Windows 7 Server to be 'minor release'

[13Gigatons]

Microsoft said on Monday in the US that the server version of Windows 7 would not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2.

In the past, Microsoft has used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as opposed to major changes to a product.

Microsoft declined to discuss what will be in Windows Server 2008 R2, but a spokesman confirmed that it is the server version of Windows 7. The release was due sometime in 2010, Microsoft said.

The server move calls into question just how different Windows 7 is going to be from Windows Vista on the desktop side. Steven Sinofsky, the head of development for the desktop version of Windows, has said that Windows 7 on the PC side would not make major changes to things like the kernel and driver model, but has maintained that it would be a major release of Windows.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/s...343,00.htm?omnRef=1337

When we started planning the release, the first thing some might think we have to decide is if Windows 7 (client) would be a ?major release? or not. I put that in quotes because it turns out this isn?t really something you decide nor is it something with a single answer. The magnitude of a release is as much about your perspective on the features as it is about the features themselves. One could even ask if being declared a major release is a compliment or not. As engineers planning a product we decide up front the percentage of our development team will that work on the release and the extent of our schedule?with the result in hand customers each decide for themselves if the release is ?major?, though of course we like to have an opinion. On the server blog we talked about the schedule and we shared our opinion of the scale of the releases of Windows 7 client and server.

Our goal is about building an awesome release of Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archi...0_of_5F00_release.aspx

I think Windows 7 will be a simple evolution to what Vista is now.

 

[nerp]

Yeah, this has been known for a while now. 7 will be driver compatible with Vista so all devices that have Vista drivers now should be able to work in 7 with no issues. This is the future of OS development and is similar to what Apple has been doing for years. Minor chanegs to the base OS with feature packages added on to warrant a new 'version'.

Just as tiger and leopard's cores aren't all that different, neither will Vista or 7.

With that knowledge, avoiding Vista for 7 isn't that tactical of a decision. You're just avoiding the inevitable changes you'll encounter in 7 that are already occuring with Vista.

 

[atbnet]

I don't really want to have a 'major release' to be honest. Vista SP1 gives me no trouble. My current uptime is 29 days and the last reboot was when the power tripped and for whatever reason my UPS didn't hibernate my PC. The only feature I would like to see is WinFS implemented. They need to be like Apple and keep it simple and not try to over do it.

 

[Jeff7181]

I'll probably stick with Vista then if Windows 7 just strips out the things ignorant people complain about that I enjoy... like Superfetch and UAC.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I'll probably stick with Vista then if Windows 7 just strips out the things ignorant people complain about that I enjoy... like Superfetch and UAC.

Does the "average" person even see a UAC notification after the first day or two? You and I may see them all the time, since we are accessing system controls, but most folks don't spend their day doing that. They browse, read email, and write letters. None of those pop up UAC warnings.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I'll probably stick with Vista then if Windows 7 just strips out the things ignorant people complain about that I enjoy... like Superfetch and UAC.

Does the "average" person even see a UAC notification after the first day or two? You and I may see them all the time, since we are accessing system controls, but most folks don't spend their day doing that. They browse, read email, and write letters. None of those pop up UAC warnings.

That's what I'm saying... I hope Microsoft doesn't listen to the vocal minority and remove such a worthwhile feature.

 

[xsilver]

Isnt the scary thing that if your regular windows user is stupid, then they are going to click YES when UAC informing them of malware/virus comes up anyways .
They should definitely let you turn it off, but should also provide a more "scary" warning when it comes up

 

[Jeff7181]

The fact that it asks what you want to do isn't the important part, the fact that it stops anything else from happening until you respond is.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Meh. They ought to just have invented a "sandbox" of categorical premissions for any given application like JAVA's JVM or SELINUX or even Flash (sort of) has.

Can I talk to the network {if so, where / what firewall rules}?
Can I read/write within my private directory?
Can I read/write elsewhere {if so, where}...?
Can I install new software?
Can I access the keyboard, screen, other devices {....}...
basically just categorize it by moderately simple to understand and administer rules similar to the existing firewall rules, file ACL / permissions rules, group policy rules, et. al.
Then if I get a pop up "MSN Messenger wants to Format C:, and this wasn't expected behavior!" dialog it is pretty clear, relevant, and informative.
As it is now a UAC alert doesn't really well you WHAT is happening, WHY it is happening, WHO is doing it, WHERE it is supposed to happen, etc. You know the basic questions of a journalist -- who, what, when, where, why.

And speaking of sandboxes, the priv. sep. protected mode for IE didn't go far enough. They should have just set up a VM and run the whole thing sandboxed in a VM with a very limited amount of read only or read / write folder sharing between the VM and host for things like downloaded files, configuration files, et. al.

Maybe they'll integrate some useful derivative of Hyper-V into Win-7-client. That'd be potentially good.

IE8 I think we can assume is a given unless it gets bogged down.

Front end code for all the MS "LIVE!" services like their online Office, email, IM, shared folders, maps, et. al. is a given; i.e. compete with google docs, gmail, google earth, et. al., and try to up-sell the subscription based services and "software as a service" stuff they're pushing for.

MS SAAS anti-virus & defender, likely.

.NET 3.5 / 4.0 (TBD), given / likely.

Some fixed version of Media Center or they just better get out of town.

WinFS or something at least a lot better with metadata / search / indexing seems likely.

Some useful backup solutions or get out of town...

File synchronization between PCs / PDAs / laptops or get out of town...

DX11 certainly.

64 bit oriented OS probably with little or no 32 bit "only" support.

Silverlight heavily integrated into the system / browser seems likely unless they give up on the whole concept by then.

SP2 level stuff for Vista to fix bugs and so on.

Basically mostly a SAAS / Cloud based / internet application oriented "front end" to Windows as we know it.

If they're clever they'll be developing some better generation 'embedded' light versions of some OS for things like netbooks, XOLPC, PDA/converged next generation media & communications device, android competitor, et. al.

As for a "major" release, they really need to get rid of the whole "file system" / "C:" type concepts at a low and high level, but at best for WIn7 I bet they'll just try to hide it / kludge it under WinFS 1.9 and with even more stuff like "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My viruses", et. al.

 

[Parasitic]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I'll probably stick with Vista then if Windows 7 just strips out the things ignorant people complain about that I enjoy... like Superfetch and UAC.

Does the "average" person even see a UAC notification after the first day or two? You and I may see them all the time, since we are accessing system controls, but most folks don't spend their day doing that. They browse, read email, and write letters. None of those pop up UAC warnings.

That's what I'm saying... I hope Microsoft doesn't listen to the vocal minority and remove such a worthwhile feature.

UAC actually is a pretty good concept and I really don't know why people complain about it. I used to turn it right off with my initial encounters with Vista, but now I don't even bother with it. The stuff only pops out when I try to use CCleaner so it's not big of a nuance.

SuperFetch is great but the issue with it is that Vista chooses to do it in a pretty big batch (and almost always right after explorer loads). This presents a problem to new Vista users because their initial impression with Vista gets ruined because of all that caching. If you are the unforgiving type that slowdown and disk activity will piss you right off and you'll jump on the Vista hating bandwagon.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

I hope they can make a consistent looking OS. There's no standard on Vista.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I'm not sure that 'superfetch' will still be relevant in 2010... look at all of the people with
4GB, 8GB RAM PCs today. By then I have to assume by Moore's law that it'll be quite standard to have that much (or more) RAM (the only thing holding it back has been the LACK of 64 bit Vista as a promient / default option in the market). That's enough RAM to handily cache most of the OS related metadata and files without the need to really play 'tower of hanoi' swapping out most recently used cache data in superfetch / readyboost etc.

WinFS + better metadata will only improve the access times and cacheing of data to the point that SF will not be needed much at all.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
I'm not sure that 'superfetch' will still be relevant in 2010... look at all of the people with
4GB, 8GB RAM PCs today. By then I have to assume by Moore's law that it'll be quite standard to have that much (or more) RAM (the only thing holding it back has been the LACK of 64 bit Vista as a promient / default option in the market). That's enough RAM to handily cache most of the OS related metadata and files without the need to really play 'tower of hanoi' swapping out most recently used cache data in superfetch / readyboost etc.

WinFS + better metadata will only improve the access times and cacheing of data to the point that SF will not be needed much at all.

I think your confusing readyboost and superfetch. You'd want superfetch with more memory, readyboost becomes less important (albeit, its used when waking from hibernation so there still is some benefit)

 

[QuixoticOne]

You're right, I guess I did sort of conflate those things in a non-specific post. I guess my overall point was that for a variety of reasons the technologies may be irrelevant in their current forms by 2010, though there may still be some benefit to successor technologies / implentations, but not for the reasons / use cases of today.
Now your typical $100 1TB 7200.11 or similar HD often exceeds 100MBy/s transfer rate.
Your typical "power user" desktop PC has 4GB or more.
Hybrid flash + mechanical HDDs will become commonplace in a year.
1TB size level solid state devices like the nanowire based technologies may well start to become common place within a couple/few years; even if we have nothing but FLASH it'd still be common for the system to have 8-16GB of that either built into the HDDs or otherwise by then.

Granted you'll always have to load your OS and applications / commonly used data files at least once, but if you have enough RAM the files will stand a great chance of being in the RAM or HDD's flash cache after that point. Loading it once will be pretty quick given the blazing fast HDDs we have today and better ones we'll have by then. Really there will be very little wait even if the MRU data isn't pre-loaded in the background, though of course loading it in the background via prefetch will eliminate that minor wait for the HDD.

One would hope that more systems are able to go into "sleep" mode and be "instant on" by that point, so again you'd be relying more often on RAM capacity and its preservation of already loaded data than on the speed of loading things that aren't already in RAM/HDD-flash.

Things like the netbooks el. al. might just totally do away with HDDs in favor of RAM + FLASH or other solid state storage by then, and be quite ubiquitous for most people's primary computing device.

I'd say the wait to load your MRU applications / OS is almost trivial for a well configured PC now and will be moreso by then due to these changes.

The elephant in the room that nobody's talking about (enough) is the 'library science' of search + indexing + metadata + management + backup of the multi-terabyte HDD / SSD datastores that will be common for most workstation type standalone PCs at that point. Caching, indexing, sorting, searching those stores of literally millions / billions of files will (and already do) dwarf any minor consideration we have today of "oh my microsoft word loads too slowly", "my PC takes too long to boot Vista" et. al. The size of the OS + applications is just NOTHING in comparison.