Microsoft Midori: That Sounds Familiar?

I just read this article on the BBC’s website.

Apart from being a complete waste of screen space from a serious point of view, there were a few tit-bits that seemed worth looking at:

Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on.

“Windows worked well…”. Did it? Really? When? Never heard of that before. lol.

Then we get this real pearl of wisdom from the chaps who gave us Winframe…

“If you think about how an operating system is loaded,” said Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, “it’s loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine.

“The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware,” he said.

That, he said, created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine.

Well if that isn’t stating the f****ing obvious I don’t know what is… And he goes on to say:

This means, he said, that Windows can struggle with more modern ways of working in which people are very mobile and very promiscuous in the devices they use to get at their data – be that pictures, spreadsheets or e-mail.

What? You mean like when these people don’t use Windows? And they realise that all their stuff is tied into some M$ application software that ONLY works on Windows. Well, tough luck; that’s what happens when you play with monopolies. Try using Open Standards and Open Applications (like OpenOffice.org) instead.

The article then rather strangely moves on to talk about virtualisation technology.

Midori is widely seen as an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to catch up on the work on virtualisation being undertaken in the wider computer industry.

That’s not what I thought it sounded like. It sounded more like an attempt to make a small kernel based OS that was portable between and across many different hardware platforms. Oh hang on a minute. I’ve heard about something like this before…

What’s that thing that runs on really small things, mobile phones, mini laptops, desktops, laptops, appliances, super computers, servers and runs all these new “cloud thingies”?

What was it again?

Ahhhhhhhh yes, that’s it. Now I’ve got it!

It’s called Linux.

Even more funny is this from 2001:

Midori Linux is an Open Source project for delivering system software on small devices. Midori includes a build system, a Linux kernel with memory- and storage-conserving features, and system-level support for running normal Linux software.

So maybe M$’s Midori is Linux afterall…

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One Comment

  • Troy says:

    Of course the OS is tied to the hardware, you can’t f***ing run anything unless you have access to the hardware!

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