Will we ever see a new commercial operating system company?

February 18th, 2007, 03:45 PM

Apple/Mac is hardware and software built in. They don't count IMO.

Linux is a share-type, public, free software.

Windows, is a for-profit operating system.

Who is out there to compete againstg windows!?

What a monopoly! I would like to see some company come in and take a swip at their monopoly. Creates better software in the end, because it would create fierce competiotion, which results in lower prices, and better software.

thoughts?

February 18th, 2007, 05:32 PM

What about OS/2 or the days of DR DOS? They did come out with competing operating systems but almost every major software developer codes for Windows.

February 18th, 2007, 06:48 PM

Apple is technically a competitor of Microsoft. Apple now uses hardware which is identical to what you would use in a windows box... x86, Intell Core 2 duo. In fact, you can run Windows natively on an Apple machine now.

For a "company to come in and take a swipe ast their monopoly" would require a company with boatloads of cash and resources, frankly most companies would not consider it due to their being a good chance there will be absolutely no return on investment.

February 18th, 2007, 09:36 PM

Well, "ever" is a long time, so I don't think a categorical no is a justifiable answer, but certainly for the foreseeable future the answer is no, at least as far as the PC is concerned. Major hardware vendors of non-PC computers do have their own operating systems, like HP's HP-UX and IBM's OS/400 for instance, but I presume you're asking about the PC world.

Anybody could take the Windows API and various other technical info Microsoft makes available to developers and write a competing OS, but you'd have to wonder why anyone would bother. Writing an OS is probably the most difficult and expensive task to do well in the entire field of software development. Look at Windows itself: 20 years of continuous development and they still haven't got it right because of fundamental design flaws that go all the way back at least to Windows 3.x, notably the .dll file, the inability to keep the OS, the apps, and the users, separate from each other, and the inability to start certain kinds of background processes without rebooting the machine. And whoever thought the registry introduced with Win95 was a good idea needs his head examined: a large and fragile database that keeps growing all the time, and Microsoft provides no real system tools to help administrators monitor and maintain it. That one continues to baffle me. Microsoft hired Dave Cutler away from DEC to handle the Win95 project, and he was the guy responsible for the OS on those excellent VAX machines DEC used to sell. (Yeah I know, I'm showing my age: how many of you are thinking "What the hell is DEC*?") He knew how to do it right, but somehow didn't get to do it at Microsoft.

But I digress. Read this guy's rant if you want more: http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

There's really no percentage in anybody trying to write a new commercial PC operating system to compete with Windows or Mac. Think of all it would have to do: everything those systems do, but better. And that really means EVERYTHING, especially the things that are now so easy with Windows and Mac systems that most users hardly ever think about them: hardware detection, auto-configuration, driver availability (still the major knocks against Linux),... It's not worth the effort.


* Digital Equipment Corporation, once one of the three major vendors of computer hardware along with IBM and HP, missed the boat on the rise of the PC, and sank out of sight, bought up I think by Compaq originally, which was then bought up by HP. Compaq brand still exists, DEC doesn't. But DEC made first class stuff in its day.

February 22nd, 2007, 09:56 PM

I feel its quite different if you see things in right perspective.

Already majority of the web servers use LAMP(Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) so we know Microsoft is not strong, lets say technically capable as google or others to really come up with a superior product.
MS is best used for recreation - Playing games and listening games. So Its good for people who just wanna to play games - listen music ,watch movies and make office documents.

But Serious computing is all togather a different domain - None of the biggies use MS for reliablity or number crunching. Thats the truth. If people are happy with eye candy - be it that way.

February 23rd, 2007, 01:21 AM

Yeah, you got that right. I haven't investigated Vista in any detail, but every previous version of Windows--and I've worked with them all since Windows 2.x as technical support for workstations and servers--is not ready for critical applications. They're too fragile, too full of security holes, and Microsoft doesn't provide the tools to maintain and protect them. That's left to third party vendors like PC Tools, McAfee, and Symantec, but they don't have all the inside dope on Windows so they can't really do it right.

Case in point: today I was installing some new software on my XP Home system and things weren't going well. I kept having to reboot and check the system logs for error messages, and I noticed that on every reboot there was an error message saying a boot time driver called cdudf_xp had failed to load. I searched the registry for references to it and found that it's part of the Roxio Easy CD Creator application, which I haven't had installed on the system since I bought a DVD drive that came bundled with Nero Burning ROM. Nero's a much more reliable and versatile program than Roxio, so I uninstalled Easy CD Creator a year ago. The uninstall left that greasy little footprint in the registry though, and none of the four utilities I have that check the registry for such inconsistencies--McAfee Security Center, Registry Medic, Registry Mechanic, and CrapCleaner--ever reported it. Windows' uninstall routines do not clean up the registry, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more and more corrupt until ultimately you have to reformat the disks and start over again. No excuse for that, that's a sign of terrible design flaws.

Windows is a pig, it's always been a pig, and it will always be a pig. I have a dual boot system, Windows XP and Mandrake Linux. I use Windows for games, and Internet browsing because I haven't been able to get Linux to deal with my wireless network at home, but for any serious computing I use Linux.

March 6th, 2007, 06:06 AM

Actually, as was already pointed out, for most tasks, windows is not the primary host operating system in the business world. A funny occurence is that microsoft themselves wont even rely on their own technology for their more in depth webservers. They use Apache, NOT IIS.

Also, as far as linux goes, RedHat has been eating away at microsoft for years. Though the software itself comes free, support for businesses comes with a price, that is what equals it out in a business standpoint.

The problem that companies are faced with is that microsoft uses extremly bullying tactics in its licensing. If you want to keep a volume license contract with them, then you will continue to pay them wether or not you use their product. That is where so many companies get gridlocked. For instance: A company who builds computers and sells them at ridiculously low prices with WindowsXP gets windows xp at a much more significantly reduced price under a volume license contract. That company has buyers request again and again "Please dont give me windows, I dont use it, I dont want it, I dont need it". Because of the contract with microsoft, they are forced to include it. Microsoft's licenses are just as sneaky, criminal, and illigitimate as the company itself. As Dexter already pointed out, go read the "Why I hate microsoft article"

Dexter: What type of chipset is your wireless card? What type of card, USB, PCI, PCMCIA? If you want, provide me some details through pm and Ill see about helping you out getting it working under your mandrake. I have 12 machines, 6 of which are servers (actual servers, not desktops with server os), and not a single one of them runs windows. I got away from windows years ago.

March 6th, 2007, 09:57 AM

Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but at the moment I think it's probably more trouble than it's worth to attempt it remotely. One of my brothers--who's probably forgotten more about Linux than I'll ever know--and I spent two days fiddling around with the NDIS Wrapper stuff trying to get Mandrake to see the card, to no avail. And he was right here beside me. I have ways of moving files between the systems when necessary, and I have the same open source software on both, so it's not really much of a problem. I think I could solve it in the longer term with a different network card. It's a Linksys brand of a particular model I discovered in assorted Linux forums is uniquely unsuitable for Linux. Or maybe I'll just string cable in my house...

Good post, BTW, I see you're a sensible fellow. At least about computing... .

March 6th, 2007, 12:45 PM

Ah, the always classic OS wars. I am a physicist by trade, and a computational one at that, for most of my programming I work in Linux. Just because its cheaper that way. I know people that use visual fortran, and do quite well by it. I know that applied mathematicians tend to use a lot MatLab running on windows. Engineers tend to use huge software packages that are made in visual c++, again running on windows. However, most supercomputers run linux/unix/sunOS/some posix.

That being said, the real drive in computing, in terms of resources being used, is sucked up into the gaming market. Games are the real expression of what a modern computer is designed for. CPU's are more cache than floating point processing. A problem that gives us physicist's nothing but headaches. CPU's are reaching the saturation point of Moore's law, where the advances slow to a hugely expensive crawl. Meanwhile, it is graphics processing technology (nvidia, ati) that is exploding.

Windows and MacOS are better than linux at games for the simple reason that it is really complicated to write a game that won't have any problems for the multiple distributions that exist. I happen to be on a dual boot XP/Gentoo laptop at the moment. However, there are large teams of volunteers working hard to make linux a viable alternative to the OS corporations. So these volunteers may not make any actual money, but Apple and Microsoft are forced to spend a lot of money to keep ahead of them, which is what competition is all about.

Not really any points. I am sitting squarely on the fence. I run a dual boot for a reason, having ran both XP and Gentoo only for certain periods, and missing the other sorely. That being said, I recently read of number of articles that show that Windows is in fact more secure than any distribution of Linux, however, most hackers would rather write a virus to infect millions of windows machines and deliver their advertisement payload, then hit a small number of Linux boxes.

March 6th, 2007, 01:00 PM

Im going to bite on two statements I saw in your post.....

#1 "Ive read numerous posts that windows is in fact more secure than linux". I can tell you from experience, as can anyone that is CISSP, OR CIH that that is pure balogna. A properly administered linux box is a bitch to get into, especially remotely. Windows has many many more vulnerabilities in it. Now, that does NOT mean that linux is perfect. But it is much more secure than windows can even imagine being.

#2 "It is much more difficult due to the number of distros". Not true. The great thing about every one of those distros is the ability to COMPILE. You being a gentoo user you should know better.

But yes, the whole "os wars" needs to continue. Windows is not better. It is what it is today because it has caused many people hardships not due to them. Research the company, research the software, look at the sourcecode. Study it for a while. After that, come back and tell me the "windows isnt evil" crap.

March 6th, 2007, 01:10 PM

Daemoen,

For the simple fact that you still have to "COMPILE" programs and cannot install them via a binary in most cases will keep Linux as an OS for geeks, DB Admins, Apache admin's etc. For Linux to become accepted by non-techies it has a far way to go in standardization in their files systems, desktops and libraries.

March 6th, 2007, 01:40 PM

Durka:

Thats what automake and autogen are used for There are 1 click compile scripts that do all the work of compiling for you.

Most windows users can install a program, right? (Dont say they cant, most know how to dl music with programs like limewire by now )

If they can install limewire, then you could reason that if you were to create an executable sh script, give it a fancy name like "Wow-Installer" and a neat icon, and it would do the configure, launch make, and install the binary, they would be just as comfortable.

I know numerous programs that already do this. And as far as the user goes, thats what the packages are for anyway, its the distro maintainers that do the work of the backend compiling

March 6th, 2007, 05:21 PM

Heheh, I knew you would.

#1 You use anecdotal evidence, how about giving me some hard evidence. That is simply the first thing I found. It wasn`t the original article I read. It turns out that obfuscation does lead to less people finding your security holes, or in this case is at least correlated.

#2 Compiling, don`t know how many tarballs you have compiled, but it sounds like a lot. I switched to gentoo because I was sick of the poor adaptability of compiling from tarballs and wanted something more FreeBSD like. I didn`t have any luck with FreeBSD due to some hardware issues so I went gentoo. Generally though, each distro has its own release for common code because of the differences in the location of key libraries. Some packages you try to install on your own, cough, cough, MATHEMATICA! use hardcoded links to libraries which aren`t always in the same location. That being said, if you are installing from tarball, you can probably fix that easily.

Anyways, my biggest problem with the OS wars is the lack of evidence in most people`s arguments. And lack of a real metric for what makes a good operating system.

March 7th, 2007, 02:26 AM

As for the anecdotal evidence, I don't need to provide any. Microsoft does that at a rate of... 4-12 a week? "Security patch fixes vulnerability"

As for the compiling from tarballs, yes, the locations of the libraries changing makes for a pain in the but, but thats why you have the configure scripts which are *supposed* to check for the locations of the required libraries, store it in a variable, and pipe it into the automake. If that fails, there is always ln -s .

The evidence is in the quantity and types of patches. To provide more evidence would require doing things that arent nice and posting those things on the net for review. But, since those things arent nice, cant help ya on that one. When you look at the number of actual "security" patches that comes from linux, they occur rarely.

Now the last statement you made is a good point. What are the characteristics of a good operating system really? Does microsoft have those characteristics? Does linux have them? Which operating systems fall into it. We could start a whole new thread on that alone. I might do that .

In the end, I think it will come down to application selection, stability, ease of use, and cost. Microsoft definately has 2 of those, but what about the stability (yes, it is very true that its gotten much more stable since it went over to the NT kernel), but cost? give me a break. We are paying for software from the 80s (even with vista.).

The link dexter posted contains more information than most people know. I had already known about it before a friend of mine told me about that site from spending 8 years researching the company. What you learn from it is quite interesting, provided you read through it all.
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

To the link you posted. Ill be going there shortly to see what this evidence of theirs is.


Ahhhhh, that method. I don't even have to really explain it. The link you posted even explains a large reason for the differences.

#1. Microsoft is closed source, so people dont get to go "oh hey, we found a bug". Microsoft tries to keep everything secret, and *if its big and discovered* they fix it.

#2. If you look at the list, most of the "linux unix" Is from *all* of the major distro sets packed into one. Those lists are formulated by gathering information from the freely available "Bugzilla"s and the like, that are present for the open source developers to find those bugs, fix them, and get them turned around. You will NEVER see microsoft doing this, because they know it would raise their number to hell.

Here is an example:

PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
ok so we are looking at the perl regulal expressions heap overflow numerous times? No. 1 time for each Distro it gathers info from the bug database. With microsoft, the "microsoft kb" is not even close to up to date with all of their bugs.

March 7th, 2007, 03:10 AM

Here is an analysis by an independent security analysis (Forrester, you may be aware of this one already). They use three different metrics to analyse the security of Windows compared to Linux. They count vulnerabilities in linux software and don't recount for each distro. The number count of serious vulnerabilities is the first metric. The amount of time it takes the OS to fix the bug is the second metric, they measure this for various distributions, the time begins once an exploit is published somewhere in the public domain. The third metric is the percentage of fixes completed within a years time of the beginning of the story.

The results: Microsoft on top, followed closely by Redhat. Linux with more security vulnerabilities, Windows with a faster update and more complete update. Although, it is arguable that if the study length had been properly normalized, Redhat would have 100% as well.

The biggest problem with the lag in update times seems to be the fact that the team working on the software itself (in Linux) must provide a patch which the distro teams must then implement.

The only thing that I am trying to say is that in the minds of Linux users, it is black and white, because they probably wouldn't use Linux unless they preferred it to Windows. When you go out and look at studies, and stop listening to the guts of a few users, the tale isn't so clear.

March 7th, 2007, 04:26 AM

After this, I am refraining from further comment. It's not worth me spending the next 4 weeks posting thousands upon thousands of damned research reports I have had to do on the security vulnerabilities in most operating systems just to prove the damn point that windows is not as secure as linux.

When microsoft makes available their sourcecode for a TRUE security audit, as does Linux, THEN you will see just how vulnerable it is. Until then, feel safe and comfortable hiding behind the same smokescreen that microsoft has used for years. "So long as they dont see it or hear about it, it doesnt exist, right?".

That is the same mentality that microsoft has hid behind since its conception. "So long as they dont see us taking notes, these notes about their software and ideas dont exist. We never stole a thing".

March 7th, 2007, 05:47 AM

ok...

Lets think about this here.

building an OS is expensive with a low profit, add to that, everyone see's the EU and everyone else making ludicris judgements where Microsoft has to give away everything it worked for, its source code "to open up to competitors" when the fact is it has no competitors because no one wants to compete. Unqualified legal bodies deciding which programs included in the O/S are "Required"and which ones are "illegally added on" usually on the basis of Profit. Its "an illegal add on" to include windows media player to play media files, but "required" to add a program to read text files and "required" to have a program that automatically mounts your drives (ie, you put in a CD or Disc and it can read them), even though microsofts competitors can't all do that one. Utter lunacy from a product development standpoint. Would you design a car if you were told you had to include everything profit draining, but weren't allowed to include any features you made money from? AND you had to share your design with your competitors?


As for linux, it is a great product, often better than windows. Its greatest flaw is that its too powerful, if you don't know what your doing you can wreck the system. Windows assumes your an idiot and holds your hand the whole way through. Iritating if you know what you are doing, a giant blessing if you run a company and don't want employees who should just be using excel to destroy your whole company.

Linux and the LAMP stack is a viable competitor and is commercial. Not every commercial product has a price tag. In this case, IBM donates a few hundred million in programmer hours each year to keep improving Linux, because it wants its computers to not be at the whim of microsoft and to be available cheaper (with a free O/S). Linux is big money to hardware providers and they invest in it accordingly.

March 7th, 2007, 06:15 AM

This is the one statement that I absolutely hate seeing more than any other statement that can ever be made about microsoft, period.

Note the word "worked". Microsoft never worked on a damn thing. Research the company. The link has been provided. If your too lazy to research, then dont bother posting. One final time, here is the link. AFTER reading, and ONLY after reading, come back and justify that fine statement you just made.

For the final time, people need to stop following the plain and obvious and look at what is underneath. Here is the link one MORE time.
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
Until youve read that link, you have no place making any comment on microsoft, or its practices. Its very rare for someone to have actually spent the time researching the company that they so eagerly defend. Microsoft is not jesus. Jesus is "The Holy Technicolour Jebus Fish" as depicted in the Catholic post about fish *nodnod*. Gates is not Jesus either. Stop following him with such blind fricken faith!. Sheeesh.