Jim Allchin is the Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft. The Channel 9 team sat down with Jim yesterday and asked him to share his thoughts on the updated Windows “Longhorn” plan and schedule that was announced on Friday. Jim gives an overview of the updates to the plan and schedule, how Microsoft reached the decision, and how it affects developers.
Jim Allchin – The Longhorn Update
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Wow, I guess open source will have a chance to beat out WinFS before it’s released. I think this misfourtune for microsoft could be used by open source projects that aim to offer better data orginization and meta-data features. In my oppinion it would be nice to have a cross platform file management solution, anybody know about such existing projects?
Well, at least we now know that Avalon is not the hardware acceleration layer in Longhorn but just a bunch of graphical API’s.
Then is Avalon like Core-video API in Tiger?
Well, at least we now know that Avalon is not the hardware acceleration layer in Longhorn but just a bunch of graphical API’s.
Not necessarily. I mean, they *do* have the Windows source code, you know. They can replace parts in thier own kernel.
Well, at least we now know that Avalon is not the hardware acceleration layer in Longhorn but just a bunch of graphical API’s.
Not true. Avalon is the mechanism for doing hardware acceleration under Longhorn. GDI will be software-only (offscreen DIB-section rendered by the desktop compositor into client area). All non-client chrome (windows, frames, etc) are composited in hardware by Avalon. That includes vector, image, 3D, etc.
Is it me, or does Jim Allchin look like one of the undead?
Have you ever spent a winter in Seattle? No need to say more. 😉
>> Not necessarily. I mean, they *do* have the Windows
>> source code, you know. They can replace parts in thier
>> own kernel.
True, but I don’t see why they would modify their kernel for it (tough we áre talking about Microsoft here.. but, oh well).
>> Is it me, or does Jim Allchin look like one of the undead?
No, it’s not you.
I guess Sunnydale is too far away from Redmond.
Yeah, NOW they’re saying Avalon stays in Longhorn.
Next month or three, watch for Avalon to get the axe, just like WinFS.
Bottom Line: Microsoft has reached its limit of incompetence and can’t even rewrite Windows any more even to add features, let alone security or reliability.
Not true. Avalon is the mechanism for doing hardware acceleration under Longhorn.
Avalon is the replacement for WinForms.
DCE is the accelerated gpu layer.
Back porting Avalon and Indigo makes life easier for developers. Its not going to add the composition capabilities from Longhorn to XP.
Dude grow up. If there is news on Windows this site will report it.
If there is news about any linux distro or technology this will report it.
What is happening in the OS world currently that is not about MS? If there is something, how about submitting an article or news item.
Are there any other operating system news sites out there?
slashdot.
Can we backoff giving MS so much prominence on this site? They’re got enough propaganda on the rest of the web they don’t really need OS news too. Let’s wait until we are closer to Long-Hauls release before we worry about what MS can/can’t achieve, still a few years out by all accounts
Look at the front page again. There is plenty of news about other operating systems.
I’m sure in your fantasy world MS dosen’t exist and never wrote an OS. Here in the real world they do exist and OSNews will likely report on the OS they offer.
Just like OSNews reports on BSD, various Linux distros, MacOS, BeOS etc. etc. etc.
Someone call the waahmbulance. To appease everyone, and to be fair, I would like to call on OSNEWS to provide a more balanced coverage, directly proportional to desktop usage as reported by Google’s Zeitgeist. Google is a well-known supporter of Linux, and so the fact that Linux’s percentage is so low speaks volumes about Google’s objectivity.
So how about we have 90% of all stories about Windows, 3% about the Mac, 5% about other, and 2% about Linux (I thought I would be generous and give Linux an extra percent since there are so many vocal whiners here).
Since there are approximately twenty stories on the front page, we should have the following breakdown of content:
20*.90= 18 stories about windows
20*.02= 0.4 (integer math rounds down to zero) about Linux.
20*.03= 0.6 (integer math rounds down to zero) about Mac.
20*.05= 1 story about other operating systems.
So, in fact we will have one less story on the front page due to my use of integer math, but I think this a small loss due to the prospect of more the fair editorial coverage this would provide, and would correspond more correctly to the amount of users of the covered operating systems.
I welcome any feedback on this matter.
While some of you may like the prejudice that this site has towards Microsoft, I don’t think its appropriate for a site thats supposed to “exploring the future of computing”
Well how about pointing the prejudice out for all of us then ? I don’t see it. I count approx. 5 front page articles on Windows and the rest are Linux, MacOS and Open source related.
The article with the most posts is about an issue with closed source driver hooks in the Linux kernel.
Get real why don’t ya
I’m sorry, but you all are pathetic. Osnews.com posts news about all kinds of things, and a small part of it happens to be of the most used OS in the entire world. Notice, it’s only a small part.
I am so sick of you trolls that come on here and bash Microsoft whenever you can, or don’t give credit where credit is due. You also see one MS article and come on and say this is a Microsoft only website… are you freaking kidding me?
Grow the hell up.
I looked at the news items for the past 7 days – approximately 4 were dedicated to MS/Windows, and two of them were about flaws in Service Pack 2. Seriously, some of you rabid ABMers need to put down the crackpipe.
now that Avalon will be backported to Windows XP, does that mean that XAML will run on WinXP applied with “service pack 3”?
Hey, I know OS Opinion… I used to write for the site. I didn’t know it was back online. They appear to be calling themselves osviews now (I wonder why?)
Anmyways, thanks for the tip. I think I found myself a new OS site. =)
I’m with the other poster who thinks that an OS site should NOT be slanted towards Microsoft or any other operating system. Its one of the few beefs I have with this site.
I don’t read a whole lot of tech sites… this is one of only about 3.
Are the other sites that were mentioned earlier in this thread as biased?
I’ve been reading slashdot for what seems like an eternity and started reading Newsforge since it started but only recently got turned on to OS Opinion. (AKA OS Views). I really like it. Its a refreshing alternative to OS News.
Yes, I prefer http://slashdot.org because it is a more objective source of news. You rarely see these types of articles (M$ is great, blah blah) because it is more fair & balanced. Yes, http://slashdot.org is the Fox News of operating system coverage. http://slashdot.org presents each side fairly, and then allow the reader to decide. It’s also backed by an independent company (unlike OSNews, whose ownership is unknown and potentially questionable or biased) called http://www.ostg.com/ .
http://slashdot.org also has a really cool new color scheme, check it out! http://it.slashdot.org/
There has been some criticism of MS not delivering these “new” features like WinFS/Avalon/<random codeword here> in a timely fashion. I think the problem for MS (that other outfits don’t have to the same degree) is legacy installations which are probably draining the companies resources.
You could argue that if MS had been more security minded the focus on older systems wouldn’t be as necessary or as draining.
However I think it highlights an aspect that is missing in the financial outlooks for software companies. To maintain a software company you need constant turnover. You need people to upgrade regularly. If the majority stop upgrading so reguarly, you are faced with a diminished revenue stream and additonal support costs for legacy users. (I’m assuming here that MS can’t really afford to ignore any large group of users, no matter how old the version of windows/office they are using)
It puts into perspective the 80% profit MS supposedly gets from selling a copy of windows. I guess for each billion it costs to release a new version of windows, it costs another 1-2 billion to develop the next version and at the same time support/patch/upgrade the old one.
This is probably the driving imperative for charging yearly rentals on software.
It’s also looking like Longhorn will be less of a revolution in Desktop computing (or even a rerun of Windows 95 migration) and will be just another version of Windows.
—
Someone,
All opinions were made up in the few minutes it took to write this…
That this site has news about the greatest diversity of different operating systems anywhere. You could go to a BeOS,Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever forum but no forum can introduce and keep you updated on the to multitudes of alternative and hobby OSes like this one does. That’s what keeps people coming back. If you just want news on Windows, you could simply go to the Microsoft website and hear it from Uncle Fester, er I mean Steve Balmer, himself.
Yes, http://slashdot.org is the Fox News of operating system coverage. http://slashdot.org presents each side fairly, and then allow the reader to decide.
You know, at first I honestly read that as two different sites. I speed read past the URLs. One is the Fox News… OK, got that. The other is fair and leaves it to the reader… Alright, now which was that?
Huh? Now wait a minute!
Well, nothing new from Microsoft about sums it up. They haven’t broken their track record of hyping something up and then not delivering it on time, or at all.
The problem, in my mind, is that Windows is a bodged up lump of millions of lines of spaghetti code with serious design flaws all over. We can thank the Wintel business model of having to bring out something new for us to spend our money on every year or two, or more often to beef up their bottom lines. They spend more effort trying to get something out, instead of getting it right.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about WinFS, Avalon and all that stuff. I don’t give a flying hoot about eye candy and can manage my files by now thank you very much.
What I do want is a small, fast efficient operating system that does not have security holes all over. I want something that works. I am sick and tired of wasting untold amounts of hours cleaning up Windows machines because of viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, malware, adware, and other crudge. I put the blame right on Microsoft for putting out such a flawed product such as Windows. Damn it Gates, you may have provided my with job security, but I frickin’ tired of your <expletive deleted>.
Sigh.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2004/aug04/08-25college…
…The results of a recent survey may bode well for Microsoft. The study of more than 14,000 students at 88 leading universities found that the company is the No. 1 employer of choice among U.S. undergraduates. In addition, Microsoft was chosen the most desirable IT company to work for, and the fourth-best employer for valuing diversity, according to the study conducted by the college recruiting consulting firm Universum Communications.
Microsoft was the only technology company in the Top 10, with 11.36 percent of the students polled choosing it as their preferred place to work. Among the top 40 companies, Microsoft topped a prestigious list of technology and non-technology giants, including BMW, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Boeing and General Electric.
“The Seattle-based software company was always a perennial favorite among participating undergraduate students who majored in information technology,” reports the study — one of largest annual surveys of U.S. undergraduates. “This year, however, most of the overall student population surveyed said they would ideally love to make the Microsoft campus their next campus home.”
This got deferred to WinFS and LongHorn too – haven’t seen/heard anyone mention this. In my opinion it would really suck to see it get swept under the carpet.
Shameless plug for Paul Wilson which maps a lot of functionality of ObjectSpaces today.
http://www.ormapper.net
Microsoft promising to deliver on something that doesn’t exist yet? Noooo. They probably couldn’t find anyone to buy it from in time to modify it.
Well said. I must say there can be some good conversations on here from time to time. As soon as an anti MS troll shows up, things go down hill. I cant blame them for accusing this site as an MS support site. Anything that has to do with MS is wrong, including closed source and making money. Doesnt matter that other companies make money or make closed source software. They are not Microsoft so that makes it ok.
“Yes, I prefer http://slashdot.org because it is a more objective source of news.”
Are you kidding? Read the abstracts on the articles that slashdot posts. They certainly do their best to skew it to make open source look superior or Microsoft look bad. Add to the fact that it is infested with trolls, and you have one joke of a website.
“If there is news about any linux distro or technology this will report it.
What is happening in the OS world currently that is not about MS? If there is something, how about submitting an article or news item.”
How about KDE 3.3 or Reiser4? Oh wait, I think KDE 3.3 already had an article here… but not Reiser I think?
Here’s the real problem with this piece of news or any of the other longorn nonsense.
LG doesn’t exist. It is vaporware until it ships. Hell, we don’t even have a final beta or a Release Candidate, yet this site has been publishing longhorn publicity for the past 3 years. While I could sympathize with providing publicity to small one-man projects, who benefits from giving free advertising to Microsoft? If they want to advertise, let them pay for it or do they do so in a covert way and that’s why we get this type of articles?
It used to be that journalists held themselves to be a critical voice in society. Eugenia should be asking the hard-hitting questions. How is it that the #1 company in the world cannot deliver what it promised to developers? How is it that security issues remain such a big problem after 2 years of BG’s Trustworthy computing?
But she doesn’t and she won’t, because she is not a real journalist, more like a blogger with a very big following. Any reasonable and responsible person would realize that a site of this size in terms of readership needs an editorial policy and an editorial board, but that won’t happen either.
Interesting guy (from his bio at the MSFT site):
Before joining Microsoft, Allchin helped start Banyan Systems Inc., where he was the principal architect of the VINES distributed network operating system. He spent more than seven years at Banyan, holding numerous executive management positions in development and marketing. Ultimately, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer.
While completing his doctorate in computer science in the early 1980s, Allchin was the principal architect of the Clouds distributed transactional, object-oriented operating system. Before that, he helped develop the DX series of operating systems for Texas Instruments Inc.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/jim/default.asp
This is getting out of hand.
First of all, this wasn’t an article, it was an interview.
Second of all, why does OSNews get called biased when an MS representative says Windows is good? That makes no sense. It doesn’t say anywhere that “this is also the personal opinion of all the people that contribute to OSNews.com”. Don’t get your panties in a twist.
Thirdly, this site’s called OSNews, for god’s sake. It’s not called OSSNews or LinuxNews or ScrewMSNews or something. Go to Slashdot or whatever if you want a pure MS-bashing-OSS-butkissing site. Have fun there.
I’m not entirely sure the “Slashdot is balanced like Fox News” guy wasn’t being sarcastic. Watching Fox for its objectivity is like eating a box of Krispy Kremes for the calcium. Not much there.
And now for the experimental / flaimbait part (actually from way back in 2000):
“Hey, most people here say they like open source. Same people who say they’re not racist becasue they have a black friend or two. They try, but its more comfortable, tho admitting it would be tantamount to being a Klan member, with living with the majority.”
Could the web jockeys at OSNews tell us if there’s 90% Windows participation in this news thread?
@Geez: let me correct yourself…
– 80% of the stories are “Why switch to linux ?”, “Mr x switched to Linux”, “Why Linux is and/or isn’t (!) ready for the Desktop”, “GTK/KDE/Gnome/Whatever v2.4.6.4 RC-2 released”
– 15% of the stories are about Windows
– 3% of the stories are about MacOSX
– 1% of the stories are about other OS
Leo.
Wow! What a great mental leap to go from OS news to the political arena. It just boggles my mind.
“I would like to call on OSNEWS to provide a more balanced coverage, directly proportional to desktop usage as reported by Google’s Zeitgeist. Google is a well-known supporter of Linux, and so the fact that Linux’s percentage is so low speaks volumes about Google’s objectivity… I welcome any feedback on this matter. ”
Well, you must have missed it, but OS stats were removed from Google’s Zeitgeist ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/18/222210&tid=217&tid=1 ). Why? “Google’s Zeitgeist service is sometimes used by news sources as a resource to generate install-base (don’t call it market share!), statistics for operating systems. osViews contacted Google to bring some clarity to questionable aspects of the OS statistic, to which Google said that Zeitgeist is only a fun search inquiry resource and should not be used to generate statistical information.”
As I and many others have questioned the methodology and accuracy of Zeitgeist’s questionable OS statistics in the past, we now have confirmation that Zeitgeist’s own creators do not support the OS statistics produced.
I know people will continue to use this crutch for years when attacking Linux and Mac on the desktop, but we have to start educating people sometime.
I know the NBM (Nothing But Microsoft) crowd is angy because they were busy predicting the demise of Linux, OS X, and every other OS, ever since Microsoft’s vaporware was announced. Longhorn was going to do them all in with promised features like WinFS and Avalon. Now it looks like Linux and OS X will have those features before Windows. Does this mean Windows is finished? I mean, these were supposed to be killer, must have features, right?
Yeah well, the osviews guy used to troll around here on purpose and spread lies about the editors of this site, so i don’t give osviews much credibility.
“I know people will continue to use this crutch for years when attacking Linux and Mac on the desktop, but we have to start educating people sometime.”
And also how can there be any way to accurately measure Linux marketshare when so many users download it for free, buy from third party vendors, get copies from their friends,etc. Who could possibly be keeping track of all this? It could easily be significantly more than we know, especially with nobody less than the U.N. promoting it in developing countries now.
If so many of you think this site is biased and find Trashdot more balanced…
then why don’t you stop b*tching about it and stop typing http://www.osnews.com into your browsers.
Oh and while you’re at it, stop sniffing the permanent markers because your definition of balanced means anything anti-Microsoft.
I was about to say just the same.
Seems that many people here are being forced to visit this site everyday. … go away if you don’t like it.
…the more I wonder whether the community isn’t pulling together to create a giant parody of OS trolling.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with what’s covered here.
I never considered it horribly biased. It’s interesting reading about different Linux distros and sometimes there’s good technical info about a filesystem or something else of interest to me.
You did ask for feedback though:
The numbers you posted do show bias towards Windows. I had not realized the extent.
That’s still OK. But what about the types of articles. You made no mention. Somehow it does seem misleading to post a large number of ‘hype’ articles from Microsoft, or MS-sponsered ‘analysts’ which just hype promised future improvements that won’t be available for years, if at all.
We know Windows suffers a much greater number of virus attacks, and yet I’ve noticed that when Yahoo or OSViews make mention of the latest attack going around, this site is often silent. I supposed you can argue that a Windows virus or IE vulnerability isn’t news.
Also, why should the percentage of browsers using Google have anything to do with the percentage of articles for an OS. The majority of computer users will never have any interest in this site. The majority of those people not looking are Windows users.
How many server OSs are searching Google? That doesn’t mean I have no interest in learning about them.
(I don’t use Linux; but I’m interested in it, and it’s one of the reasons I read this site.)
Lets hype technologies that might/might not make it into anyother OS created to be released maybe in 2006 or 2007. Make sure we are writing about creat catchy names and ideas and then as we get closer to the release dates (which are forever moving) we can then inform users that the concepts were to hard to implement so we are stipping the OS’s of any interest that we hyped in the past.
Sound familier??????????????????????????????????????????????
Look at the history of the Microsoft Hype Machine, they have been doing this for the last 15 years. Time to call this Bull Shit for what it is and not give credence to it.
Sorry for the spelling, written in haste at work but hey, just calling a spade a spade.
Would you trust anything from this man – he who determined in a court statement that opening the windows code was a security risk and then allow shared source access to it to the Chinese?
Avalon is the replacement for WinForms.
DCE is the accelerated gpu layer.
Actually THAT’s not correct.
The Application Compositing Engine (ACE) and Desktop Compositing Engine (DCE), both D3D accelerated, have been combined into the Unified Composition Engine (UCE). Former two and remaining latter one are and always were Avalon components.
Under XP, according to some Avalon architects, it’ll composite the window surface offscreen with the UCE using as much hardware acceleration the XP driver model allows, and then does to screen on a D3D surface hosted inside the application window. No desktop-wide transparency and fancy effects tho, since there’s no DWM.
On Longhorn, the composited surfaces are handed off to the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) which runs D3D in fullscreen and renders the desktop, window borders and what not, with all fancy effects and transparency between overlaid windows and stuff.
Avalon can run without the magic Longhorn Display Driver Model, however then it doesn’t get the GPU virtualization and virtual memory gimmicks that this new driver model supplies (if your hardware supports it, otherwise some software emulation thingy will try to do it). The missing GPU virtualization will give you a performance hit on XP, since the first device that gets the D3D surface wins, if it eats up all video resources, all other Avalon apps might fail and thus switch to software rendering which would be an even heavier performance hit.
Forgot to say that the DWM uses the UCE too, but since they can’t change the existing infrastructure (GDI and User, support nightmare), backporting DWM isn’t viable.