Microsoft plans to retool its Windows XP operating system so that two people can run applications on the same machine concurrently (one via a Smart Display), an important step toward the company’s goal of transforming the PC into a home entertainment center.
Windows XP to See Double
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
they finally want to make windows multiuser?
Wow. I find myself supressing giggles. UNIX has been doing this for how many decades now? Oh, and this whole Mira “smart display” thing? Yep, you guessed it. It’s network transparency! Maybe this will shut up those people who say we need to get rid of X, because “who uses network transparency anyway?”
Well, I suppose that’s the whole point of competition. UNIX is playing catch up to Windows in a lot of ways, and now Windows is playing catch up to UNIX in a lot of ways.
LOL…all OSes are becoming the same…it’s frightening, but UNIX is becoming easy to use, and MacOS is already UNIX, and Windows is becoming UNIX!!!
If only they’ll beef up their command line.
-bytes256
Windows is becoming UNIX!!!
Wrong. Windows is starting to emulate the best bits of Unix.
Beef up the command line? That’s what 4NT/4DOS or bash is for.
nfm.
Multiple users can run programs concurrently in Windows XP right now. It has had this “UNIX” like functionality since Windows XP shipped. For example: start a program, then “switch users” to a different user. Now start another program – they are both running quite happily and you can view each task along with the user who owns it in Task Manager.
What this article is talking about is a second, removable tablet like display that uses the main PC for its processing power and internet connection etc.
“What this article is talking about is a second, removable tablet like display that uses the main PC for its processing power and internet connection etc.”
And you’ll only be able to access via this MS “tablet” running MS-CE. Once again relying on only MS products. right….
Hasn’t the Windows NT line been able to do this since Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition? Windows 2000 Came with this functionality built-in, WinXP sort of stripped this out in the home edition, but it’s still built-in to the OS.
Furthermore, Windows 2000 has it via terminal services (did NT have this too?)
The news here is that the first generation smart display articially limited you to using one display (and keyboard/mouse) or the other. Now it won’t.
Now they just have to make these smart displays much cheaper. They were to near the cost of a decent laptop (or maybe TabletPC) last I checked.
…here with our Linux Application server for some time…
A few users use it for FTP access to client sites, since the network is very locked down, keeping unauthorized systems from connecting directly to the internet. This server is the users only access to the “Greater World Wide Web”.
A few other users utilize it to access Mr Project, which is a temporary stop-gap until we have our Intranet (web-based) CRM/ERP blah blah blah software in place. (Which will still be running off of the same machine by the way…)
To clarify, all of this is done using Cygwin and the built-in X11 “Network Transparency” feature. Which is surprisingly fast on our 10/100 Switch Based network.
It is kind of funny to see that Microsoft is finally taking a good look at and using some of the better features of the UNIX world. It’s still to bad that they won’t move to a more KDE-like approach to the registry… (Ie. a text-based back-up to the Binary Registry, in case the binary registry blows its load and needs to be rebuilt…)
Windows should support a multi user, multi IO environment. That 4ghz P4 wouldn’t be such overkill if one could plug two USB keyboards, two mice, and two moniters running Windows XP for you and your roommate. That would be a pretty good value proposition, and would allow for dual-work environments.
This, though… using a MS specific thin client + the base station? This is how it should have worked from the beginning…
I’m a bit doubtful of the security of all this. We all know that WLAN’s are insecure. WEP is a joke. Only if you use eg. IPsec you can establish a secure wireless network.
Given Microsoft’s total lack of interest in security considerations, I wouldn’t be surprised if these smart displays talk to the host over an unencrypted wireless link, allowing the neighbours to read along
The hardware looks pretty nice though. It would be cool if a similar device that could speak X over an SSH or IPsec tunnel would exist.
But maybe the NetBSD team will manage to get NetBSD running on one of these toys. Heck, it runs on other kitchen appliances too 😉
Isn’t it funny that Ballmer keep telling us that the open source community are all copy cats and can’t come up with their own ideas?
Though I welcome this feature a lot. I wonder when MS will bring their “new and innovative” tabs to IExplore.
Could you please paste a link to comparable technology, including removable TabletPC with styuls input etc.?
Typical Linux user. You see 10% of the solution already exists in Linux, and so you claim 100% of the product has already been done. I don’t see any Linux boxes with thin client TabletPC smart display’s that use stylus input. And no, a Zaurus doesn’t count.
For all you bashing MS for trumpeting something “*n*x has had for decades”, where are all the 802.11 wireless touch sensitive flat panel X-terminals?
If they exist, they need much better marketing.
Gee, how predictable. The next version of OS X is rumored to have this capability, and less then a month later, Windows gets it too.
I bet they try to take credit for it.
i thought that was supposed to be already the case with XP (wasnt one of the selling points during the big launch?).. meaning one user is working, lauches apps, does “log out <username>’ but the apps remain open (but dormant, not sure what the appropriate expression is)
(obviously because 2 people cannot work in seperate accounts using the same keyb/mouse/desktop)
Yes, its called fast user switching.. and it works fine in XP.
Nobody said that Unix invented the tablet PC!
The main subject of the article is the new level of multiuser capabilities. In the case of Unix, it was a bulky terminal, while this will be an elegant tablet display, but otherwise, it IS the same damn thing.
Um, XFree86 supports touch screen flat panels, and Linux supports wireless network cards. Go out and by the hardware, install Linux on it, and you have your “touch sensitive wireless X terminal.” The point that it’s not marketed at all is a valid one, but is entirely different from the point that none of this, technologically, is anything new.
They’re too expensive and you wouldn’t buy them anyway.
We’re waiting until they make them durable and cheap so we can toss them around like a typical paper tablet without worrying about the thousands of dollars in shiny fragile plastic breaking under normal use. Either that or we’re waiting for Apple to come out with it.
“Yes, its called fast user switching.. and it works fine in XP.”
For security reason, fast switching is disable on XP Pro when the computer is on a domain.
You guys are cracking me up. Here’s some of the more ridiculous comments:
Yep, you guessed it. It’s network transparency! Maybe this will shut up those people who say we need to get rid of X, because “who uses network transparency anyway?”
Nope, try again. RDP is anything but network transparency. And RDP is so much faster than X over a network it isn’t even funny.
I’m a bit doubtful of the security of all this. We all know that WLAN’s are insecure. WEP is a joke. Only if you use eg. IPsec you can establish a secure wireless network.
RDP sessions are encrypted by default.
Gee, how predictable. The next version of OS X is rumored to have this capability, and less then a month later, Windows gets it too
Another clueless anti-MS person. 10.3 is supposed to have user switching, something XP was released with over 1.5 years ago. Thank you, please come again.
CLARIFICATION: This is not fast user switching. This is the ability to have two users concurrently loged in, one over RDP (which you can connect to from Linux, PocketPC, OS X, PC or Smart Display) and another one at the console.
Could you please paste a link to comparable technology, including removable TabletPC with styuls input etc.?
I can’t find one, though it can be solved with either a dual display card or a driver for that pad.
Typical Linux user. You see 10% of the solution already exists in Linux, and so you claim 100% of the product has already been done. I don’t see any Linux boxes with thin client TabletPC smart display’s that use stylus input. And no, a Zaurus doesn’t count.
Actually I’m a BeOS/Linux/Windows user. The stylus input only requires a simple touch screen such as seen in the GeoROG (http://www.sbg.se).
My point was that the MS front figures has this “thing” for bashing the open source community, and here they (or the news sites) come and making it sound like MS got this kick ass new thing coming up.
Well, there is this thing: http://www.visionplate.com/
It looks neat. No sign of a price. I can well imagine it is over $1000 US. Make it about $500 and we’ll talk.
Keep us updated on that fully transparent windows, window resizing without tearing, decent driver support, and a product that can compare to Visual Studio .net (please don’t say kdevelop, I’ve used it)
Please don’t make this into yet another boring OS war.
“Well, I suppose that’s the whole point of competition. UNIX is playing catch up to Windows in a lot of ways, and now Windows is playing catch up to UNIX in a lot of ways. ”
I will second that. The way I see it it is just one gian circle jerk going on now. at this rate, the major OS’s such as Mac OS, Windows, Linux will appear the same as far as abilities, and the GUI’s will all look alike, about the only difference would be the partition table, which from an average users perspective, does not matter anyhow.
>>Though I welcome this feature a lot. I wonder when MS will bring their “new and innovative” tabs to IExplore.<<
Actually in a way Microsoft did this a couple years ago. Back when .Net was is Alpha release their SDK uses IE for HTML rendering. Well, you can open regular web pages in the SDK interface, and it uses a tabbed interface. You can right click a link and say Open In New Window, it will open a new tab. Visual Studio .Net does the same thing. Funny thing is all of this was available before Mozilla released the 1.0 version of it’s browser. So, they could easily release a version of IE with tabs, because they’ve technically been doing it for a couple years. I use Crazy Browser myself, it uses IE’s rendering engine but has tabs and built in pop-up blocking; without all of the bloat of Opera or Mozilla, and is more stable than Phoenix.
some of you MS only people are too sensitive.
the trolls are getting to you.
maybe it’s time to start working with more then one operating system.
knowing windows nt, 2k, xp,
redhat
freebsd
& os9/X
will give you a different perspective. people ranting for/against various operating systems will make you laugh.
you will not feel the compulsion, that you currently experience, to *jump in* and fervently DEFEND (insert your OS here).
putting big BWAH AHH AH AH AH
and all that other crap in there, is false bravado.
get a life.
they were called xterms.
I know many more OSs than that and I still feel the compulsion to jump in and defend Linux whenever I have some free time.
get a life.
I had a life but then somebody told me to get a job.
It does not matter that Linux/Unix/etc has had this forever, Microsoft’s strength is that they will make it easy for the most brain dead user to set up.
It will not matter that their implementation will probably be flakey and insecure compared to the years spent refining the *nix multiuser, as it will have a pretty gui interface.
It will not matter that most of my existing Windows programs still refuse to work even if you log in under a different name to the one you installed it under. Multiuser is a brand new technology, and the software companies have to catch up, right?
Bah. Perhaps I’m just getting cynical.
While it may have been released before Mozilla hit 1.0, it was not invented in IE.
Many features worked quite well in Mozilla’s beta stages, including tabs.
if im not mistaken there was a crack circulating that allowed this in xp pro pre-sp1 …. in any event this is just minor retooling i would imagine.
i thought opera brought this to the table first (at least first for the masses), but i could be mistaken
i thought opera brought this to the table first (at least first for the masses), but i could be mistaken
That’s correct. Opera had it waaaaay before any Mozilla and .Net public release.
Microsoft Windows NT has always been a multitasking, multithreading, multiprocessor, multiplatform, multi-application-interface (Win32, Win16, POSIX, OS/2, DOS) and multi-user operating system. The ability for multiple users to start Windows desktop sessions over a network and run graphical applications was introduced with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. The technology was based on WinFrame, an edition of Windows NT 3.5 that was enhanced by Citrix with this capability.
Multiple users can start remote graphical sessions on all Windows 2000 and 2003 server operating systems. The number of users is limited only by resources and licensing. This is also the case with Windows XP, except that Microsoft made a licensing decision for client operating systems that only one user will be able to use a Windows desktop session at a time.
Many users can log on to Windows XP and maintain simultaneous sessions, but only one will be displayed at a time. It can be displayed at the console or on a remote terminal. The change that Microsoft is apparently making is to augment the licensing on Windows XP so that two sessions can be simultaneously displayed.
As has been mentioned, Unix and Linux also support multiple, graphical, remote user sessions. The X Window System allows a graphical application to send its display to any terminal running an X Window server.
A notable difference in the capabilities of Windows and Unix in this area is in the protocols used the send the display to a remote terminal. The X Window protocol is inefficient and insecure when compared to the protocols typically used on Windows systems, Microsoft RDP and Citrix ICA. The protocols normally used with Windows provide better performance, because they make much better use of bandwidth and they feature secure authentication and encrypted data streams outside of WEP, VPN or SSH. There is a long list of other advantages, such as session shadowing, load balancing and access through a Web page Java or Active-X applet.
Citrix has a product, MetaFrame for Unix, that makes the ICA protocol available on Unix-based systems. Is Unix finally catching up to Windows, Rayiner?
If you think about it, it’s not until recently that wireless networks, handheld/tablet PCs etc. has been standarized and/or available at a reasonable price. We now also have cheap servers with enough power to deliver multimedia and other computing needs to multiple users.
I remember reading articles 7-8 years ago about Microsofts vision of the future. I clearly remember reading that homes would have a central server/entertainment system and that we would have thin clients around the house (handheld PCs, television, control panels). It looks like Microsoft is beginning to make this technology available to the consumers.
… just wait until the OS is handling two users at the same time…
It’s bad?
Does MS want to sell multiple copies of their OS? Probably.
Apple’s going to implement the same thing soon and I bet there will not be an arbitrary limit on the number of users.
Will users be able to do this under the same license or will another one have to be purchased?
Slackware, thats a good question, Im sure Microsoft has a legal team working on it
tl;dr
Did you help Al Gore invent the internet?
I think copying UNIX is not being a copycat. Remember one of the first software releases from MS was a UNIX (like) operating system (not talking about DOS) and it supported applications on UNIX systems.
Its just that opensource projects copy a propety operating system called UNIX in which MS in its history also had a stake in. So I think its OK for MS to copy it as one: UNIX is not opensource and two: It has an UNIX history anyway.
Side note:
I read once that all new operating systems make the same mistakes. They ignore the OS running on the old mainframes and reimplement every idea them selfs and think its new. Instead they should be looking at those old disregarded OS’s as they will sooner or later implement features of them in their new OS.
I’m sure if BeOS would have lived it would support multi users now or soon but the stupid thing they didn’t do it at the beginning and now would have hacked into the OS.
Been there, saw it in action, live, at CeBIT 2003, in Hannover, Germany.
I taped footage of the demonstrator showing off the fine points of Microsoft’s Smart Display.
If you can hop onto BeShare, or want to use the Ozone client at:
http://www.tycomsystems.com/ozone.exe
you can find it on the main BeShare server:
beshare.tycomsystems.com
Look for any of the CeBIT Experience 2003 videos being shared, and have fun.
My personal impression of this “technology”. It’s been done in unix for over 30 years. Once again, Microsoft comes late to the party, sees something it likes, tries to bribe it with some cheap wine, take it home, and claims it’s being original.
Whatever. Only time will tell.
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
The BeOSJournal.
I still think X11 is far more flexible than any of the remote frame buffer stuff of Windows. And X can have good performance, for example you can use the compressed X protocol extension, or tight-vnc…
Another thing about the flexibility of X is that at my Uni, I’m forced to use Win2000 (they will NOT let me have any sort of Unix on a PC)…but I have a rootless X server running (via something called xwin32), and so I can run various X11 applications from a myriad of Sun Solaris servers as though they are local, without exporting an entire desktop.
Also Unix/X11 has been able to handle the mutliple users on the one machine locally for ages, nobody bothered to make a GUI for it that’s all (nobody requested it – in opensource, things are only made if people want it, with MS things are made and people are told they want it).
Try this on a Linux box:
log into a normal desktop account, start some apps..
press ctrl-alt-f1
log in as a different user
type:
startx — :1
and it will start a new X session on a different virtual terminal. you can switch between these sessions using ctrl-alt-f7 (for the original session) and ctrl-alt-f8. While you have 2 users logged in, you can log in a third time as well with
startx — :2
which will be on ctrl-alt-f9… you can keep going until you run out of function keys (f8-f12 on my box)
You can also have text mode logins from f1 to f6… so thats 12 users simulataneously on the one physical terminal
And no you don’t need to buy 11 more licenses 
Then…hook it up to a network, and have more people running thin clients off it, or normal desktops running individual apps… if it’s a dual opteron with about 8 Gig of RAM, why not have 30 people running off of it (or more, dont know how much the opterons can take)… at no additional (software) cost
In Unix/X11 you can run diferent programs in the same display too.
A simple example of this is that you can logon on a xterm as a diferent user an then spawn any command. If the user has permissions and has DISPLAY variable set to the current framebuffer than the windows will show up in that display but as a differnt user (simple isn’t it).
I planned to implement some of these concepts in my intranet nome to allow more flexibility to users (currently four) without getting rid of my old boxes…
And X is FAST on 10/100 network…
Yeah but that’s not that exciting really, windows has “Run as…” doesn’t it? (I don’t use Windows other than for gaming at LAN’s, so I’m not sure).
My professor has a Red Hat Linux desktop, and he can start an ssh session to his Solaris Server and run some graphical apps with no problems. Yes Sun Solaris X11 talking to XFree86 X11, with no configuring to be done at all, with nothing special to be added on top. It’s just how X works…
You can have some pissweak desktop box, but have an awesome server (shared by a few people), and you get to use that power as if it was local.
I’m sorry, you can’t beat *NIX for a flexible, powerful server platform. It takes one admin 5 minutes to roll out a new application on all the Solaris servers at my University so it’s available to 2000-3000 students. It takes one admin a couple of hours a week (if that) to maintain these servers.
>>Yeah but that’s not that exciting really, windows has “Run as…” doesn’t it? (I don’t use Windows other than for gaming at LAN’s, so I’m not sure).
I agree with this.
>> My professor has a Red Hat Linux desktop, and he can start an ssh session to his Solaris Server and run some graphical apps with no problems. Yes Sun Solaris X11 talking to XFree86 X11, with no configuring to be done at all, with nothing special to be added on top. It’s just how X works…
You can have some pissweak desktop box, but have an awesome server (shared by a few people), and you get to use that power as if it was local.
That’s the whole purpose…
>>I’m sorry, you can’t beat *NIX for a flexible, powerful server platform. It takes one admin 5 minutes to roll out a new application on all the Solaris servers at my University so it’s available to 2000-3000 students. It takes one admin a couple of hours a week (if that) to maintain these servers.
Wasn’t trying to bash *NIX (I liked). As a matter a fact the environment that I was talking is a FreeBSD (ix86, sparc), Linux, Windows “thing” (No dual booting).
Linux has supported this technology 100% for a while now. Go look at http://www.ltsp.org. It is totally possible for me to do this on a thin touch-screen tablet. Really!
I’ve used LTSP’s stuff before, and it’s really quite nice. Some configuration is required, of course, but it’s pretty easy. Wouldn’t be hard to make a GUI for it, either.
-Erwos
I thought some govt agency invented the internet. but I forget. does anybody know?
Hmmmmm…..didn’t Robertson just say that multi-user systems were an anachronism? That’s why it’s OK for him to manufacture Linux systems where the user is encouraged to run as Root?
Corporate America:
An old friend of mine once said:
“This is the Holy Trinity of Corporate America: TV, Nonsense, and Bullshit!”
Gee, Windows NT Terminal Server, and every version of Windows 2000 Server (and now 2003) with Terminal Services installed. It’s not even that new to Windows.
Heck, if you open the %systemroot%infsysoc.inf file on Windows XP with a text editor, you can see an entry for Terminal Services listed in the file (I noticed it back in 2001 when I was playing around with the system setup), so they’ve been planning on adding this into XP since it was released.
Still, my favorite way of remote access on an NT based system has to be DameWare. What an excellent piece of software.
The slashes didn’t come out right, that’s the sysoc.inf file in the inf directory (which is hidden by default), in the %systemroot% directory.