
Coding Horror: Has The Virtualization Future Arrived? - twampss
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001258.html
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randomtask
"The original system requirements for Windows XP are almost comically low".

Is an operating system to only be taken seriously if it requires a significant
amount of resources to run?

~~~
mechanical_fish
In the Windows world? Yes. By no coincidence whatsoever: Windows customers
have been _trained_ to this behavior, over decades, by Microsoft and Moore's
Law.

Microsoft thrives when people buy new PC hardware, because the easiest way to
acquire a customer for a new Windows license is to bundle that license with
every PC sold. [1] And Moore's Law provided great leaps in processing speed
every year or so. So there was never any incentive to save on resources. Quite
the contrary: A Windows release which pushed the envelope of compatibility
with current hardware encouraged fence-sitting users to bite the bullet and
buy a new PC -- with a new Windows license -- rather than watch their apps
gradually slow down or become incompatible as app developers gradually
introduced features of the new Windows into their codebases.

Among other things, think of it as a subtle form of copy protection. Back in
2001, you could buy one copy of Windows XP and install it on all of your Win98
boxes. But it would run like crap. Better to just buy some new boxes -- each
of which comes bundled with a copy of XP.

Of course, once PCs and Windows became "good enough" the whole strategy fell
apart. We seem to be in that world now. The new rage in consumer computing is
netbooks and smartphones -- machines that _deliberately throw away_
performance in exchange for other useful characteristics like "cheapness" or
"lightness" or "low power consumption".

\---

[1] For years it was nigh-impossible to get a company like Dell to sell you a
PC without a Windows license included. Linux users complained and fought for
years over this "Microsoft tax". For all I know, this is still a problem.

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old-gregg
What I don't understand is why people keep voting up CodingHorror posts: that
blog has never been interesting... mostly boring observations of obvious
facts, nearly always somehow Windows-centric. Even Barnes&Noble "gets it" by
now - their Windows/.NET books have been pushed into the bottom shelves to
make up room for Cocoa, Python, Ruby development and Ubuntu books.

Yeah... virtualization. Yeah, good way to run legacy apps, here is a screen
shot of how it works, see kidz?

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gordonguthrie
When I worked on a large contract for a customer with 20,000 desktops and a
couple of thousand servers we used to take great delight in waxing about our
server virtualisation to major hardware vendors... and then drop the bomb that
we had virtualised 250 instances of Windows NT...

NT was (then) 7 years out of support and is nearer 10 now. But if you have
apps that run on it, they still run on it...

However trying getting an replacement network card with NT drivers these days.
Virtualisation is your man...

~~~
sep332
You know "waxing" means "growing," not "talking," right?

~~~
talboito
I imagine it was a play on "wax poetic", but then this comment should be about
the content of the OP's post, not one upping their spelling.

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nx
I hate Jeff, but this post makes sense: instead of being constrained by the
backwards compatibility requirement, one can just pack every past version of
the software on each release, just like HTTP clients and servers do when they
ask for the protocol version.

~~~
potatolicious
I see this also as a way of getting developers to stop being so damned lazy.
If I were MS I'd start stripping deprecated API calls out of the OS
immediately - force anyone who's still running an ancient code base that they
refuse to maintain to virtual mode. This might light a fire under their asses
to get "Windows 7 compatibility" (i.e. no lame dead API hooks) higher
priority.

Back-compat has always been the main force that held MS back, I'm glad they're
doing something about it.

~~~
mooism2
If MS strips out deprecated APIs, won't they have to include virtualised XP
with all new versions of Windows, and not price discriminate on it? They don't
want horror stories of Aunt Tilly not being able to run her favourite apps on
her new PC and blaming Windows.

~~~
potatolicious
The thing is, Aunt Tilly is likely to run apps like IE, Outlook, Office, and
Firefox, all of which are run by teams that are professional enough to keep
their code up to date. It's unlikely that these guys can't have "Windows 7
compatibility".

The horror stories will come from enterprise software, where companies are
running Win3.1 binaries even to this day, and where developers are _even
lazier_.

And there's no reason to strip out WinXP compatibility per se from Windows 7 -
IMHO the OS needs to keep native back-compat for at least the last couple of
generations - but anything older shouldn't be in the code base.

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mcantelon
Can people play their XP games via the virtualized layer?

If not, then there isn't true backwards compatibility, just more bloat.

~~~
miguelpais
That's true, but when MS decided to make all versions of windows backward
compatible, I think they were thinking more about companies than the home
user. Companies are the ones who really need to be able run their programs on
their machines, sometimes really old programs that no longer have support or
alternatives they can choose from.

~~~
rbanffy
If you have to run ancient applications that no longer have support, then you
deserve to run ancient applications that no longer have support ;-)

You should always have an exit strategy.

But running an emulated Windows environment is not the worst possible
scenario.

~~~
MrRage
These ancient, unsupported apps aren't things like spread sheets and word
processors, they're industry specific applications. They're much more
expensive to create and update (and buy) because of limited demand, and
there's often little choice in what software a company can use.

I've been working on a project to upgrade a old DOS based industry specific
app to a "modern" browser app. There are still people using the DOS based
version, and our main client for the browser app is still using Windows 2000
and IE 6.

~~~
rbanffy
I have suffered a similar fate. Back in 1998 I had to translate the shipping
cost calculation of a huge brick-and-mortar store in Brazil written in FoxPro
- it was the _only_ documentation on how to calculate it they had and finally
I gave up on understanding it and made a line-by-line translation for their
web store.

It ran for about five years, until the company went bankrupt.

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jballanc
I'm sorry, but if virtualizing an old OS in order to forego concerns about
backwards compatibility is "The Virtualization Future", then it arrived on OS
X in 2001...

