yes, yes; it's windows 7, but it does NOT do justice to what blackcomb was all about! it was a journey to recode windows from scratch! right?! that's what the codename proudly bestowed! all they have done is recoded the kernel and now from what i'm reading win7 is going to be just a changed vista!!! ooooo MinWin ooooo HyperVisor! so what!? what happened to making everything modular and changing the application platform so that windows developers and 3rd-parties don't end up making hundreds of DLL's flying everywhere and stuff? it was supposed to be revolutionary! that's what talks were all about when it was still in the early days of Whistler/XP......

here here +1

They promised us flying cars "by the year 2000" and here we are nowhere close to that. That's 60yr old "promise" from like 1940s to 50s..

My point is that one can dream big dreams but getting them to come true usually takes lots of things to happen. There's things outside of your control too that influence your progress. So in a perfect world Microsoft would hire some guys and be like hey, this is what we want. The guys would slave for years and make it work. The planet would rejoice unanimously and name the day it's launched a worldwide holiday.

Too bad we actually live in the real world where wants and demands change all the time The flying cars need lots of different parts ot make it fly and also need the infrastructure inplace to handle that. Having a flying car now might have been a flop as maybe the world isn't ready for flying cars just yet.

yeah life is just one soul crushing broken promise after another

Umm, it was around. It was never meant for commercial release. This was done in the MS Labs and was built as an experiment. So with all the millions MS spend each year on R&D on lots of different other things you DON'T hear about (so less things to b!tch about apperently) I'm sure what they've learned was incorporated into the release of windows.

"Blackcomb" was a codename, nothing more. A sparkle in Jim Allchin's eye, perhaps. There was never a "plan" called Blackcomb, and certainly no project. No one ever promised anything. Your expectations for "Blackcomb" were unreasonable by the mere fact that you had any expectations at all.

The name is gone because those who came up with that name are gone. And because times have changed so much since it came about that whatever ideas anyone had 7-8 years ago aren't terribly meaningful anymore. The flying car analogy is a pretty good one, I think.

you can already pre-order flying cars

I don't remember ever reading plans for Blackcomb, only for Longhorn.

In the case of Longhorn, MS attempted too much and cut their losses, Vista is better because of that.

They should take things slowly to avoid another Longhorn disaster.
A complete rewrite would break many things. People (idiots) already complain about Vista, imagine for 7...

Longhorn and blackcomb were just microsofts attempts to reach for the stars, unfortunately technology and expectations kept them weighted to the earth - and so we moved from the philosophy of revolution to, evolution, in the platform instead.

...And I'm hypothesizing that what they've learned, is that having to lease a whole office building and fill 300 positions of programmers to go over every security bulletin in all of Windows history and attempt to check if each hole exists in the coded-from-Scratch Windows, would take decades to do (nevermind the money). lol.....

but hey.... didn't Apple do it? Isn't Mac OS X coded from scratch on FreeBSD as opposed to MacOS 9 or older being just RISC-type stuff? well I guess yea it is trouble; they had it standard to dual-boot between OS X and OS 9 until developers had time to make new Aqua-themed OS X-compatible apps..... imagine that happening on a Windows scale where it's the most used OS on Earth..... yea..... chaos...... meh......... i STILL think Windows from scratch would be a golden opportunity to make things right.... hmm... or maybe escape through the "window" into the "sky" and release a new OS called Microsoft Skies alongside Windows..... ok i'm rambling now so cya later lol but wait then you can't have application windows; you would have fluffy cloudy application skies; ok omg ok bye! lol

Windows 7 is really just going to be Vista Second Edition......

Mac OS X is based off NEXTSTEP, an OS made by a company Apple purchased, thereby gaining the rights to their OS. NEXTSTEP is based off BSD, but I remember someone saying to me Mac OS X is about as much like BSD as Ubuntu is (not very)


Oh please, nobody knows barely anything about it yet.

Because you obviously know oh-so-much about it.

Even when 2010 comes and Win7 isn't Vista SE, Foub will still say it is regardless.

2,700 post on this forum, and thats the kind of comment you make?

The "Number of Posts" meter is in no way indicative of the content or quality of those posts.

Longhorn "promised" really nice features, some are in Vista but many dont get in

we could seen on this famous video with the promise -> http://youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y

lets see if Windows7 get's the effects that is shown on this longhorn video, hope that code weren't lost

yep, I agree with thread starter.

MS is just continuing down the broken pot hole road.

It would be best to start clean...but with somehow making older versions of software run in some type of virtual space for backward compatibility.

you know like....Apple with their migration from PPC to Intel and their built in software that makes it possible....Rosetta.

That's the way it will have to go if they want to start clean....


But they should do it... Too much issues with Registry, DLL's, etc.... the bloated monster windows is becoming.

That was a CPU architecture change -- Not an OS architecture change. OSX is still fundamentally the same, just compiled for a different OS.

What you seem to want is a switch like Apple did from OS9 to OSX....but that's just silly. Apple had to do it. OS9 was a mess compared to more modern operating systems like Linux/Windows NT. It had no protected memory, multitasking, security concepts, etc.

There's no reason for Microsoft to make that kind of switch. Microsoft upgraded or flat out replaced many of the systems with Vista (Networking, security, audio, video, media, and so on) and look at how much people complained about that.

We simply don't know enough about it to be be able to make any judgement at this stage. From what we know so far it appears it's not going to be a radical departure from Vista but that's a good thing, imo. It took months for all my software and drivers to be updated and for the performance of applications to come to close to that of XP - I don't want that to be the case everytime Microsoft release a new operating system. However, Microsoft screwed me over with Windows Ultimate Extras and I'm going to wait a while to decide if Win7 is worth the money.

100% agreed. It seemed like a "possibility" but now we see that "flying cars" are NOT the way forwards. Tichnology may eventually allow them, but the problems they would supposedly solve could be better solved in other ways.


Captain of the failboat!

Blackcomb wasn't ever supposed to be a complete re-write of Windows. It was supposed to be the successor to Whistler (XP) they ended up deciding they wanted an incremental release between XP and Blackcomb and thus Longhorn started. The longer it took, the larger vision they had for Longhorn, and ironically the less features actually made it into the shipping Vista.

Anyways, the complete re-write of Windows was called Microsoft Singularity. More on that here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

Anyways, Blackcomb isn't technically dead, because it didn't ever exist. It was part of a larger roadmap Microsoft used to describe to developers and investors there future vision. The inital roadmap had Windows XP in 2001, Windows Longhorn in 2003 and Windows Blackcomb in 2006, funny how that worked out.

and why dont they do a complete rewrite??

Why would we?

Wasn't Vista close enough to one? I mean I know it wasn't entirely, but you still had a new audio engine, new network engine, new security features, new graphics engine...you get the idea.

I wouldn't mind a new non-compatible OS project as long as I could guarantee the old OS couldn't read the new filesystem and therefore mess with it, but for MS that would be a hard thing to convince people to get unless it was cheap and had some really convincing reasons to snag it.

And likewise really hard to spend the money and time developing, especially when it'd be competing even more directly with alternative OSes, which are getting fairly well fleshed out at the moment. On that note it'd be competing with Windows itself, which would be just as painful for MS.

I'd rather just see NT 5.3 ... you were going in the such the right direction, but than veered hard right into wall.

Actually, they were at the wall before they changed direction.

Ever heard of "If it's not broke, than don't **** with it!" ?

Yeah, I have. From mechanics. Software engineers know it's either broke, or it doesn't do anything to begin with.

QFT



Source

That doesn't mean anything!

Just because a new car's engine is kinda similar to the old cars engine .. does that mean the new car is a copy-paste of the old one?
No... because cars arent just engines ... they also have body shells, suspension, brakes, handling, chasis, interior design .. even the leather trim may differ...

Just because the kernel won't be rewritten, that doesn't mean Windows 7 will be Vista SP1. Just because they will be more compatible and use same guidelines .. doesn't mean they will be the same.

Microsoft started with a lot of new guidelines and principles with Windows Vista (on many fronts .. UI, networking, security...). By doing this they broke their own development cycle and released the os "3 years too late". They got a lot of critic on this but now it will pay off as they now have a new foundation to build on with the new principles with Windows Vista.

Also .. we know nearly nothing about Windows 7... Windows 7 information isn't public yet and people who do know what they are talking about can't just yet.
So till PDC you can speculate all you want but talking about 7 before ANY public information is out is just plain stupid and speculation.

Conclusion ... saying Windows 7 is Vista SP2 is just stupid as you (or anyone else in the public) know NOTHING about Windows 7 itself...

That isn't really news though. Vista is the first time Windows has had a major overhaul in ages. Of course they're not going to pull the rug out from under everyone again.

However, that doesn't mean there won't be significant changes.

This.

There isn't a reason for MS to re-write Windows from scratch, Vista had a few components overhauled (including proper security elevation for users) and people whined and bitched about it constantly.

Re-writing Windows from scratch would break backwards compatibility, and love it or hate it, it's the reason Windows is so popular.

I expect the virtualization stuff getting so popular will offer MS interesting ways to mess around with compatibility problems though.

Virtualization isn't anywhere near the point as to be accessible to the casual user.

Try building a softgrid package. It's neither easy nor straightforward.

Try explaining installing why she should or how to install a guest OS in a virual machine. She'll look at you like you're crazy and wonder why she needs another windows to run her programs.

It doesn't have to be accessible to the enduser at all if it's part of the OS. Vista already does some virtualization.

You certainly don't have to make a guest OS of Vista within Vista for it to use its virtualization.

So I'm guessing you didn't quite catch my drift.

My god you just do not read. Nobody said its going to be SP2. The reference made is that its basically going to be like Win98 was to Win95. No major fundamental differences, because it is built on the same core. Your not going to see a Win98 to XP style jump, is the point that is being made.

Do you actually realise how monolithic the windows platform is? Completely rewrite the OS from scratch? You're kidding me right?

Windows is compatible with thousands of devices, do you realise how long it would take to achieve the same level of compatibility with a rewrite? What about software? One of the reasons Microsoft took so long with Vista is because they need to maintain the greatest percentage of backwards compatibility. Could you really imaging them brining out a complete rewrite, and half the worlds devices just didn't work, and even more software failed too.

And you can't compare Apple's OSX. Apple have been working on basically the same finely tuned hardware platform for years. A handful of specifically chosen devices work with it, so development time for ensuring compatibility is drastically cut down.

I still do not understand why so many people still put down vista. If you were to buy a system built for Vista, you'd really understand how great and such genius it is. I love my vista, and its so much better than XP.

I don't think a rewrite is needed. I think the only thing that is needed is the users to get hardware and update their software to the newer technology. I did and it works perfect.

An example: instead of tryin to use photoshop 5 on Vista, I just got CS3, and instead of using some 2003 graphics card, i just went to walmart and got one made for vista for under $100, and my system never crashes or slows down, or has any other errors that are caused by the system itself, which is a large step up for me from XP, or any other windows version.

I love Vista, and i'd be happy if windows 7 started off where Vista stopped. It can only get better from here.

Honestly, this entire hate thing with vista is starting to make me go crazy because i don't understand how so many people can have so many problems with vista, and i have had zero. makes me think they're just haters, but then again i am pretty sure that some people really want vista to work on their pentium 3 computers.

As far as I can tell three pain areas are partitioning tools (Vista really hates some,) RAID drivers (likewise,) and older development tools (which can be expensive to replace.)

For the first six-nine months I could understand that XP was just all around easier to get along with, while the drivers and app compatibility stabilized. Now, though, I can't imagine ever using XP again.

Oh I caught it, you just have no idea what you're talking about. The only "virtualization" in Vista is a bit of write re-direction so applications don't **** the bed when they suddenly can't write to certain parts of the FS/registry, what you want is a whole different beast entirely

It's pretty obvious you've never really used a virtualization solution. We had several deployed in my last workplace. Virtual PC/Virtual Server is pretty much what you see, but try explaining why your grandma needs to boot up ANOTHER OS to write an email or do some trivial task ala the classic enviornment in OSX. Don't forget to mention that she needs to shell out for another OS license, btw. I'm sure she'll be thrilled aobut that.

SoftGrid... well, heck, softgrid needs a virtual machine itself (or at the very least a spare real machine) to do the capturing, then you have to repackage and deploy the software. Oh whats that? You needed to install something to the context menu or interact with just about any other component on your system? Tough ****, ain't happening.

I don't know anything about Kidaro but I'm sure it's not that much simpler. My point is this is all way too advanced for your average user. They simply won't do it just to write a document or balance their checkbook. Buying a mac or even installing Linux is much less hassle.

It would be a massive undertaking to overcome these problems. It's easy to say they should, its a whole nother thing to actually go and do it. And to what benefit? So you can toss Win32 out of the system? You can already do that; Win32 is just a subsystem that runs on top of the NT kernel, which has been proven by pretty much anyone who knows anything about OS kernels to be fast, reliable, and extremely well designed. And if the whole point of virtualization is to keep compatibility with Win32 apps, well, why the hell don't you just leave the subsystem in there until you don't need it anymore and not take the performance and complexity hit virtualization incurs?

And while you're throwing away compatibility for virtualization, don't forget that you'll need an entirely new set of drivers. Don't worry, its no big deal. It's not like anyone had any problems with drivers when Vista was released.

People are claiming the Vista is bloated and blaming all this "compatiblity code" for taking up all the resources in their systems. Guess what? There's about 4 MB of compat code on your hard disk, and none of it is loaded until its needed. And outside of one check call, it doesn't have anything to do with kernel. What's taking up all the resources in Vista (mainly sucking up your RAM) is the new features in Vista: desktop search, SuperFetch and even the DWM. Turn off those features and you wind up with something like... oh I don't know, Windows Server 2008 which has received pretty much nothing but praise.

Just give Vista time and then it will be loved as much as XP.
In time drivers will catch up as companies revisit and rewrite them.

I mean anyone else remember when Win2k came out or NT3.5 came out. It took a while for drivers to really be written for them that worked and were stable 100% of the time.

And what happened to blackcomb --- As the vision changed so did the code name-- I mean don't we all wish we had a dime for all the code names that never was... Anyone else remember Neptune?

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/ac_preview.asp

also here is the wiki on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Neptune

I fail to see what's wrong with just expanding the implementation of the compatibility shims that XP and Vista already use (The Application Compatibility tab).


It seems like a much more elegant and lightweight solution than virtualizing a whole OS.

Now this is a topic that could help make the push to 8,000,000. Posts .

I do agree Windows 7 is not the vision blackcomb was.

In fact I think isn't it this Ski resort...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler-Blackcomb


Just a thought what if it was not a Windows version plan but instead a location for the next business meeting to discuss the next Windows. (The Whistler which became XP). And someone only heard what they wanted to hear.

That is just my thought.

Windows 95 (without IE4) to Windows 98 was actually a pretty considerable leap. You might be surprised how much was missing if you go back to 95. No quick launch, no drag-and-drop in the start menu, and the entire Explorer was very basic with far less extensibility.

I remember installing the Desktop Update with IE4.0 for Win95 and NT4.0 which gave it some if not all of what Win98 had... It also had preview in the side.


But yes it was a big leap... Though the question is have you ever installed Windows 95 using the old Windows 3.1 desktop. Instead of the Start menu-?

What Windows 98 had that Windows 95 did not have was better support for higher memory and drive sizes as well as Fat32 support.

Yeah but all the stuff that came with IE4 was basically the Windows 98 shell.

so i just caught up on what was said on this thread i started

Singularity: it's not something like a desktop O/S; it's just a small lil thingy for hardware and software geeks to go "Neee!!!" over lol

Neptune: yes; it's based on the old age Microsoft Encarta UI and navigation and it was soooooo cool! Just like the Longhorn concept video is cool today, Neptune was just as cool back in those days.... But of course they didn't go through with it; maybe they didn't want the whole OS to look like one big website hehe.

many posts are regarding the question WHY recode it from scratch? i could think of MANY reasons.... like i'm tired of how some developers release software that sticks its stupid driver(s) right at the very native boot opportunity and risk preventing Windows from starting, or just slow down the boot! A re-coded Windows with an appropriate loading time for such drivers would have a boot time of like three seconds!!! When Windows starts, the ONLY drivers that should be loaded are functional (i.e. filesystem, CPU, power management), and user experience (i.e. peripherals, audio, video) -- NOTHING ELSE! Why the f**k does Alcohol 120% want its stupid SPI CD-ROM driver thing to load during the Windows boot logo screen at the very beginning?!? They're just too lazy to make their stuff work by loading it later on when Windows starts that's why, and it's Microsoft that allows developers access to shove drivers there. Have any of you ever noticed that booting up after a clean Vista or XP install is only like 2 or 3 runs of the loading meter? And then after you install let's say the nVidia ForceWare drivers and you reboot, it is eternally gonna take about 6 or 7 runs of the loading meter! How annoying!

that's just ONE reason.

Anyway; I'm saying that re-coding from scratch is an excellent opportunity to do things right with no BS. Knowledge of how to make software work with today's hardware technology is exponentially more advanced, and it's limited by the current platform. For example I don't know about everyone else but the new "low-latency" Vista audio stack is laggy/choppy! I've gone through like 5 motherboards and 3 sound cards and like 6 installations of Vista ever since it was released, and no matter what, the problem persists! It's totally gone if you have a really suped up computer though, but even now with my X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro sound card, 2 gigs DDR2 RAM, etc. etc. and Windows Experience Index of 5.9, in Windows Media Player when I enable the crossfader, it's choppy doing the fading between songs!!!! Like COME ON!!! That's what happens when you remove the functionality of the audio stack from the kernel itself like it always has been. The whole architecture is just totally messed up. They NEED a fresh start!

Some posts express worry about compatibility with hardware devices and stuff. I'm sure that the thousands of beta testers would squish most all of such bugs. There could be a separate dev. team for the coded-from-scratch Windows and have it developed for like eight (8) years while regular Windows is being released on the side.

A favorite place that I like to goto is these to see the up and coming new toys....

http://research.microsoft.com/


But the really fun project that I think would make an interesting OS is.

http://research.microsoft.com/ui/TaskGallery/index.htm