>Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.
A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.
>Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.
>To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.
>It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."
I once went through the VMS documentation, and could at least find some of the design ideas that I knew from Windows NT.
I think it is good that the industry enjoys different types of OS architectures and designs.
Just because UNIX managed to spread as it did, doesn't mean it is the be all of OS design. After all, its creators tried to fix UNIX, just the industry did not adopted it.
In the 2001 audio book Arthur C Clarke had a 15 minute intro where in it (amung other things) he explicitly says it is a coincidences and lists the page in the book explaining what HAL stands for.
Thanks for the tale, heartwarming to hear that he is still at Microsoft. In my view some of the best work in our industry has come from lifers (or at least long-timers).
I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and security.
One thing VMS was not was quirky, DEC went to considerable effort to make everything consistent. If you didn't know a command you could guess it, and it would take the same switches as any other command. Contrast that with Unix whose commands really are quirky...
Given by background was UNIX, it certainly felt quirky, but it was very consistent. The "why the heck are there 4 of the same file" moment is a little odd. It was a good OS.
Reminds me of when CNET was blacklisted by Google for publishing Schmidt's personal info that was available on Google searches after he downplayed privacy.
please stop spreading this as though it were fact. The OHA terms don't prevent you from shipping an alternative browser. They could if google wanted to, but they currently don't.
And the only carrot has to enforce compliance with the OHA is the google apps suite including chrome. If you don't want chrome and the other google apps, you don't have to comply with their compatibility tests.
It works! The lack of an agreement between Amazon and Google has yet to be a hindrance on my new Kindle Fire. All but one of the apps I wanted is in Amazon's store, and that one app was available as an .apk.
That doesn't help companies like Skyhook(and Mozilla if Firefox too is banned by the agreement) because almost all OEMs are current members who are bound to the agreement:
HTC
LG
Sony
Samsung Electronics
ASUSTek
Garmin
Huawei Technologies
Sony Mobile Communications (joined as Sony Ericsson)
Toshiba
Acer
ZTE Corporation
Alcatel Mobile Phones
Compal Communications
Dell
Foxconn
Haier
Kyocera
Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd.
NEC
Sharp Corporation
Saygus Corporation
Care to guess the marketshare of Android handsets not shipped by one of the above?
Anyway, I don't begrudge Google doing this, I only have an issue with the bastardization of the word "open". AOSP and Android are very different, and when people say Android is open, they actually mean AOSP is open, since Android as shipped on devices is very different and contains a lot of proprietary things.
When I saw the comment, the story had 6 points i.e 5 upvotes.
Even making the huge assumption and leap that it was all MS employees and no one else voted on it who thought it was interesting news, I don't know if 5 counts as a "large contingent".
To be clear, I am not in favor of this campaign and I did not upvote the story.
IIRC, the biometrics profile is stored locally on the device, just like the iPhone 5S, and is never synced to the cloud. If you sign in on two consoles, you have to go through the biometrics setup process twice.
The device runs arbitrary code. It's trivial to have a module that runs locally, downloads a "wanted list" and returns a probability of match for each entry.
This functionality will almost certainly be implemented given how effective it would be in locating young males.
I can't tell if you're serious or not. "Almost certainly"? If this were true, why wouldn't every smartphone already have this? Turn on the front-facing camera and send a picture of the user to the FBI. We've had this capability for years, and the Xbox doesn't add much new to the equation.
Spyware deployed by law enforcement like Finfisher does capture and transmit photos and audio.
In terms of mass surveillance, only very recently has facial recognition been built into phones and penetration is still low. It is also easier to detect because of limited connectivity and conspicuous bandwidth and battery usage. But yes it will become almost as easy to do it on phones in the near future.
Given what we now know about surveillance the claim that facial recognition and gait analysis on the Xbox One will be used in mass surveillance shouldn't be contentious.
It's an easy sell: "NSA/FBI: If we had such a system deployed during the Boston bombing we could have found the perpetrators in a matter of hours instead of days."
"POTUS: What about privacy concerns?"
"NSA/FBI: The biometric data is stored on the users machines, we only query the Xbox network for individual suspects and return high probability matches, it's not mass surveillance at all!"
Except that it's closed source so who can really tell?
Anyone with a computer and Wireshark.
And even if it is now, who says a 'security update' won't change that in the future?
Do we want to get into justifications about what could possibly be done with a technology and therefore refuse to use said technology? I've heard Kinect could identify the guns in your house and send the police automatically!
This assumes that the information is not encrypted, for one.
> Do we want to get into justifications about what could possibly be done with a technology and therefore refuse to use said technology?
When it comes to security, yes, you must consider all vectors. See the two news stories below about cell phones doing similar things as far back as 2006.
So people are also refusing to use the PS4 camera, their cell phones, any laptop with a webcam, any tablet, the Moto X with its always-on microphone, etc? Because they could be used to infringe on privacy?
It's about risk management. What's the potential harm, what's the likelihood of that harm, and what would be the impact if this were to be used maliciously? It sounds to me like people are rejecting this because a) Microsoft and b) rumors and speculation.
Same with almost all smartphones with cameras and microphones that people have with them 24/7 and even take to their bedrooms and bathrooms. Even on Android, the baseband and many drivers are closed source. I fail to see how this is any worse.
The difference is that because Xbox One feels like it's watching you, people's minds jump to how people could end up watching you, even though the actual risk is far less than with the devices you mentioned.
Why does it feel like it's watching you? The Moto X is constantly listening to you. The PS4 has a camera as well, along with every smartphone. What's different about the Xbox?
The article did say that 40 comments is the minimum cut-off before the flamewar penalty is applied.
However, the flamewar detector seems to be throwing the baby with the bathwater in many cases, with legitimate stories going off the front page(and then some posters mistakenly assuming it was because of flagging).
Here's a very good post about the chilling effect of the flamewar detector.
>The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.
Sure it does, but when some of the profit increases are made by deliberately decreasing contrast of the background of the ads and avoiding borders to increase ad clicks, especially from old people who are unable to see contrast [0][1], that's when it crosses the line into "decline" of the user experience. They(along with other search engines) got smacked by the FTC [2], it's an interesting read.
That plus shoving Google+ down the throat of people and making them literally cry [3] (yes I mean literally) in an effort to compete with Facebook at any cost leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and reminds me of how Microsoft got it's M$ moniker.
Micro$oft leveraged their market dominance to stifle competition. Google leverages their market dominance to... get more people to create more data with real names.
Microsoft leveraged their market dominance to distribute more copies of Windows and Office, not to stifle competition. Your statement makes it sound like you don't understand the profit motive.
Distributing more software is how they earn more money. The $ reveals what you think of Microsoft, and going by that, one would have to assume you think Microsoft's goal was to optimize profit. Optimizing profit would require distributing more copies of their software.
Maybe you're older or maybe you know something more than me but Micro$oft I remember already won the Windows and Office game. It was Borg Gates by my time. They then used that market dominance to handicap, break, or deny entries by anyone else into the platform. They also used it to make Internet Explorer a thing.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about the profit motive either. Distribution doesn't necessarily means profit nor driven by profit.
They could have tossed Windows on to blank CDs and threw it out of helicopters if they want but it serves no purpose when they were making fat margins licensing Windows to Dell.
A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.
From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros...
>Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.
>To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.
>It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."