Windows 7
Of course, I can’t say anything about the Microsoft deal, which is of course the #1 most popular conversation topic at
Yahoo right now. But, it has got me thinking (again) about that piece of crap operating system they make up in redmond. Now, I know there are a lot of super smart people up in redmond working on windows, so I assume that the crappiness of windows comes from poor design decisions made early on (before things like security and multiple users were considered important for a desktop OS) and the nightmare of maintaining backwards compatibility.
So what is MS to do? It seems based on vista and recent news about SP1 that they have hit a wall with Windows NT, they can’t get the crappy out. So I propose its time to through it out and start over. Now, you can’t do that easily, but if you were here would be the goals of the project:
- multiuser from the ground up
- support SMP to take advantage of multi-core processors
- designed to be secure at the base level
- preserve a “windows” user interface
- POSIX compliant
- backwards compatible
- run on x86
- Not be GPL
So, that’s a really big project. But I propose microsoft do what apple did when facing this kind of project–go buy yourself a real operating system. And that operating system is SCO Unix. Now available at a bargain price. You would take SCO Unix, port a bunch of drivers, port the various .net/MIL/WPF stuff over to give it a windows interface. Now you have a secure os that runs on x86, has a windows interface, supports all the design goals but one and does not suck. And the good news about backwards compatible is that with modern, very fast processors (including those that support hypervisor) backwards compatibility can be maintained with a virtual machine, possibly using a very light version of the windows kernel.
Done and done.