Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.
Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms! Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!
Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)
You are aware that the "World Domination" being referred to was talk of Linux's World Domination, right? So you're not disagreeing, you're supporting the observation that Linux eventually dethroned the 800 lb gorilla and that the 800 lb gorilla is a shadow of what it once was.
IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."
Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?
I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer here to is most definitely not SV or startups; think old, entrenched organizations that have no impetus to change or improve. You know, like government orgs. Or Microsoft).
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it.
But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and possibly other stuff. The EULA used to refer to the regents of Berkley.)
(But not the Sun. It ran on commodity 16-bit IBM PCs.)
((I refuse to resist puns. They just flow through me.))
Then you'll like this one.
When I was in college, we had a computer lab full of Sun workstations running Solaris. It was officially called the Solarium.
There's some interesting stuff in there. This one always seemed like a weird problem:
Global variables in Win32 dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) are visible across
processes, so it is important that developers are careful that these globals
do not conflict with any variables within the Unix shared libraries.
[0] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/98/11/17/1624254/microsoft-pr...
[1] http://www.linux.cz/pipermail/linux/1999-September/051669.ht...
I personally think that makes for a decent 'moral standing'.
Basically GPL only a problem if you want to create proprietary software, which in turn is typically very much a 'being told what you can do with said software' type of situation, with no code and often incorporating DRM mechanisms to prevent copying.
Edit: For those of you downmodding me for saying that the GPL is a cancerous license, please understand that this isn't a negative connotation - it's simply an aspect of the requirements of the license. It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Linux is doing well while BSDs have languished.
I used to like GPL, so nobody would "steal" my code adding it to a closed source product. I don't care anymore, just use BSD or other credit-where-credit-is-due license: my code was included in a high profile closed source product? Lots of bragging points and free publicity!
You're mistaken if you believe that.
Linux is by far more popular for developers, tinkerers, and cool software projects but BSD is still massive in the server and embedded devices space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
BSD is a minority in servers, which also reflect my own experience talking with other sysadmins in conferences. Debian and Redhat are huge in the server market, outside of windows shops. Some older system might have novel or a BSD system running together with massive amount of legacy perl scripts, but those companies also complain that they have a hard time finding new employees that can support the old systems.
I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...
This is not a bad thing. It sometimes sucks, but overall it's helped preserve the ecosystem and it has been integral, IMHO, in making sure companies stay honest with their upstream OSS meal tickets.
Which is why cancer is not a good metaphor.
I don't think such language is nice. It is damaging to civil conversation and can only alienate people more. No one likes hearing that what they create is like toxic waste.
Note that it is not the code that these people produce that is toxic, it is what they demand in return (via the terms of the license) that is. The language may not be nice, but it is descriptive of the situation the GPL puts many people into. The GPL essentially seeks to impose the ideology adopted by a subset of folks onto the rest of the world. "We believe code should be free, so if you want to use our stuff, your code must be free too, regardless of what you believe or what your business needs are or what is practical." That is not a very nice stance to have, and so many people do not say nice things about it.
Think of it like someone saying, "Here, I'll do you a favor, but you must change your religion". Having different ideologies is perfectly fine, but enforcing them on others is not.
(Especially bogus because SCO knew in advance they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM), but I doubt Microsoft knew that.)
I'll bet that by itself had consequences.
And Caldera, which renamed itself in the next year to The SCO Group, got all of the original SCO's assets but Tarantella. Not sure what happened with Microsoft's ownership of the original SCO, but I don't remember through the years of SCO v. The World that Microsoft had a large ownership stake ... which would have been major.
Instead, per http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween10.html and my memory of Groklaw ..., well, here's ESR's first summation paragraph:
There you have it. At least a third of SCO's entire market capitalization, and their entire current cash reserves, is payoffs funnelled from Microsoft. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail.
I also seem to remember some Microsoft related deal involving the purchase of Novell SUSE? licenses, although now I can't remember if The SCO Group directly benefited from it.
Microsoft earned this part of its bad reputation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's purchases from the company in part ended with Windows XP prior to that (of course, it helped that Vista was long delayed and awful). Supporting Microsoft back then was unconscionable.
In 1987 Microsoft sold Xenix to Santa Cruise Operations Group for a 25% ownership shared of Santa Cruise Operations Group.
In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group. Caldrea was part of Canopy Group which has a lot of subsidiaries.
Round about 2003 the SCO vs. Linux fight started. Microsoft still owned Caldrea stock, and provided them financial assistance as they attempted to sue the entire world.
As noted in my posting replying to you, that doesn't match my memory or Wikipedia, can you provide any citations to support it?
After this sale Santa Cruise Operations Group changed its named to TARANTELLA inc. While concurrently Caldrea founded SCO Group, which was built on the purchased Santa Cruise Operations Group software.
Agreement and Plan of Reorganization:
http://sec.edgar-online.com/tarantella-inc/8-k-current-repor...
FWIW, I remember people saying this in 1999 as well...
There's also the "culture wars" to consider, where many (myself included) revered IBM for superior alternatives (OS/2), while old timers would just shake their head at anyone trusting them. Now, I shake my head at anyone trusting Microsoft, although they've tamped down their rabid attacks on open source and Linux, and they do offer some things that aren't complete garbage.
Incidentally, Microsoft co-developed OS/2 and there were only three problems with it: (1) you couldn't sell PCs running OS/2 -- IBM tried; (2) you couldn't get software houses to write programs for OS/2 -- except maybe Lotus; and (3) you couldn't get end users to install it. You had to install a whole OS to run OS/2, but Windows installed just like any other DOS program, and you could delete it if you decided you didn't like it.
Thanks to hiring Dave Cutler and staff from DEC, Microsoft could see a way out. However, IBM rejected the plan to move to NT as OS/2 3.0, and the two companies formally divorced. After that, IBM did its best to kill Microsoft. (One IBM senior manager told me: "We're going to burn Bill's butt.")
Bear in mind that in 1990, when Windows 3 came out, IBM had an annual turnover of $69 billion and Microsoft's turnover was $0.8 billion. It was a giant monopolist against a tiny start-up.
So, given the context, what was underhand about Microsoft's behavior, and what should it have done?
How did IBM's 1991 development of Workplace OS for PowerPC -- intended to cut both Microsoft and Intel out of the PC market -- fit into the strategy?
Microsoft's turnover had grown to $5.3 billion in 1995, but IBM's turnover was $72 billion, and it was still a brutal monopolist targeting a much smaller company.
I started programming in 1978, on IBM systems, and they were indeed "a brutal monopolist", probably feared more than Microsoft has ever been.
Sure, during the early-mid '90s Microsoft had sharp elbows and was looking out for its own interests, but those also just happened to coincide with ours. IBM was big, stupid and much more dangerous, UNIX(TM) was horribly fragmented (one of the core competencies I developed in the early '80s was porting software between different versions of it, and see The Unix Haters Handbook publishing in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook (disclaimer, Simson is a friend)).
GNU/the FSF was doing worthwhile stuff, but was and still is hanging fire on a kernel, the BSD porting efforts had been crippled by the '92-3 AT&T lawsuit, Linux was started from scratch in 1991 and immature, while NT was developed by well funded top notch experienced people (at least back then it was very rare if not unheard of for someone to develop more than one operating system, the process was so onerous) and was a great hope for a lot of us. In the mid '90s I developed or took part in developing several very solid systems using it, and I believe it's TCO and maintainability exceeded UNIX(TM) during that period.
Unfortunately, Microsoft started fumbling the ball about 3-4 years after NT's release (on or after the first Service Pack of NT 3.5 or more likely 3.51 as I recall), NT 4 was conceptually hopeless by moving graphics into the kernel, "and the rest is history".
Microsoft, of course, had a major problem, which was how to get the market to move from DOS-based Windows to NT. Not even offering OEMs 75% off the price of NT managed to shift them. Ultimately, Microsoft had to do whatever it took, and not all of it was nice. It didn't manage to do it until XP in 2001.
Re Unix, you have missed out the COSE/Hamilton group development of OSF/1, first released in 1991. This was supposed to unify most of the major players -- DEC, HP, IBM etc -- except Sun* behind a single Unix to prevent Microsoft from getting into corporate computing with NT.
Presumably you would have come across it....
* OSF = "Oppose Sun Forever" according to Scott McNealy
Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them.
As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.
I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side....
To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame.
There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture.
Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.
Otherwise, IBM claimed Workplace OS was new code.
NT, of course, wasn't written for x86 in the first place. It was intended to be cross-platform. It was also sold on PCs with DEC Alpha chips.
Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?
Microsoft realized that you couldn't force people to buy something they (rightly or wrongly) didn't want, and decided to sell them something they did want. Small companies are like that. Being a global giant with a long history of monopoly power (going back to the 1930s), IBM didn't think like that.
There are companies out there still shambling along that used to be dominant but are now ghostly memories of their former selves.
There's also, XBox itself and Azure, which are key points to the future of MS along with Office, which will now grow to other platforms, as it should have some time ago.
I thought Facebook was going to die out too then they became defacto telecoms in the developing world through WhatsApp/Internet.Org, and now have a billion users.
Plus, programmers started imagining they
could innovate as designers and we have
Gnome 3, Unity, etc.
But, for filling out forms and keeping the design as it is, I'm currently using a web interface of Office 365. It's a bit annoying to use it at the moment (you can't get rid of the constant "Install Word on Your Device" messages and you first have to upload your document on OneDrive before you can edit it), but it gets the job done.
Microsoft created Xenix because they knew DOS would have a limited future, and in particular they knew there was a lot of value in running enterprise software on microcomputers. They also knew costs would go down and performance would go up over time and that running minicomputer-grade stuff on micros would become more and more feasible as time goes on.
They made Xenix for a number of microcomputer platforms, typically partnering with the hardware manufacturers (as is the case with Tandy). For the PC, they chose to partner with SCO instead for some reason.
Xenix was Microsoft's next-generation operating system, intended to be a platform for the few high-end customers who wanted to run enterprise software on PC, with plans to push it across the mid-range and even the low end as PCs get faster and fast hardware gets cheaper.
And then, it all changed when AT&T got broken up. Suddenly, AT&T was allowed to commercialize their software, including Unix. And AT&T was very, very much interested in doing this. The whole thing culminated in System V Release 4, but that took a few years for AT&T to put it together. In the meantime, Microsoft thought they'd never be able to compete in the Unix market against the creators of Unix, so they panicked, sold Xenix to SCO, and began looking for a partner for their _new_ next-generation operating system.
So Microsoft hooked up with IBM and created OS/2 as their successor to Xenix. Eventually, however, Microsoft fell out with IBM...
After falling out with IBM, Microsoft decided to do it entirely by themselves, so they poached a bunch of ex-VMS guys from DEC and created Windows NT. After a few years serving as an enterprise OS, Microsoft began trickling NT down to the consumer market, eventually replacing DOS-based Windows entirely with the launch of Windows XP in 2001.
Just imagine the alternate world where Microsoft didn't get spooked by AT&T commercializing Unix and instead focused on Xenix, trickled it down to the consumer market, and ultimately replaced DOS-based Windows with a Windows-style GUI built on top of Xenix.
IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy for a long while (one reason Compaq was the first to come out a 386), and demanded OS/2 run on it.
Unfortunately, the 286 was seriously crippled for doing this sort of thing, as I recall, switching segment registers was very expensive. And for those of you who didn't live through the ugliness of 8086->286 (and 386 and beyond compatibility modes) programming, these were thoroughly 16 bit computers, where you had at most 64 KiB segments each of stack, code and data, unless you switched one of those segment registers to point elsewhere. That was cheap enough for the vast gain in memory on the 8086/8, and the 286 in its compatibility mode, but native? That mode did a lot more for you (like, hey, memory protection!), and Intel when that decision was made and implemented slowly simply didn't understand how people used their CPUs.
Anyway, Windows 3.0 and on was taking off, no one but stupidly managed Lotus wanted to program OS/2 Presentation Manager, and prior to in 1988 that DEC killed off a RISC CPU + new operating system effort in favor of continuing with VAX/VMS for a while longer. The software people, at least, were in Bellevue, WA, and many were hired to develop OS/2 3.0, which due to the above morphed into NT 3.1 (which really was around a 3.x Microsoft quality release :-).
(Seriously, it's a vile, vile hack, involving dynamically patching running binaries to work round Windows ABI differences and work around seg faults. But it works well enough to run a Debian userland.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_%28software%29
Larry mentions it in the perl configuration file:
Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?
I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Server.
Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that.
Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.
Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.
Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move.
As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation.
IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well.
The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc.
Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
http.sys is a giant fucking turd. That and the whole urlacl thing. Nothing but pain. They added it because of shitty performance in the NT kernel when serving HTTP from userspace and it turned into a friction point for the whole operating system.
This seems to be one of the patterns for large enterprise software companies, IBM did it as well.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft could do with Linux on the desktop if they swung their weight behind it, Microsoft has incredible engineering resources and some amazing programmers, I doubt it would happen but it would be fascinating.
It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
Strangely that document makes me want NT 3.51 back again as well :)
Exchange Onsite deployments aren't dead, on-site email is dead. Unless, you're "too big" for the cloud (>20k users) because of <$Requirement> then Exchange is an option.
Keeping data On-Premise has always been a challenge, SAN are expensive but that's what it takes if you want data locally.
I can't comment on the rest but we're comparing Apples to Oranges here.
Doesn't really sound you know what you're talking about. That technology is dead and doesn't really replace BizTalk.
"In April 2015 Microsoft announced that it will end support for AppFabric for Windows Server on the 2nd April 2016."
People are stuck with it now, deprecation or not.
Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
Anecdotally, back a decade ago it was common to see a Windows 2000/2003/SBS box in even an SME environment being a fileserver/exchange/intranet/AD box. Now, I rarely see one. In fact they're declining even in large corps.
Which OS do you deploy on thin clients (ChromeOS, Android, Ubuntu/RedHat Linux)?
Clients: anything really. The OS almost doesn't matter now.
Are other nix shops using Ubuntu for their servers?
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/...
i.e. "libunwind8" translates to libunwind, unzip to unzip and libssl-dev to openssl-devel. libunwind's from EPEL though...
There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
Most FOSS devs never care to learn such APIs and stay with the lowest common denominator that happens to exist in GNU/Linux and *BSD.
They're definitely not. AIX copied the IOCP interface almost verbatim, but missed one critical piece: associating an IOCP with a desired concurrency level. Solaris added event ports, but again, they missed the concurrency link too.
The root of the problem on UNIX is the readiness I/O model.
See https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-... for more info.
It is all about .NET, C++ and additionally the JVM when going outside Windows.
Even though I used UNIX a lot on my career, I have always been with foots on both lands and enjoyed Win32 more than POSIX, claimed as portable, but full of nuaces per UNIX clone.
"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?
I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.
This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?
This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
If one codes as "C with C++ compiler" then no.
If one makes use of the features that fix C unsafety, then yes.
> "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?
Which UNIX clone provides a standard OO ABI, as well as, a shell close to the Xerox PARC user experience?
Taligent failed.
I must ask, what exactly makes the current NT kernel a 'hybrid' kernel ?
Also since Windows Vista many drivers are now implemented in user space, with minimal kernel primitives.
Is this what is described as LPC ? Could you elaborate on how it separates the modules (as opposed to unix subsystems) ?
>Thus still offering a micro-kernel cleanness in a monolithic space.
What does this 'cleanness' provide, and how ? It's all in kernel space so if one module crashes the whole kernel crashes ?
What Windows does, is that there aren't any direct calls between modules, only kernel level RPC calls.
All parameters are packed into the RPC message, it is dispatched, unpacked, validated as much as possible on the receiving end, then processed.
Messages and its validation introduce an indirection layer that improves safety.
It is based on the original micro-kernel design Windows NT had, before they moved graphics back into the kernel.
So the micro-kernel message passing is still there, but simplified since now everything runs on the same space. But as of Windows Vista, UDF was introduced for user space drivers.
The "Inside Windows" book series go into great detail how everything works.
[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh397409.aspx
[1]: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...
You won't be buying a Windows Server license to run them any more and it's feasible that they may even not run on Windows at some point in the future. Office's server portion and Sharepoint is all .Net so expect them to move it to ASP.Net 5 at some point.
SharePoint is basically the server part of Office. It's a web CMS, a web based Office (viewer), with AD account login support. I wonder why there is no open source SharePoint alternative e.g. coded in PHP.
I think it's because SharePoint's strengths lie mainly in integration with Office and other Microsoft products. Lists, workflows, wikis, etc. in SharePoint aren't great. Basically everything it does can be done in a better way with another tool.
However, due to AD integration, Office integration, the ease of connecting to MS SQL Server, the product can do things that would be difficult to do in any third party product. You can upload Word documents, run a workflow on them, have users edit list data directly in Office products, bulk edit lists in Excel, and use InfoPath forms (basically dead now though from what I recall -- thankfully I no longer have to work with SharePoint).
I think SharePoint won't ever have a competitor that can offer all of its integration.
I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:
> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.
The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.
Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....
Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."
To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.
There's no denying the NT kernel is an excellent piece of engineering.
But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
Wikipedia says that "Interix will not be included in Windows versions after Windows 8" though.
Yeah, it's obviously been destaffed at Microsoft. There's a blog, last updated years ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/
I know it's likely to be impossible, but if anyone at Microsoft's reading this (and chances are they are), whacking all the source code up on codeplex or github would be awesome. It worked so, so much better than Cygwin.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-l...
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with...
If you run your pre-existing JRE, its behaviour won't change. If you run a JRE compiled with cygwin (I've no idea if they provide one or not) then it will have UNIX-style path support.
"c:/whatever/another_dir/some.file"
There's also cygpath to convert between Windows/Unix style paths: http://cygwin-lite.sourceforge.net/html/cygpath.html
As for .Net, ASP.Net 5 runs fine on Linux and OSX without any COM or registry dependencies. It is entirely platform portable and open source.
"InfiniBand enables the most efficient cloud – Microsoft Azure" source: http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...
Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?
They have no choice. Desktop systems aren't a growth market anymore and, so far, they don't own anywhere else which is.
Microsoft has also overtaken IBM in annual turnover, having given it a $50 billion/year start. That means it's refocusing from a healthier financial position, at the moment. It remains to be seen whether Nadella can do as well as Ballmer, who tripled turnover and doubled profits. That's quite a challenge.
It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that. They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever possible. Except maybe the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can inspect, fork and/or clone.
On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.
Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would have to work to screw up that bad. Microsoft is clearly a natural. Can't wait to see how much mockery (or praise) I have to offer at end of Nadella's reign. Honestly, though, I hope he transforms it operationally like Lipner's SDL did for security. Microsoft Research, in particular, has tons of potential that could inspire new stuff just to compete with whatever they offer. And then we buy the competing, hopefully-OSS stuff. ;)
Nadella I'm very uncertain about. To the extent he can terminate with extreme prejudice stack ranking and the poison it has suffused throughout Microsoft, he'll have much more people capital, including much less internal sabotage (part of why Kin failed). And he's completely changed how QA is done, although I don't know if for the better. On the other hand, he doesn't ... "feel" like the sort of person who can sufficiently directly change the culture for the better.
We'll see.
Ah, here's a bigger question: can Nedella change the perception of Microsoft's trustworthiness? That was bad under Gates, became catastrophic and frankly insane under Ballmer, and after so many have been burned by Microsoft has got to have an incalculable cost.
Hopefully he turns that around. That alone might help a lot.
No, they haven't.