NT daddy turns his hand to Xbox Ex-DEC VMS code king Dave Cutler, who moved to Microsoft to drive the development of Windows NT and later focus on Azure, is working to evolve the Xbox into a "complete home entertainment device". Dave Cutler Microsoft Fellow Dave Cutler Cutler's NT code is at the heart of all Windows builds today. He is a Senior Technical …
"...Now the best OS designer on the planet is coding for a game and advertising platform. Disgusting, if you ask me..."
Do games have no worth? It seems you're being rather snobby about some of the most highly performing and complex hardware and software stacks that exist, just because they don't do something you approve of.
That's a bit rich, unless you believe, as redmond does, that all the world is redmond. That this isn't true demonstrates mr. Cutler himself, as he is a well-known unix hater. For if all the world equals redmond, then logically unix cannot exist. Yet here we are, and it does.
Note that this is not about your assessment of the quality of their produce, only about the bit where you extrapolate from "made the best thing redmond ever published" to "the best OS designer on the planet". I can think of a few people whose designs I admire more, and no, that's well before considering linus or the gn00 crowd either.
Mac and win had to cave in for commercial reasons, I don't say you run next when you run Mac today, that purity exists theoretically when you run Darwin and window maker.
Hfs+ has no place on next either or those massive b tree files and forks.
I am talking about basic design philosophy is carried.
>>that's well before considering linus or the gn00 crowd either.
What is OS then? If it is a kernel, then gnu has no OS yet. As far the utilities and apps are concerned are here any better ones than the gnu-ed ones? Even apple uses bash.
Linus' creation is not really his, thanks to thousands of developers. No other kernel project has this power, not even mighty M$. That is why when some company needs to create its new OS it puts it on the LInux kernel, not VMS/NT Darwin or even *BSD.
Windows 2K was definitely great. It was a big enough rewrite of the NT kernel that it was impressive. It included major features such as the ability to gain hardware access without having to write major layers of code between cryptic drivers and terrible user land code. It made all kinds of things possible. What was best was the introduction of the windows driver model... which although today is burried under a million tons of often unreadable abstractions was fantastic... I loved how it finally made developing drivers for classes of devices much simpler... assuming the class was already part of the WDM DDK.
Windows XP fixed huge problems with the Windows 2K kernel. It was the only version of Windows which had a reliable system scheduler (assuming you were willing to write kernel code) and made it possible to get sub-millisecond latency for task switching for real-time applications... something utterly impossible on Windows 2K. There were bugs... but the XP kernel was a feature kernel which made programming multimedia apps a dream compared to earlier releases. It also added a much needed upgrade to the networking stack.
The XP kernel was definitely evolution on the 2K kernel though. The Vista kernel had the ability to be great, but gave up way to much stability and performance in exchange for massive amounts of features. They were needed and Windows 7 is finally back to where XP was on all fronts except real-time programming.
Windows 8 will be a total dream... but it'll piss people off all across the board. Especially since Microsoft has now joined the kernel code compiler with the user code compiler and as a result has "upgraded C++ to a first class citizen" as they said in the build conferences. Seeing that nearly everyone was hacking C++ into their drivers anyway, it's a good thing, but it means that eventually, there will be much more C++ code in the kernel itself. This isn't a bad thing itself, but it mean there's a chance eventually that certain kernel APIs won't be accessible except through a C++ or COM ABI which will be annoying. It's also possible that there will be kernel services that driver developers depend on which will be C++ instead of C which can cause huge problems for developers coding drivers for multiple platforms.
Vista was a distaster... but from a kernel perspective which is precisely what we're talking about in this case, Microsoft has been pretty damn good about improving over time. From an OS perspective overall? I have never seen anything past the kernel and its ability to start another process as being the OS... the shell and everything else is little more than applications on top of the operating system.
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I did not downvote your interesting and informative comment, however...
With all that there is still one big problem: whatever proprietary kernel is practically not modular.
If modularity is there, it could only be accessible to a handful of M$ developers.
Whereas, any other free and open kernel is modular, even Mac OSX -- the Darwin.
Availability of the feature when you can cd to you favorite branch (v3.0 of Linus' git tree in my case), git cherry-pick commits you like revert whatever you dislike for the NT kernel is akin discovery of intelligent life on Venus.
Linus and RMS are the men!
This guy is obviously a genius (or at least as close as you can get) so if he's really on board with the XBox team and is allowed to help drive the design of the hardware as well as the OS then he could help produce something that EVERY home will want, not just a (relatively) few gamers. Even technologically inept people realise now that an internet connected TV is the way things are going and Microsoft obviously want people using their kit. As a PS3 owner I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.
Depsite the fact MS got where they want due to PC openness they hate it. The benefit of the xbox is it's locked down tight. Tighter than anything Apple has done. The more the xbox grows the more control they have and they can charge you a subscription fee for their heavily filtered internet access.
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I'd much rather see him devote his undoubted skills to doing something exciting AND useful with RaspberryPi or similar.
Of course, the point about being a Microsoft Fellow is not primarily that you are doing useful things for Microsoft and their customers, it is primarily that you are NOT doing anything at all to help any potential MS competitor.
"What makes you think a software guy is going to have any hardware skills?"
Fair question. Your average software guy doesn't have hardware skills. Cutler isn't your average software guy,
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Who killed Desktop RSTS in 1979 from manfacturing prototypes and ran off to Microsoft? Called PCs/desktops a senseless packaging exercise? The guy has real grasp of people and hardware and the cybernetic loop, indeed, not.
Coulda shipped before Estridge/IBM, with Basic (interpret/complie), CoBOL, ForTran, DBMS, WP, and 40K available software packages competing with an 8086 with an assembler and a truly unbelievably bad BASIC.
Coulda been a contenda.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/happy_32.png
it would guess that Microsoft forked W2K when they did the XBox and have not kept it updated because as a game console it's multi-tasking of processes and resource usage wasn't of much concern given the tightly controlled gaming API's and single tasking nature of a "game console". Now, Microsoft wants the "game console" to also do TV and DVR functions, network streaming, social media events, etc. So maybe Dave is getting called in to help bring the aging W2K kernel up to date for this.
Or the next version of the XBox is going massively parallel(CPU or GPU or both) and again, the kernel needs rebuilding.
Is this groundhog day?
There was me thinking I could fire up my 2006/7 vintage Xbox 360 and with the current updates I can...
A. Play games. (standalone or online)
B. Communicate with friends.
C. Play music
D. Play Movies
E. Stream content from my Pogo drive (music/movies/TV shows).
F. Access On-Demand content (netflix/youtube etc, iplayer)
G. Bing t'interweb.
Ok so to me knowledge I can't surf online, bu then thats what my netbook/fondleslab/phone are for.
So what additional content could I expect to make my Xbox360 more "media" orientated?
A console became media center? Fine but how can that company stand the idea of a full remote control for android shipping on android market? Seriously, they don't even release a live messenger client for android, they use a puppet/ officially licensed company.
A full feature remote for android matters since xbmc has one.
Cutler, who is a genius who saved Microsoft with his NT should really sit and speak to them again, perhaps they can listen to him and understand what kind of an universal device with support for standards (including matroska/mkv) people expect. Hope they don't confuse themselves with Apple. Only Apple can sell Apple TV with such specs. People using Microsoft products have no such patience or understanding.
I mean he came from VMS and built the NT kernel so it would be like VMS. However there's very little of it left in actual Windows. After all most Windows systems are run as single user systems with the user being administrator. All those nifty security features are useless when the browser offers you to execute any file you download from from the Internet.
Advanced operating design in games consoles probably might be interresting, however there's little money in that. Most likely you'll end up with a simple loader, which is heavily "secured" by code signing.
How many VMS servers are/were there, how many Windows NT series servers are there, just at this moment in time?
The use of workstations tends to promote single user use, the use of admin accounts is changing, pretty quickly as since Vista you've been forced to use a standard user by default.
I also think that games console OSes are rather more complicated than you realise.
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