into itself will be a good start for MSFT. Run old windows apps in a wine/vmware enviroment. When an app crashes that enviroment only that enviroment goes down.
That is what Apple did with OS X. M$ wants to be everything to everyone and will therefore not remove any of the legacy crapo.
What is this “DLL Hell” that you speak of? Seriously, stop spreading the FUD already. DLL Hell hasn’t been an issue since Windows 2000 was released. NT5.0 and up all have facilities that aid in the use of multiple DLLs of the same name.
He may be spreading FUD (he’s not anyways) but you’re spreading false information; either you don’t have an idea what DLL Hell is, or you are not a programmer. (Python doesn’t count).
Come on, create a simple COM object in C++, VB, or your language of choice. Expose a simple API. Register the DLL in a box. Create an application that uses that API you have just created. Copy it and use it. IT works.(tm)
Change the API (changing the signature of a method will do). Recompile. Re-register the new DLL in the other box. Now try the old application.
Welcome to DLL Hell.
No. I don’t accept complains. It happens. I see it very often. Breaking “binary compatibility” is a darn patch MS invented to “warn” you about what you were doing.
Only .NET appears to have solved that with Side By Side execution, private deployments, and the GAC, but only time will decide if the solution is really effective (so far, it looks much better than the old one, but it has some drawbacks as well).
So, saying that w2k solved DLL hell is as funny as pretending to say that the whole code that makes Windows XP is written from scratch. I bet my box that there’s Win 3.x code in there. (After all, windows CE is based upon Win 3.x)
DLL hell is something unavoidable in all modern Operating Systems. I do honestly find the problems easier to resolve with a shell and good package manager: In one command I can tell what I have to upgrade to get the problematic shared library. But I also see this problem more on *nix than on Windows (often because many commercial apps do not make as much use of shared libraries).
I don’t think DLL hell is something to hate MS for.
Transactional FileSystems:
My understanding here is that the FS basically keeps a backup of stuff that you edit, and it doesn’t commit your changes (delete the backups) until you tell it to (or in implementation, something smarter than you does). It sounds moderately cool, but it seems like an attempt to replace a good backup scheme (I’d rather have off-machine backups of what I did yesterday to go back to). The reason I say this, is because sometimes you don’t realize you want your old copy for 10 weeks! And it’s not because you want to just revert, it’s cause you want something out of it.
But, for system purposes this is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely costly! Imagine doing your SP2 upgrade and the FS auto-magically keeps your old copy backed up (so it wastes about 300MB of disk space) just in case you wanna revert. Microsoft seems to basically do this anyway, but with this it would likely be deleted after a while; which would be nice!
I don’t know much about transactional filesystems. I’m sure there is a large number of cool things they can do.
It’s not so much about “keeping a backup” as it is keeping a “state”. Let’s say, for instance, that an update looks like this:
Open file, seek to a position
Make a change
Seek some more
Delete some bytes
In a transactional file system, those four instructions are grouped as one unit (“atom”), and they are ALL either performed, or not performed. If something goes wrong at some point, the changes are all reversed, as if nothing ever happened.
Basically, it leads to greater reliability, especially if something has crashed. You can be assured that your file system and data will always be intact.
BTW, CE is based on 3.1x? I don’t think so. 3.1 was a shell on top of DOS. Windows CE is completely different.
I am glad this feature is taken out. Looks like less of a “big brother” situation now that the security stuff has been taken out. Phew!
To put it as simply as possible…
DLL hell refers to dynamic linking of library/API files… and the incompatibility between different versions.
The ONLY way an OS can claim there is no DLL hell is to have nothing but static linked executables.
So saying windows “solved” DLL hell is plain stupid. No programmer with even an introductory 101 course would make such an ignorant moronic statement.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<&l t;<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< <<<<<<<<<<<<<
To put it as simply as possible…
DLL hell refers to dynamic linking of library/API files… and the incompatibility between different versions.
The ONLY way an OS can claim there is no DLL hell is to have nothing but static linked executables.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>
Very true. Not only is this basic knowledge, it’s so basic that it’s literally chapter 1 material in every programming book. This is explained before anyone even writes one line of code.
This is one of the dumbest things in Windows. What exactly are you recycling when you delete a file?
What are you actually trashing? You don’t throw anything concrete away. It should be named Deleted Files or Removed Files. But in that case… what is deleter if they still exists somewhere? And deleting file don’t usually delete it, it only hides it and marks the space as writable (in most file systems).
I stopped reading here:
It was designed to prevent a virus from entering the operating system through the browser and making its way to the email application to further spread itself.
So they’re going on this long, elaborate goose chase to stop bad things from happening to the system and they’re working very hard to come up with a high tech solution to a low tech problem.
NASA had developed a pen that would work in zero gravity. Cost them a load of money. Then you had detente and they asked the Russians: “well, how did you solve that problem?”. The Russians said: “we use a pencil”.
You’re not going to see someone exploiting Mail through Safari because Safari is not some ghoul kludged into the OS where it feels free to rape anything it can get its hands on.
If you don’t want IE to have vulnerabilities that translate all through the OS, just make it a separate app that doesn’t have automatic permissions to screw up everything that comes close to it. How bloody obvious do you have to make an easy answer before Microsoft finally sees the light?
They’ve been working on that thing for years now, hopelessly late, way over budget [has anyone ever asked Microsoft what this is costing them in development time and resources? – and don’t tell me they can afford it, of course they can], they’re dumping features from it left and right, the screen shots so far don’t indicate spectacularly innovative ideas that I’d desperately want to have.
All that seems to happen is that the user interface is turning into a hopelessly convoluted mess of buttons and acres of text for the users to find out what they can do in any given context. And this is the OS that everybody is waiting for?
Look at Windows Media Player 10 today. If you compare that to the simplicity of the iTunes interface then WMP10 is just a hate crime for people who just want to enjoy some music.
Hint: when I want to listen to some music, I don’t want to go spelunking to find out all the crazy ways that you guys cooked up so that I could Command And Control my music library. The experience of listening to music is my first and foremost concern. Managing the music should be as trivial and straightforward as it can possibly be. I don’t want to fight the interface to come up triumphant when I want to listen to Ray Charles. I only want to listen to Ray Charles. Anything you do more is junk.
My OS has to be there when I need to do something. And when I don’t want it, it has to stay out of my face. OS X, and I’m not making any effort to convince those who won’t buy it anyway, does just that: it’s there when you need it and you don’t have to fight it to make it comply.
Longhorn seems like an activity center. It’s supposed to be at YOUR service, not the other way around.
>So, saying that w2k solved DLL hell is as funny as >pretending to say that the whole code that makes Windows >XP is written from scratch. I bet my box that there’s Win >3.x code in there. (After all, windows CE is based upon >Win 3.x)
You just contradicted the earlier advice to only run Windows NT (32bit core) run on “Pentium Pro” since particular P6 core release compromised the 16bit modes.
Note that, iAMD64’s “Long Mode” has killed 16bit support.
> What exactly are you recycling when you delete a file?
In Australia, we have two kinds of “trash cans” i.e.
1. Recycle bin**,
2. Trash can,
**Recyclable items such aluminium cans, PET(plastic) bottles, glass bottles, tin cans, paper, cardboard and etc.
“Recycle bin” is appropriate in green oriented mind set.
Note that, 32bit Windows XP Preinstall Edition (illustrating the fundamental Windows XP code base) doesn’t have support for 16bit applications.
>So saying windows “solved” DLL hell is plain stupid. No >programmer with even an introductory 101 course would >make such an ignorant moronic statement.
Depends on POV and conext i.e. end-users that are not programmers.
The flying boolaboola wrote:
“If you don’t want IE to have vulnerabilities that translate all through the OS, just make it a separate app that doesn’t have automatic permissions to screw up everything that comes close to it. How bloody obvious do you have to make an easy answer before Microsoft finally sees the light?”
I not sure, maybe it should be a billboard the size of Texas. Decoupling IE from the bowels of the OS might interfere with Bill’s plan for ‘World IT Domination’. Everything I’ve read indicates that Microsoft is planning to intergrate IE even deeper into the OS. It seems some people never learn.
w00t. In other words, Microsoft just dropped Palladium Hardware DRM from Longhorn. This is excellent news for everyone.:)
It’s true that they are taking things out and delaying them for next year with a free upgrade (like WinFS) but that doesn’t mean longhorn doesn’t have anything new.
From what i’ve read/heard they have a new kernel, new desktop rendering system, new user level account (which might break lots of apps that go crazy if you don’t have admin access) new API’s to replace Win32, new memory managment, new tcp/ip stack, new networking bits which are similer to P2P networks for the home (or something along those lines) New sound subsystem (you can, from what i’ve seen, set each app to have it’s own specific sound settings, so your music can have a high volume setting, while anything else like IM beeps etc can be set lower) Maybe they have even more things under the hood that we don’t know about and won’t notice from a few screenshots of a pre-beta build.
The new security bits might scare most people, the new Trusted Computing Platform chips (I think that’s what they are called) out there in laptops and even new PC’s could if used the wrong way lock you out of many things, and even lock you in. I find it interesting that when most people read about this stuff they say drop windows and go to linux, then I read today that the next Linux kernel will support this hardware security also, but then again you can turn if off when you compile a kernel etc.
The good things about this are better then the bad things as long as people keep on eye out and don’t let it start taking away our fair-use rights.
I like the idea of the OS having secure parts where nothing can mess with that data inside these secure areas, and only the user has the option of what apps can access that information or not. Then any hidden virus can’t get at that information and so on.
I also read that longhorn will use more virtualization, so maybe older apps that don’t support longhorn’s new API’s nativly will run in a Virtual PC type setup, Like how OSX has it. It’s the only way to bring in something new like WinFX and replace win32 while keeping things secure.
Only time will tell though. and I hope things work out for the best.
As I’ve said before, longhorn will be for the 2000s what Copland was for the 1990s. Features keep getting stripped, I wonder how long Microsoft can use this existing codebase to make new operating systems
I think that in 1-2 years we will see another OS sort of like longhorn, but not longhorn (what OS 8 was to OS 7). Then M$ might buy some other codebase (like apple did), customize the heck out of it, work from scratch to build a new-gen OS, and have some sort of backward compatibility through a MOL or VPC like application
A while ago there was a article on OSNEWS saying what a waste most hobby OSes were because there were just re-inventing the wheel and what extra features they did have/planned would be available in Longhorn so why waste time on those hobby OSes.
Now I reverse the question as the hobby and serious OSes besides Longhorn continue to advance, why wait for LornHorn? Lately it seems every advance it has over all other OSes are being taken out. The Transaction-FS may find people who really want it, but what features does it have that I – JoeBlow User want?
Running BeOS I sure am not worried about virus problems.
Games probably will run better with XP than Lornhorn.
Since I already don’t use any Office product and still live why do I need to add it now?
As for my personal programming I already have a clean API to work with.
What good is Longhorn to an personal user? Notice I did not say Windows. I have Windows on a laptop hard drive for the few Windows (example e-machineshop) I use, I ask what good is Lognhorn to me?
backwards compatibility seems to be microsofts biggest enemy. it’s a shame that they can’t just re-write and create a compatibility layer for the old stuff that can eventually be abandoned. make use of some the VM technology available out there to keep the old stuff in it’s own little bubble.
i always wonder if microsoft management has read that book by the IBM os/360 (or was it 390?) project manager from the 60’s who theorized that adding more programmers to a project creates more problems and delays.
i’d love to get my hopes up and see this as microsoft putting one foot in the grave, but i doubt that’s gonna be the case. they’ve probably got something up their sleeve. maybe the lack of visible features is all part of their evil master plan.
suddenly i feel the need to go theorize about unnamed government agencies and their effect on history as we know it.
[quote]
The rest can come with longhorn .1 free upgrade. Because we all know MSFT shamelessly rips off Apple, why not the numbering sequence as well?
[/quote]
Well, Windows 2000 is NT 5.0 and Windows XP is NT 5.1 (any “about” dialog box tells you this)! But it wasn’t a free upgrade…
I wonder what’s Windows Server 2003 real version number.