Microsoft (finally) releases Singularity, the research oriented operating system
By Ryan Block 
posted Mar 5th 2008 2:28AM
posted Mar 5th 2008 2:28AM
It's been in development for nearly half a decade, but this year at Microsoft's R&D extravaganza TechFest, the company finally lifted the curtain on its research-oriented Singularity OS. Let's just be clear from the get-go, though: while it's available for immediate use, Singularity is nowhere near anything you'd replace your desktop OS with. The sole intention here is to test out futuristic new concepts in application interaction, microkernel architecture, and so on, so don't expect to hear that Microsoft is hanging up the Vista apron or anything. But for the turbo-geeks in the crowd, the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 1.1 is now available for download for academic non-commercial use. And for the rest of us, well, we'll just see what the year 2011 holds in store.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Brush up on your Singularity theory
Read - Download that biz
Hmm, this is pretty interesting. I might have to check this out.
But I have a question, Ryan. Why the hell are we still awake?
Judging by the number of typos in this story, he's not very awake :P
Ugh, thanks, made a few corrections. That 17th straight hour of work can wear on a guy.
i don't see any typos, maybe i'm not very awake ... =P
Guess I'm also not very awake becase I onl see one typo
Or maybe he already corrected them. ;)
Ryan, there's still a typo...: while it's is available
Is it okay for normal people to read this? I'm scared from the picture.
What we really want to know is.... will it find Sarah Connor?
judging by the picture, it's actually the FINAL nail in HD-DVD's coffin.
Is it me or does the picture accompanying this story show Windows disappearing down a black hole?
Can you play Crysis on it?
The diagram makes it look like it's at the bottom of a black hole.
It is the "Event Horizon" is the mouth of the black hole
I always knew Vista would spawn a giant black hole...
event horizon was a pretty good movie, gates better not be planning any of that time travel crap though
The bottom of a black hole is vista.
Boots fine in Virtual PC .... doesn't boot fine on my X61 :( wah wah
Nearly half a decade? So 4 years? Doesn't sound nearly as epic when you say it that way though, sounds more like a normal development time for any large software project.
Thats just typical Ryan Block bias - dont worry about that... you'll get used to it!
You know, for a second I was thinking 'half a century' when I read the post, and then I realized: no, that's not right, MS wasnt even there in the 50s! Yeah Maybe I'm not very awake right now..
Actually, 2003 -- so about five years.
Yeah, Mr. Block needs to stop showing his blatant favoritism for Microsoft products. It's tearing this family apart. :(
Can you install it on Parallels? I'd like to try it, and the virtual environment seems perfect for that?
I didn't think the singularity was gonna happen until 2029??
Thats a relief. Since the world ends in 2012 that whole singularity business is just worry for nothing.
So half a decade? It still hasn't been in production as long as Duke Nukem Forever.
Don't do it!!!!! If this OS is anything like Vista, it could slow research to a crawl...
Am I the only one who has seen this similar image on the Simpsons. You remember it was a Halloween episode where Homer gets stuck in a 3D world when hiding from Patty and Selma? The image come just as Homer kicks a pointy cone and it pierces a hole in the floor, in turn causing the world to collapse in the black hole using the same image as shown in the blog.
lmao yeah i remember it was one of the Halloween specials. Homer went into a weird 3d world and i remember him saying "I am somewhere where I don't know". lol classic. Then he got hit by a 3d cone in the head and the ground started sucking him in.
I used it to run the 'Hello World!' program I wrote 22 years ago in class and got a BSOD.
I'll take a segfault over that anyday. I mean, how the /heck/ does an /application/ crash an OS?
That makes no sense.
so thats why Vista sucks!
Ah, so the next iteration of Windows will simply suck money and processing power out of the universe.
Fine, so I am a "turbogeek" - thought I was a plain old regular geek until now.
Reading the article, it looks like the singularity project is where Microsoft put all those smart people it hired over the years. Or maybe those who couldn't take the Vista crapfest anymore.. it sounds like it is what Vista should have been. Actual under-the-hood enhancements instead of "the shiny", efficiency instead of bloat. And a security concept at kernel level that sounds like it would work. I wonder why they even bothered with Vista? Wrong priorities in Redmond...
Oh for f***'s sake... A concept operating system called "Singularity"? Not since "One World, One Web, One Browser," has Microsoft made its intentions so clear with its marketing.
It would be interesting to see what OS market share would be like if mass media marketing didn't exist.
...grassroots FTW.
*cough*ubuntu*cough*
...maybe canonical will start running ads though, hard to say.. Maybe Dell will do it for 'em :)
It sucks so hard, it bends even the best idea.
It's so bloaty that its mass bends space-time.
It sucks so bad, good ideas go in and are never seen again.
So... You're saying this is kind of like Plan 9 from Bell Labs, right?
Singularity: Windows + so much bloat it starts attracting more bloat at an exponential rate until your hard disk collapses in on itself and then destroys the planet. Thanks a lot microsoft, way to go to kill us all.
But I've been calling all the time I've "wasted" on my XP "research oriented". Therein lies the need to upgrade to Singularity. Oh Microsoft, you are so diabolical!
A new universe powered by microsoft, now that's a scary thought!
You think seeing a cat twice is bad?
Hello, your ____ is gone!