[GRLUG] M$* Blue

[Michael Mol]

On 05/10/2013 01:33 AM, Mike Williams wrote:
> It's a bit of history repeating itself. In the days of Windows 2000 and
> such, Microsoft did their unification theory between server OS and
> desktop OS. Windows 2000 (and I'm pretty sure NT 4, but this knowledge
> is rusty) had basically identical code for workstation and server
> products. Slight tweaks to the scheduler, different licensing models,
> and the option of installing more server applications were the only
> differences between server and workstation. So server hardware had to
> run the full, fairly processor-intensive for its day, NT 4 GUI on
> servers that nobody ever used as workstations. While 100 megs of memory
> and 4 megs of video memory are trivial these days, servers of the day
> didn't always have that to spare. Linux made a better server OS in many
> cases because you could save a significant fraction of the machine's
> meager resources by not running the GUI.
> 
> It's a similar problem with Windows 8. Like a server is not a
> workstation, a desktop is not a tablet! MS figured this out in later
> server versions, differentiating them from the desktop OS even though
> they share quite a bit of code, but they're trying to make something
> that works as both a tablet-on-the-go operating system and a
> desktop-at-real-work, and it isn't working. I've been forced to use
> Windows 8 a bit at work (because somebody, somewhere really loves the
> Surface), and it feels like a toy. This big, animated tiles thing so I
> can quickly pick out the one application I want  to look at, rather than
> the start menu that takes up a small amount of screen space to let me
> add another running application to the five I already have going.
> Windows 8's interface might be perfectly viable if I just need to read
> something during a commute (consuming content), but it sucks for doing
> any real work (creating content).
> 
> Yes, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Yay, a soapbox thread. :)

So, Microsoft developed something called Windows Core. I forget if this
started with Vista or Win7. I think Vista. Anyway, the purpose of
Windows Core was to make the system much, much more modular. I forget
what the minimum requirements for the fully stripped down core are, but
I remember they sounded insanely low when announced.

You can see this some of this modularity when you "Add/Remove features",
but it's most clearly visible if you do the online-upgrade. If you've
got Win7 Starter, but you've got a product key for Win7 Ultimate, you
can load up the Control panel, go to System, click "Add features with a
new version of Windows", enter your product key, and it will download
and load in the new modular bits.

This is different from the XP era, when you could enable higher-grade
SKUs' features with simple registry hacks...I once turned my cousin's XP
home machine into a Terminal Server; I was doing my taxes over a web
browser over RDP while he was playing CounterStrike...

The upshot of all this is that they can rip out some components if they
need to fit into a smaller platform, and they can replace subsystems
with slimmer versions, if needed. They actually provided themselves with
a decent foundational platform once they got Windows Core going for them.

[snip]


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 555 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20130510/165849bd/attachment.pgp>