Why Microsoft's engineering changes will be the real Windows Threshold story
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
In the DOS era applications had a huge degree of independence from the OS. You could nuke the OS, upgrade it, modify it and move machines and your apps worked just the same.
Today things are different. The OS, by means of such "features" as te registry, holds applications hostage.
Say I have a five year old machine. I want to purchase (or more than likely, build) a new machine. In the past this was relativley painless. Once the machine is up you move your apps and off you go. Today this requires full re-installation of apps from scratch. It's a nightmare and it is one I contend has significant economic consequences. Whereas someone like me might consider upgrading hardware every year or two, the financial math now includes the non trivial time and expense of reinstalling everything.
We've done this a few times. With typical high end engineering workstations full of software it can easily take a month of installing and configuring software to get back to the setup you had before he upgrade. This isn't pallatable at all from more than one perspective. And so machines continue to be used as long as possible before upgrading anything that might trigger a reinstallation event.
To me this is a major flaw in the design of Windows. OS, applications and data ought to be fully separable independent entities. I get all the advantages of DLL reuse and centralized settings, etc. I still contend that this could be achieved at the cost of additional storage and some more smarts. A one terabyte hard drive is about $60 today. I could not care less if DLL's need to be duplicated for each software installation in order to break lose from the OS and registry as much as possible.
The point is, if they are smart they ought to be able to figure it out. I ought to be able to install all my apps on a portable USB drive, walk up to any machine in the world, plug in and have my tools and files available for use instantly. That's the way it should work.
A lot of the responsibility for that lies with the application developers, by the way.
The reason it doesn't work the way you are dreaming is of course because the OS provides more abstraction than ever. In the old days, DOS just handed the whole machine over to the application you launched- that would not be acceptable today.
Of course there are tons of details to work out. My point is that we live in an age where computing power, memory, storage and remarkably intelligent computer scientists abound. With some work this is not beyond our capabilities.
Imagine the selling point of an OS that allows you to isolate your apps and data to the point where they travel with you to be used on any machine (or machine migrations as people and companies upgrade systems).
As much as possible, I use PortableApps on Windows. When I migrate to a new machine, all I need to do is copy the PortableApps folder.
I don't see this as a flaw in Windows. If every application developer/packager built portable apps, there wouldn't be a problem.
As a business you would be risking all kinds of possible nightmare scenarios with compatibility, maintainability and general support issues.
The real solution has to be OS-based. Which is unlikely to happen.
Application data for modern apps lives in the user profile; back that up and the process becomes much simpler.
DLLs: .Net has a really cool feature called the Global Assembly Cache. That stores one copy of every version of every DLL that has been registered. Which means best-of-both-worlds: conserve HDD space and no issues with versioning.
On OSX you really have to go out of your way to modify the OS.
Question: Can I take the entire "Applications" directory, copy it to a USB drive, go to an Apple store, plug it into any machine and run Photoshop from my USB drive?
Lets see what really comes out.
Time will tell.
I'd like to see an OS (not just a shell) from the ground up to include actually useful things like support for distributed persistent assets, P2P networking and so on.
I would like it to be responsive, so it best uses the capabilities of the hardware you give it. Windows 8 started, but didn't get quite there. Ubuntu has a nice idea for plugging your phone into a monitor and getting a full Ubuntu install. If I'm tapping, don't make me double tap just because I would normally double click. Recognize that it's a tap and not a click. And don't give me options my device can't handle. Don't show me a desktop on a 7" tablet. Don't default to full-screen apps on a 4k display. And if my monitor is big enough that it could be four regular sized monitors, tile my windows automatically. It's not that hard to do.
I'm tired of starting something on my PC and trying to figure out how to continue on a tablet or a phone, or even just another PC. This could either depend on application developers to support or be baked well enough into the OS that applications don't even know it's happening, but everything should be available to me everywhere. Again, Windows 8 has a nice start with Onedrive, but I still have to manually save things there. Why not replicate my drives so I can access any file from any where without even thinking about it? Make it completely invisible what is local storage and what is cloud storage, and with that, cache things on my hard drive for if the network goes down. If I don't have a connection, everything should be there. If I do have a connection again, everything that happened without a connection should automatically show up on my phone and tablet too. Make Onedrive/Dropbox automatic and invisible.
That's actually an annoyance I have with Github, too. Why do I need to manually commit my changes? When I hit ctrl+s, it should just go straight to version control. If I need to revert later, well, that's why I'm using version control, right?
I don't want to have to boot. I don't want to have to shut down (or wait 10 minutes while it shuts down). I don't want to have to install updates, nor do I want to have to reboot for those updates. Chrome is the best model here. Just push updates in the background and either apply them immediately or wait until the system is idle and apply them.
I don't want to think about anti-virus. Actually this is the one thing Windows 8 got perfectly. I've never thought about putting an AV on my system. It's just there.
I don't want to run out of power. Windows Phone is a great reference system. If power is getting low, start disabling features that drain the battery. I can handle checking email manually if it means I get another hour of battery life. My eyes will adjust to a dimmer display for a little while. Facebook can wait. If power is low, disable the things that I have turned on but am not using.
Now, I know a lot of these features would be very controversial to the HN crowd (since Windows 8 is very controversial). But that's fine. Anyone who threatened to switch to OSX or Linux because of Windows 8 is free to do so. I want a desktop OS with the simplicity of an iPad, but the problem with the iPad is that it's simple, but not magic. Make it magic. I don't want to micromanage my computer. That's why we invented computers in the first place.
And for the love of god can somebody PLEASE make cross-device copy-paste? The amount of fb/whatsapp/email I send just to copy a link from my laptop to my phone or vice-versa is silly.
As it happens, my free Android app SSHelper has a bidirectional clipboard server, very easy to use:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arachnoid....
You open a browser on the desktop, enter the address of the phone on your local wireless network, and you have a two-way clipboard exchange with the phone.
My app is free, there are no ads, and it's not a shareware-get-the-pro-version deal. It's exactly what it sounds like -- a useful, free app.
In fairness, my app isn't the only Android app that provides a clipboard gateway, but it's the only one that doesn't have ads or some other restriction.
Wait ... you want a mobile device clipboard feature to communicate with a laptop, but be integrated in the OS? Which OS -- the device, or the laptop?
> Use the normal copy feature, and Cmd+V has that thing on my laptop.
Any laptop? Without any setup or permissions?
People who write programs can get pretty close to what you want, but not quite as you describe it.
As for Android, I've already done it -- it's part of my free app SSHelper:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arachnoid....
Given that it is based in what was going to be .NET (Ext-VOS), nothing prevents the API to be improved.
I'm anxious to see what Microsoft has in store, but I'm not excited. The recent post here by the developer whose system credentials were changed after he linked his Microsoft account is part of the reason why. Of course I'd want access to the Microsoft Store, but I don't want to log to the system with those credentials, I want to keep the ones that were already set. I doubt this will be the direction that Threshold will take, and if it turns into another Win8 turd I'll probably be done with the Windows OS
EDIT: Since I've been downvoted to oblivion I can only assume that the MS employees here like my post about as much as I like their Winows 8 OS
But frankly, I don't see Microsoft changing course on that.
* Applications which use CEIP typically send data to Microsoft servers after the application is closed
[long, drawn-out sigh] No amount of head-shaking or facepalming will suffice here.
Is it possible that the author knows about Isaac Asimov, but that she also knows that Asimov is also the name of a character from Halo? And that it fits in a pattern in the Halo context and not in the Sci-fi-author context, and she therefore reports it as such?
What if there were a Halo character called Sinatra, and the Windows feature would be code-named Sinatra, would you call the author out (sigh! facepalm!) for being too stupid to know about the actor?
EDIT: personal pronoun gender. thanks cwyers.
Linking the name "Asimov" with the Halo games seems to be a bizarre speculation/research failure on her part, as far as I can tell.
"One of my contacts said Asimov is a system that the Xbox team originally built and used during its development process."
I don't see why you'd need to facepalm the Xbox team using a codename from the Halo series, or why it's so headshaking that the larger Windows team would adopt a tool from the Xbox team they found useful.
It's about as depressing as people 5000 years from now thinking that most of what 21st century people knew about birds was disseminated using an ancient application called Angry Birds.
1) http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-next-version-of-ie-codenamed-sp... 2) http://www.geek.com/games/microsoft-taps-the-halo-franchise-...
Not everything with the same name is the same thing, and it's possible to reference the second in a series of shared names that itself is referencing the first.
References aren't transitive, in this case.
What I think the quote shows is not a lack of awareness about other uses of "Asimov" but that much of her stories are copy-pasted from emails with Microsoft marketers. Someone in Microsoft (Azure?) wants you to know about "Asimov"... perhaps an announcement next week? This way Mary Jo looks like she is relevant and you are primed to want to learn more...
Edit: I agree with the facepalm, just for different reasons