- page 2

Recently Gabe Newell of Valve, the developers behind Half-Life 2, stated that if coding a game engine with in-order processing had a difficulty of one out of ten, then out-of-order processing raised the difficulty to four out of ten, while efficiently coding for a dual core processor was the full Monty of ten out of ten. I can see his point but it seems to me that Newell is being selfish and assumes that his latest game should command the entire resources of your PC. With a multicore processor that uses virtualisation Half-Life 3 should think that it has the entire PC at its command but in fact it will be just one application among many, albeit an app that will use most of your graphics card and a fair chunk of your processor too.

Virtualisation is a neat trick but it effectively puts the processor in conflict with the Operating System as Windows wants to take control of which app runs where, while the next generation of processor is trying to trick Windows into running in an environment that has been created by the hardware. It could be argued that virtualisation transforms Windows from an Operating System into a mere program loader, and I suspect that there are many of us who wouldn’t be too upset with that state of affairs.

Microsoft will have views on the subject of course, and as it is already using a multicore processor in Xbox 360 it is undoubtedly going to defend the importance and value of Windows tooth and nail, which brings us neatly to Windows Vista.
We currently expect Vista to ship on the 6th December 2006 but it’s a very different creature to the beast that was promised when project Longhorn first started out.

Of course Vista will look pretty and no doubt it will further embed DRM (Digital Rights Management) into everything that we do but we know for a fact that WinFS won’t be part of Vista when it was originally supposed to be one of the central pillars of the software. WinFS is a file system that lives on top of a database and it will be in Beta at the time of Vista’s launch. WinFS will be released in versions for both Windows Vista and Windows XP ‘at some point before the next client release’ which ties Microsoft down to a vague date somewhere between 2007 and 2011.

WinFS is used to ‘Unify, organise and explore your data’ which is wonderful if your documents, emails and photos are tagged in the same way as your MP3s. That way you’ll be able to search for photos taken in France in 2003 which include James and Sarah but not Richard. But how will these tags or metadata get added without a spectacular amount of work? No doubt new versions of Photoshop and Office will include suitable features but the mountain of existing data on your hard drive would rather seem to be excluded.

A cynic would suggest that WinFS, which runs on .NET 2.0, is intended to steer PC users away from the evils of Linux or Mac OS as there is surely no way on God’s Green Earth that Microsoft will allow competitors to get their mitts on .NET. This means that Windows XP and Vista with WinFS will have an entirely new dimension in which to display data that simply won’t be available to other Operating Systems. That same cynic might conclude that WinFS is a rearguard action to lock Windows users in as tightly as possible, rather than a new and exciting direction for PC technology which rather suggests that we should look to AMD and Intel for genuine progress with our Operating Systems.