From: Greg Knaddison greg.knaddison@gmail.com
If you want to compare CentOS to this, then you have to realize that this "lightweight" version of MS will only run a remote desktop session (Terminal Service), a browser (IE), a music app (MSWindows Media Player), a virus scanner and a file navigation utility (Explorer).
They are basically "Thin Clients" using a PXE boot, although local installation is an option.
Long story short, Microsoft has _never_ produced a "consumer" Windows product, not DOS7 "Chicago" nor NT, that is "read-only" bootable. That's been a major limitation of DOS/NT versus UNIX systems, they _require_ the filesystem to be "read/write" during the boot process. Most of this is due to the more "consumer" libraries designed for DOS7 "Chicago" Windows (9x/Me).
At the most they've created an ultra-light Win32 kernel with just enough to RDesktop out of a EEPROM. But even when they did, companies like Wyse and many others opted for a BSD kernel with Citrix code instead of Microsoft's.
This is a totally different issue. Microsoft is trying to do what UNIX X-Terminals, Workstations and other UNIX-based Thin Clients have done for years. This isn't "innovative" it's "catching up" to UNIX.
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org