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Old 05-12-2005, 03:34 PM   #1
Motown
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consoles vs pc's An alternate paradigm for the OS


A magazine I subscribe to had this article in it. I feel that the author really lays out a good path for a next-gen computing platform, and I think that linux really fits the bill.

<QUOTE>
Starting Fresh With Windows
The Saint by Alex St. John
Alex St. John was one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology. He is the subject of the book “Renegades Of The Empire” about the creation of DirectX and Chromeffects, an early effort by Microsoft to create a multimedia browser. Today Alex is President and CEO of WildTangent Inc., a technology company devoted to delivering CD-ROM quality entertainment content over the Web.

The last few columns I’ve written have been diatribes against the mess Microsoft is making of Windows security. Of course it’s always easy to criticize Microsoft, but it’s much more difficult to explain how it could be doing things right.

Let’s start with the premise that the Windows OS as we know it has to be junked. It was designed all wrong for the modern network-connected consumer and no patch can fix an architecture that was designed around assumptions that turned out to be mostly wrong. Windows XP is basically Windows NT, which was designed at a time when Microsoft was very focused on competing with Unix and mainframes for corporate dominance. It was thought by Microsoft at the time that a consumer OS was just a subset of an enterprise OS. The only networked world that anybody had extensive experience with was one that was contained within corporations and run by IT professionals in a highly controlled environment. “Security” meant not connecting the corporate network to the outside world and not letting users install software on their own. If a computer needed to be fixed, upgraded, or connected to a peripheral, that was the IT department’s job.

Nobody imagined a world in which every consumer would have to be their own IT department supporting home computers connected to a completely open network flooded with a mixture of benign and malicious software. As it turns out a modern home computer’s security needs are no “subset” of the enterprise, they are an entirely unique problem. Selling a stripped down Enterprise OS to consumers instead of an OS designed for consumers has resulted in much of the Internet turmoil we experience today. Trying to secure Windows as it is with a monthly burst of security patches is like trying to hold Jell-O together with rubber bands. Failing to control the flood of problems by simple means, Microsoft has been taking increasingly drastic measures to completely shut down OS functionality that it had previously promoted to consumers and its developer community.

What’s worse is that Microsoft has thousands of brilliant engineers working round the clock to pour more gas on the proverbial fire. Consumers don’t need a bigger, more complicated OS that achieves security through stringent restrictions on their use of the computer. What consumers need is easy to find in the most popular and widely used consumer computers in the world: game consoles. The features that make game consoles cheap, ubiquitous, inexpensive, secure, and reliable at running the most sophisticated and demanding computing applications consumers use (games) are simplicity and elegance.

What consumers need is not more giant, fragile OS features, but less.




Single-user text and image processing the Windows way on a $1000+ personal computer.

Nintendo’s GameCube, for example, is secure because it’s not attached to a network and has no hard drive to corrupt. It can only run one application at a time, and all applications are published by a single trusted entity on encrypted media. Notice also that an Xbox which has 64MB of RAM and a 768MHz Intel CPU and 8GB of disk space still runs games as well or better than most modern PCs with five times the computing resources and cost. Why? There isn’t a fat, sloppy OS in the way sucking up resources and obstructing efficient performance. The Xbox has a minimal Windows OS. Any OS services it doesn’t include gets shipped as libraries with just the games that need them. There are no consumer applications that are in widespread use that are more demanding of computing resources than a video game, so any solution that works great for games, should work great for all the other trivial applications consumers also use.

If we assume that we can’t live without a network or a hard drive, we find that an Xbox also appears to be very secure. Why? Because Microsoft runs a closed network for the Xbox, and nothing can install itself on the hard drive over the network without an encrypted CD published by Microsoft giving it permission. This may seem restrictive, but there are some valuable ideas here that give us the makings for a better consumer OS. If all applications on your computer, including the OS, were encrypted by the publisher, then it’s very difficult for a virus or spyware to infect the computer because each application would detect that it was corrupted on launch and presumably restore itself before proceeding.

If all applications ran in a protected memory sandbox, with access to the file system limited to their own resources, then it would be very hard for a malicious application to do any damage to a computer. This is basically the security feature that languages like Java achieve in software. Intel processors support this kind of sandboxing in hardware, but Windows does not make full (or correct) use of it to secure your computer. Properly hardware sandboxed you could browse and install software freely without worrying about damage to your computer or getting infected with software you couldn’t easily remove. The fact that today Windows can’t tell if it’s corrupted and doesn’t know what applications it has installed or how to remove them cleanly is a major design flaw for consumers.

In a hardware sandboxed environment, you wouldn’t need a firewall because software couldn’t install itself secretly and run all the time on your computer. You wouldn’t need antivirus or anti-spyware software because the OS would know where all applications were, how to remove them, and if the OS or any other applications in the system had been corrupted. Software wouldn’t be able to “spy” broadly because applications would only have access to their own data. Notice that nobody writes spyware or viruses in Java?




Single-user text and image processing the Windows way on a $1000+ personal computer.

There are many obsolete OS ideas that have become entrenched in the Windows architecture that represent a growing body of unnecessary security, stability, and support baggage. Multitasking was an idea invented in an era when computing resources were scarce and access to an expensive CPU had to be shared among many users. Virtual Memory was invented when RAM was scarce. Even the Windowing UI paradigm was created to conserve scarce screen real estate at a time when monitors were small, low resolution, and expensive. Today RAM, CPU power, and increasing screen real estate are cheap and abundant. Does your game console need all this Windows stuff to play a game? Does your DVD player need it to play video, or your iPod to play music? Has viewing, editing, and sending text and images become so much more complicated that you need a computer more than 1,000 times more powerful than you did 15 years ago to do the identical things? Probably not. Why is your computer slow, insecure, and unstable? Because you’re running an enterprise OS at home that devotes enormous resources to doing things you don’t need and its own complexity is the security hole.

In the console world there is only one “legitimate” publisher for a console. This is how consoles enforce security, quality, and content standards and guarantee a profitable market for content developers on their platforms. Console owners such as Sony and Nintendo take a cut of all software sales on their platform and provide marketing and distribution support for their content partners. Microsoft has always had a tendency to think of itself as being in competition with all other successful software publishers on the PC. Any software business or “platform” that has shown profitable potential, well, Microsoft has claimed for itself. If Microsoft instead acted like a console company and created programs to certify market and distribute legitimate third-party software to its users instead of obstructing online distribution, it could create a very lucrative console-like publishing business for itself. As Sony has clearly learned, it doesn’t have to make and own all the best games on its platform to make a tremendous profit; it simply has to set quality and security standards, enable distribution, and let the free market create the best products.

I’m not saying that Microsoft should become the exclusive software publisher and distributor for the Windows OS; only that it doesn’t have to completely surrender consumers’ online freedoms in the name of security. It isn’t necessary to block downloads, constantly handle pop-up warning dialogs, download patches monthly, and burden the OS with virus and spyware scanners when the OS architecture can be “inherently” secure through simpler more elegant design.

Multitasking with real-time 3D graphics and audio, supporting four concurrent players Nintendo's way on a $100 children's toy with no OS.

by Alex St. John
</QUOTE>

I noticed a distro on distrowatch a couple of days ago Symphony OS- It seems to have the same philosophy as what Alex St. John talks about, minus the third party stuff. If you pair an OS like this with some cheap modern hardware, you'd have a pretty versatile kick-butt platform.

Anyways, it's just an article that I found interesting and agreed with, so I thought I'd share.
 
Old 06-13-2005, 12:07 PM   #2
titanium_geek
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nice. must of taken you ages to type... thanks.

Yeah- microsoft just hasn't caught on to 'user security' have they.
 
Old 06-14-2005, 12:36 PM   #3
Motown
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Actually, I think that they will soon be way ahead of us. Once they release microsoft office for the XBox 360, it's all over. What need will you have for a crappy dell that costs $300 (usd), plus another $400 for gaming-quality video card, when you can buy the xbox360, which has kick-ass hardware, no spyware, no viruses, et cetera, for 300-400? It takes up less space, It's secure, will have an upgradeable hard drive, and you can hook it up to your tv.

If you're into linux just for the sake of being into linux, then there's no need to fret, but if you feel that linux is the rebel alliance to take down the evil empire, then you've got to reconsider the paradigm of your operating system, and really evaluate what people want their computer to do.

What we really need is a hardware vendor or two. And not just another OEM packaging red hat on their beige (or black) boxes, but a real entertainment appliance for anyone and everyone. Something innovative, and maybe a little more like a gaming console.
 
Old 06-14-2005, 01:04 PM   #4
J.W.
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My view on Microsoft's products is that they are just way too bloated to be considered state of the art. Look at Word -- in general, it's a great program, but why does it need a footprint of 100's of megs of space? That's totally unnecessary, all that extra complexity can potentially create security vulnerabilities, and why should the user have to pay for literally thousands of features and functionality that they will *never* use? If I were in charge of their software offerings, I'd offer 3 editions of each major package: a stripped down minimal version (to illustrate, for a word processor this would only include a few different fonts, a handful of basic formatting tools (bold, underline, indent), and maybe a spell checker), a standard version (more fonts, more formatting tools, more features) and then a full version (all possible functions). In other words, make it more like buying a car, where the base model can be enhanced by purchasing extra options if that's what the customer wants. Let's face it, does the typical Word user really need 200 different fonts, Greek mathmatical symbols, automated tabular and columnar formatters, etc, etc. I'd say No, but that's just me -- J.W.
 
Old 06-14-2005, 04:57 PM   #5
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Mostly agreed, but modern hardware can handle the bloat.

So, about your three different versions, you're saying you'd offer wordpad, works suite and ms office?
 
Old 06-15-2005, 12:52 AM   #6
J.W.
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Well, I'd say the issue isn't whether or not the hardware can handle it (obviously it can) but I look at it in the same way I look at buying something -- suppose you needed a widget, and the cost of the widget was $100. Now, maybe you could afford $100, but suppose you could obtain a suitable alternative for only $15. Would you still be willing to buy the $100 widget? I'd guess No, and that's the point of my post - there's no point at all in paying for a fancy widget when a less complicated, more basic widget would suffice equally well. Just rambling -- J.W.
 
  


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