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You must be pretty retarded if you find the Media Center software hard to use, it comes with a remote control, plugs into your television, and it's as easy as selecting "Music"->"Albums"->"My Album", and your playing music. All the other features such as video watching/recording, photos etc are equally as simple with an elegant interactive menu system which even President Bush could operate. I'm guessing you've actually never used it, in which case go here for a peek at what it is really like.

applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows,
In what alternate reality? Windows, in particular, is completely schizo. You've got so many toolkits:

Office XP toolkit. Note the lack of Luna-style buttons.
The Visio toolkit. Note the freaky blue gradient toolbars.
The .NET toolkit. Note the flat buttons and .NET combobox.
Windows Media Player 10 theme.
And here's Luna. Note the distinctive Luna-style buttons and tabbar.

Now, this doesn't count any non-Microsoft apps! Yes, all this schizo-osity is from a single company! Throw iTunes in there, or ephpod, or musicmatch, or AOL (all common apps), and you get even more schizo-osity. Just having GTK+ and Qt is looking pretty good right now, isn't it?

64 bit Windows games are hardly worth discussing until we get an OS. Latest release date is sometime in the 1st half of 2005.

Recent article:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_x64 _preview.asp

Feck! Not any more ..

From Paul Thurrot's excellent WinINFO Daily (27/9/04):

Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts

Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft will announce today that the company is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that lets nonpaying customers access their Hotmail email from Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), an extension of the HTTP protocol on which the Web is based.

"Since we implemented Human Interactive Proof (HIP) to ensure that only humans and not automated systems were opening Hotmail accounts, spammers have found other ways to go after the system," MSN Lead Product Manager Brooke Richardson told me in a prebriefing Friday. "Recently, there's been an increase in exploits of the WebDAV protocol, which is used to enable people to access Hotmail from Outlook and Outlook Express. We've offered [this access] for free for some time, although it's typically a feature that other email providers charge for. But because of the rise in abuse of this protocol, we're making a change to WebDAV to curb abuse. Over the next few months, we're transitioning WebDAV to be available only to customers of our subscription services, such as Hotmail Extra Storage and MSN Premium. We expect this change will help us to more effectively stop spam emanating from Hotmail."

Richardson said that only a small percentage of free Hotmail account holders use the WebDAV feature. "About 5 to 10 percent of people have it set up," she said, "but most don't use it. And among that group, most activated it once, then never used it again. About 95 percent of our users don't use the feature." Richardson was also careful to note that this change doesn't mean that Microsoft is walking away from its nonpaying users. "We continue to invest heavily in Hotmail," she said. "We've recently instituted antivirus scanning and cleaning and brought back the [free] MSN Calendar. And we're actively moving free customers to the new storage allotments we announced earlier this summer." Richardson said that the company will upgrade storage allotments for all free Hotmail accounts by the end of the year. Microsoft has already upgraded paying customers, such as those who opted for Hotmail Extra Storage, she said.

Microsoft won't immediately shut off nonpaying users who have enabled Outlook or Outlook Express access to Hotmail. Instead, the company will phase out those customers over several months and give them plenty of warning that the change is coming. "Free Hotmail customers who want to use WebDAV have two choices," Richardson said. "They can opt for Hotmail Plus, which offers 2GB of storage space and 20MB attachments for just $19.95 a year. Or they can subscribe to MSN Premium." Microsoft will continue to enable WebDAV for customers of both products, she said.

PSdiE

Yes you need a database, which is why WinFS has preinstalled schemas for People, Organisations, Places, Events, Tasks, etc.
Windows already has a built in address book WAB, or you could use Outlook or some other program. With WinFS the contact database is unified and accessible from all applications, things that people would need outlook for today can be done through the shell.
So either import your old contact database, or start up an IM client and have it fetch your contacts from the server, or receive an email from someone and add their address, and you will quickly build up a set of contacts to link your documents to.

This screenshot shows the integrated contact history prototype. It combines together all the past emails, IMs, SMS messages, Phone Calls etc from or to a particular person. I'm sure someone will come up with an IRC client that integrates with it as well.

I agree, however at least he recognizes IE as a has-been.

Overall, IE's improvements are welcome, though I wish the company would take the extra time to bring IE up-to-speed with the competition. I use Mozilla Firefox for my daily browsing needs and will continue to do so.

from his review on SP2

What the fuck is Microsoft smoking with Longhorn? 2 taskbars, 2 clocks, huge huge huge amounts of wasted space with every window having a giant banner with common (and useless) tasks across the top. Giant carnival buttons to close windows. Theyve seriously lost their minds. You could have a 24" widescreen and still barely fit 2 Longhorn Windows on screen.

What in gods name?

The entire top 1/3 of the screen used just for "File, Edit, View, etc". Look at the "28 items in this folder", it gets like 7000 pixels of height and width all to it self, leaving 90% of it unused.

I dont even want to talk about the dual taskbars and dual clocks. YES, GIVE ME 2 CLOCKS, 1 ISNT ENOUGH. AND A LITTLE SLIDESHOW VISIBLE ALL THE TIME ON THE DESKTOP.

Preference aside, don't they realize the more shit on screen at all times, the more the average user says "what? where? I dont see it?" when you're trying to talk them through doing something? They should be shot in the back of the head just for littering redundant icons in 5 places as it is (start menu folder, start menu commonly run apps, start menu Pinned list, desktop, quicklaunch bar), that is just assinine, but Longhorn takes it to a whole new level.

Longhorn makes me sick.

Mod me offtopic if you want, the rant was worth it, I feel better now. :)

So you think that 320 kbps is low quality -- oh wait, you actually mean that you didn't bother to RTFA. How surprising in Slashdot...

FYI: A quotation from TFA:

You can now rip music to MP3 format from WMP 10 directly, without needing an add-on (Figure). There's just one problem: Microsoft's MP3 encoder only supports 128, 192, 256, and 320 Kbps MP3 ripping. Because I prefer to rip songs to 160 Kbps MP3 format, I still need to install a third party MP3 encoder. Hey, it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than the crippled MP3 ripping in RealPlayer 10.5 Plus.

Sure, VBR support & free bitrate selection would be nice, but I as the author said, it's better than nothing.

I have one (don't ask) and I'm really quite impressed with it. While it won't replace my iPod for music use, I really think that the video/tv functionality would be fantastic for someone who commutes to work on a bus or ferry every day.

The UI is clean and easy to use, and the sync works great. I also like that it is easy to configure the system to transcode (in the background) all of your content to lower quality in order to optimize space utilization.

These are actually surprisingly good tools. There's a good review here.

I will say, however, that if I had not gotten one for free (again, don't ask) then I don't think I would have been willing to pay $500 for one. When they either get down into the $350 range, or have MUCH higher capacities at the $500 price point perhaps.

As for Longhorn, you'll still buy it like all the other cattle (Ha! Longhorn! Cattle! Now I see the connection!) when it comes out, by the way, I expect the successor to Longhorn to be Bighorn (Guess the species! ;-)

The name of Longhorn is pretty easy to track if you look at the previous version of Windows (Whistler) and the blue-sky version of Windows (Blackcomb), and know a bit about the Pacific Northwest (specifically, the Whistler ski resort up in Canada). At the Whistler resort, there are two mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb. Between the lifts for the two mountains, there is a tavern called Longhorn. The initial plan for Windows was supposed to have Longhorn be a small release between XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb, with Blackcomb coming around 2006 or 2007. Thus, Longhorn, because it's a stop on your way from Whistler to Blackcomb. Somewhere along the line, Longhorn became a much more prominant release, so the codename is no longer as appropriate, but that's the root of the name.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has an entry in the XP FAQ (near the top, scroll down about 1/5th of the page) and in the Longhorn FAQ (near the bottom) that mention this in lesser detail, though he gets the location of Longhorn wrong. The Garibaldi Lift Co. is the tavern at the base of Whistler. Quite a nice little tavern, too, if you've got friends who are into skiing or mountain biking and you're not.

As for Longhorn, you'll still buy it like all the other cattle (Ha! Longhorn! Cattle! Now I see the connection!) when it comes out, by the way, I expect the successor to Longhorn to be Bighorn (Guess the species! ;-)

The name of Longhorn is pretty easy to track if you look at the previous version of Windows (Whistler) and the blue-sky version of Windows (Blackcomb), and know a bit about the Pacific Northwest (specifically, the Whistler ski resort up in Canada). At the Whistler resort, there are two mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb. Between the lifts for the two mountains, there is a tavern called Longhorn. The initial plan for Windows was supposed to have Longhorn be a small release between XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb, with Blackcomb coming around 2006 or 2007. Thus, Longhorn, because it's a stop on your way from Whistler to Blackcomb. Somewhere along the line, Longhorn became a much more prominant release, so the codename is no longer as appropriate, but that's the root of the name.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has an entry in the XP FAQ (near the top, scroll down about 1/5th of the page) and in the Longhorn FAQ (near the bottom) that mention this in lesser detail, though he gets the location of Longhorn wrong. The Garibaldi Lift Co. is the tavern at the base of Whistler. Quite a nice little tavern, too, if you've got friends who are into skiing or mountain biking and you're not.

As for Longhorn, you'll still buy it like all the other cattle (Ha! Longhorn! Cattle! Now I see the connection!) when it comes out, by the way, I expect the successor to Longhorn to be Bighorn (Guess the species! ;-)

The name of Longhorn is pretty easy to track if you look at the previous version of Windows (Whistler) and the blue-sky version of Windows (Blackcomb), and know a bit about the Pacific Northwest (specifically, the Whistler ski resort up in Canada). At the Whistler resort, there are two mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb. Between the lifts for the two mountains, there is a tavern called Longhorn. The initial plan for Windows was supposed to have Longhorn be a small release between XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb, with Blackcomb coming around 2006 or 2007. Thus, Longhorn, because it's a stop on your way from Whistler to Blackcomb. Somewhere along the line, Longhorn became a much more prominant release, so the codename is no longer as appropriate, but that's the root of the name.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has an entry in the XP FAQ (near the top, scroll down about 1/5th of the page) and in the Longhorn FAQ (near the bottom) that mention this in lesser detail, though he gets the location of Longhorn wrong. The Garibaldi Lift Co. is the tavern at the base of Whistler. Quite a nice little tavern, too, if you've got friends who are into skiing or mountain biking and you're not.

I used this article: Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) as a guideline to create my slipstreamed CD. Easy to follow.

Here's a list :

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_hom e_pro.asp/

Looking at that list, most home users would never have any need for any of this stuff.

Perhaps you meant to say Windows ME?

Yup -- in fact, the i860 was codenamed the N-Ten, which is where NT got its "NT" moniker from initially. Marketing then called it "New Technology" and licensed the letters from Northern Telecom.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winserver2k3_g old1.asp

IIRC, GNOME added it around the same time (earliest reference I could find to the feature).

Windows XP's version of the feature was publically known as early as November 2000.

The reason X works badly has nothing to do with the one extra context switch per action. In fact if X is just drawing and avoiding the problem calls, it has far fewer context switches than Windows, since the drawing calls are all stuffed in a buffer and sent as one block (it's possible Windows is doing this in modern versions, too, I don't know).

Microsoft has also significantly changed the way "browse in a new process" works in IE 5.01. In previous versions of Internet Explorer, there was an option in Advanced Options to allow each browser window to open in a new process. When selected, this meant that each browser window controlled its own memory space: If one browser window crashed, it couldn't take down the whole operating system, a pretty embarrassing problem when you're integrating the Web browser into the OS. In IE 5.01, this feature is not available as a user-selectable option. Instead, Microsoft has hard-coded behavior into the system based on the amount of RAM installed. If the system has 32MB of RAM or more, this feature is turned on by default. Otherwise, it's off. Frankly, this was a good decision: There's no reason for a user to need to tweak this kind of feature.

What's so amazing to me about dashboard is that it is a more innovative way to do what Microsoft Longhorn's Sidebar is trying to do. Take a look here and you tell me that Apple didn't see Microsoft's sidebar and figured out that Expose would let them do something that Microsoft couldn't even think of.

I am absolutely thrilled by the prospect of Dashboard not cluttering up my screen with "essential" information. Microsoft's Sidebar is translucent and floating on the right side but its constricted to that finite pixel width. Apple's solution is characteristicly Apple and its just a damn good way to use the Quartz engine. I think this really is a kick into the ribs of Longhorn, so far from screenshots I think its pretty clear Apple has solved this problem better than Microsoft.

Actually, as shown in this screenshot of Media Portal, the user interface is a direct copy of images found in the Dell Media Experience user interface, which itself was modeled (different artwork, same color schemes and theme) in the likeness of Media Center.

NOT TRUE

This is simply not true. In the past decade, Microsoft has released versions of windows which run on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and Itanium (not to mention Opteron). The first hardware NT actually ran on was MIPS - it was originally intended for the intel i860 which never made it to mass-production. (Source

My error, I typed too fast - what I have is Longhorn milestone 6 build 4053, so it's technically an Alpha release, not a beta. (Incidentally, 4053 is the build from the original NT code tree, not from the start of Longhorn development.)

The reason I have it is - as someone else rightly pointed out - because I have an MSDN subscription (I have had for C~5 years now). I signed up a while back to do pre-release testing of various MS stuff: Everett, XP SP2, Whidbey, Yukon (MS SQL 2005) and Longhorn. I must admit it's kind of a buzz to try out stuff before it's available and I'm lucky enough to have the hardware and the impetus (I freelance and advise clients of upcoming software/hardware trends) to actually do it. As far as I know, it's not publicly available for download.

Just for the record, what I've seen so far has impressed me a great deal. There are some very neat things in there - probably too much to mention here, but you can check it out at Paul Thurrott's Site if you're interested.

Paul Thurrott's supersite for Windows has this information about what Longhorn is all about from May 2003. I highly recommend that readers check out what MSDN has to say about it.

It is a document and content management system with synchronization capabilities built right into the desktop. And it is going to hit yet another software segment right in the pocketbook: document management and storage.

With the advances in disk drive capacity and network speed, imagine being able to sync your company's entire set of PDF files/engineering drawings/(pr0n? ;-) ) to a laptop for use on site.

I was under the impression that Longhorn would be using vector graphical extensively in its UI. Mind you, I don't follow Microsoft hype very closely so I may well be totally wrong.

It will. This is one of the beta builds. I've seen at least three MSDN videos showcasing the technology...clearly, people on this site haven't been paying attention.

All the questions and comments similar to this one in this discussion really reveal how absolutely uninformed about Longhorn Slashdotters are as they meanwhile bash it. Common knowledge about Longhorn seems to have not yet reached Slashdot--no doubt because Slashdot would rather post silly anti-"M$" article when meanwhile, great strides are taking place in their technology. Someone here actually implied you'd need a DirectX9 level card just to run the thing--obviously he didn't know Longhorn supports several tiers of operation, going all the way down to standard 2D like Windows 2000. You can choose a tier manually or let Longhorn decide for you according to system specs. This is just one example of bizarre posts that completely reveal how ignorant people are of this OS--they call it "vaporware" as though there is no information released about it. People, there is tons of info already known that Microsoft has given away freely in the past year.

For crying out loud, visit WinSuperSite and read up a little bit! :P

Exactly what I was thinking.

AFAIK, Longhorns GUI was supposed to be vector based. And this article on winsupersite.com seems to agree:

"In Longhorn, a new presentation layer code-named Avalon is responsible for the entire user experience, including the display of graphics. Unlike GDI, Avalon is vector-based."

The wankers over in Redmond are about to release thier self-proclaimed "iPod killer" brick and since it's been proven time and time again that they aren't interested in innovating (just copying and/or smothering). So maybe it's a protective measure against Billy & Co. Apple has been Redmond's R&D lab for many years. Don't beleive me? Go here and read the part about "New graphics with the Desktop Composition Engine". It still goes on to this day.

I'd be a little worried if I were Apple. I mean, look at Microsoft's track record - they missed the boat on the GUI, office productivity apps, the internet and now the search engine. They missed the mark early on only to copy and then dominate those respective areas (don't you dare take Google away you bastards!). In typical fashion, Microsoft slowly looks at the digital music phenomena and says to itself "hmmm...there's something bright over here...let's exterminate it".

Apple may be setting themselves up to take MS to court if they end up having to. At least the EU has proven that they aren't blinded and seduced by corporate money like the current U.S. administration. Admittedly, I have no idea if a U.S. patent makes a rats ass bit of difference over in the EU.

GNOME vs. KDE will perhaps be one of the holy wars of this millennium, and this is certainly another kick in the teeth for the ever-so-slightly clunky KDE (in my opinion). As said in the article, the developers have done some superb work and, well, put it this way, it is almost making me want to lose Mac OS X on one of my iBooks. Do not underestimate the pulling power of eye candy and the HIG!

Liberal inspiration has, of course, been taken from the Apple way of doing things - the spatial navigation is, as noted in the Ars Technica article, based on the pre-OS X MacOS Finder. And that's no bad thing, certainly if FOSS wants to move towards real usability on the desktop.
The file dialogue boxes are also notably similar to Mac OS X's way of doing things, although the puzzling (at least to me) scrollbars that the Mac uses to browse up and down a directory tree are here replaced with arguably simpler tabs. Very nice touch.

Personally I'll keep Mac OS X on this for the moment, if only to avoid kernel recompiles and incompatibilities arising from that, but hell, if I were a Windows user, I'd be sitting here asking myself why the fuck I am waiting till 2006 for Longhorn when I can have this now...
Zealots were quick to criticise the most prominent competition - Mac OS X 10.3 - in terms of eye candy on the desktop when it came to making comparisons with their darling Longorn (which is, rather pointedly, not available for purchase yet). Now that UNIX is offering two superb alternatives, one of them properly FOSS (and, more importantly, runnable on x86), Windows' days should surely be numbered...?

iqu :)

GNOME vs. KDE will perhaps be one of the holy wars of this millennium, and this is certainly another kick in the teeth for the ever-so-slightly clunky KDE (in my opinion). As said in the article, the developers have done some superb work and, well, put it this way, it is almost making me want to lose Mac OS X on one of my iBooks. Do not underestimate the pulling power of eye candy and the HIG!

Liberal inspiration has, of course, been taken from the Apple way of doing things - the spatial navigation is, as noted in the Ars Technica article, based on the pre-OS X MacOS Finder. And that's no bad thing, certainly if FOSS wants to move towards real usability on the desktop.
The file dialogue boxes are also notably similar to Mac OS X's way of doing things, although the puzzling (at least to me) scrollbars that the Mac uses to browse up and down a directory tree are here replaced with arguably simpler tabs. Very nice touch.

Personally I'll keep Mac OS X on this for the moment, if only to avoid kernel recompiles and incompatibilities arising from that, but hell, if I were a Windows user, I'd be sitting here asking myself why the fuck I am waiting till 2006 for Longhorn when I can have this now...
Zealots were quick to criticise the most prominent competition - Mac OS X 10.3 - in terms of eye candy on the desktop when it came to making comparisons with their darling Longorn (which is, rather pointedly, not available for purchase yet). Now that UNIX is offering two superb alternatives, one of them properly FOSS (and, more importantly, runnable on x86), Windows' days should surely be numbered...?

iqu :)

Now that the link is slashdotted, I'll post another review / info page about this alpha build from PDC:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_4051. asp

There are no apparent differences between that reviewed build (4051) and the one in this article.

... In the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks.

So? A lot of commercial software does too. Have you ever seen the usability halls of shame? Check out this one and this one. Notice all the stupidities that are allowed into commercial software, especially Microsofts. You'd think with their budgets they could hire UI experts, but apparently not.

My point is that usability is hard, and you can't make sweeping generalizations like "open source has bad usability, proprietary software has good usability".

OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla have completely different interfaces from each other, in fact there are few simularities among them.

Erm, because they do different things?

Perhaps you mean the widget toolkits they use. Let's see what the competition has to offer:

• Outlook
• Word
• Internet Explorer

I don't know about you, but to me those apps all look entirely different. They use different artwork and even widget sets! Yet, they are from the same company and are all flagship products produced within the last few years. Microsoft don't even have history as an excuse. Apple are just as bad - Aqua today, brushed metal tomorrow.

So, I don't see what your point is. Given that FireFox and Evolution both use the same widget themes, and recent builds of OpenOffice can do the same trick, it looks like in terms of UI and widget consistancy Linux beats Windows hands down.

Well, not technically true, despite the fact that it's commonly believed to be so. NT is short for 'N-Ten', the codename of the Intel i860 processor on which it was originally intended to run.

'New Technology' is a later marketing retrofit.

I find it somewhat amusing that he harps on and on and on about the slightest little problem with any other platform -- particularly the mac -- but has almost completely ignored the latest couple of mail worms pestering his platform-of-choice.

For a journalist who writes almost exclusively about Windows and Microsoft, I'd always found that Paul Thurrott was remarkably a lot less biased than you would think. His news articles seemed to be generally fair and his reviews and previews, while generally pro-MS, were some of the most in-depth and technically accurate you could find.

Anti-Apple and anti-Linux postings have always made up a sizable proportion of posts on his weblog but they also reveal that he owns several Macs, has used Linux since 1994 and has Mozilla as his default browser. Most striking of all, he believed that Microsoft was guilty of antitrust violations and thought, like the rest of us, that the final settlement was hopelessly ineffective.

Recently, however, his personal views have started appearing more and more in his news and features. There's mentions of Linux "zealots", jabs at Apple's supposed lack of innovation (he now believes Microsoft leads) and the words 'Windows Media Audio' are never present without being prefixed with the adjective 'superior'. His weblog became tiresome months ago and now his news is going the same way. Even some of his normally excellent in-depth previews are suffering: his look at task-based inductive user-interfaces in Longhorn is an almost farcical anti-Apple rant.

If you're interested in the comings and goings of Microsoft, Paul Thurrott is a good source of reliable and accurate information (I really can 't recommend his previews enough). However, his tiresome rants and raves are starting to make it his articles less and less enjoyable.

For a journalist who writes almost exclusively about Windows and Microsoft, I'd always found that Paul Thurrott was remarkably a lot less biased than you would think. His news articles seemed to be generally fair and his reviews and previews, while generally pro-MS, were some of the most in-depth and technically accurate you could find.

Anti-Apple and anti-Linux postings have always made up a sizable proportion of posts on his weblog but they also reveal that he owns several Macs, has used Linux since 1994 and has Mozilla as his default browser. Most striking of all, he believed that Microsoft was guilty of antitrust violations and thought, like the rest of us, that the final settlement was hopelessly ineffective.

Recently, however, his personal views have started appearing more and more in his news and features. There's mentions of Linux "zealots", jabs at Apple's supposed lack of innovation (he now believes Microsoft leads) and the words 'Windows Media Audio' are never present without being prefixed with the adjective 'superior'. His weblog became tiresome months ago and now his news is going the same way. Even some of his normally excellent in-depth previews are suffering: his look at task-based inductive user-interfaces in Longhorn is an almost farcical anti-Apple rant.

If you're interested in the comings and goings of Microsoft, Paul Thurrott is a good source of reliable and accurate information (I really can 't recommend his previews enough). However, his tiresome rants and raves are starting to make it his articles less and less enjoyable.

One look at his website should reveal the source of that delusion.

Not to troll, but I'm curious why somebody using XP strictly for gaming would shell out the extra $$$ for XP Pro vs. XP standard/home?

Better local networking/wireless networking options?

Actually, this site has a great breakdown of what Pro has that Home doesn't:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_hom e_pro.asp

He's demonstrating pop-up blocking by visiting the Macworld website...

That site is absolutely retarded. The winsupersite, not the macworld site.

And to add to the confusion, check out the screenshots for the Service Pack 2 preview.

Note the title bars -- "Virtual PC". He's running it on a Mac!

So WTF -- is he a Windows zealot or closet Mac user!?

Hah. Gee, what a shock. Paul Thurrott whores himself out to Microsoft again. I'm SHOCKED, SHOCKED I say. He's only done it a few times before... not so surprising that he should do it yet again. He's just a pro-MS troll who happens to get paid for it.

who, as near as I can tell, is some sort of sentient appendage growing on Bill Gates' ass. He has a whole site devoted to his particular brand of hyperactive boosterism.

Actually:
Finally, it was time to start writing some code. "We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"
From http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winserver2k3_g old1.asp

Most of these are simply the same Alpha leak build 4015 that has been available on irc for months.
They do NOT include WinFS, WinFX, and are extremely buggy.

Yes, that's right, nobody. I think we all need to be reminded that using Microsoft products is an act of free will. It's not as if they're the only game in town for personal computers (they used to be) or that you couldn't interoperate without them (that used to be the case too). Furthermore, to run a successful business these days no longer means that you have to use Microsoft products. Lots of people are doing just fine (if not better) without crap from Redmond. (And that doesn't even mean they have to use open source alternatives. There's always Apple which put out better hardware than anyone else. Of course, using open source is good too. What Windows functionality isn't provided on the server by some variety of BSD or Linux?)

So don't say that a security researcher releasing findings before alerting Microsoft is making things "bad" for Microsoft users who are "forced" to use Windows. I have yet to talk to anybody who uses Microsoft products that doesn't acknowledge the weaknesses in the platform or isn't aware of the media surrounding Microsoft's utter failure to make "security their top priority". They (Windows users) know well enough by now that the platform they've chosen is vastly inferior in terms of security to alternatives. And if they don't realize that, they're mindless zealots (who have an infinite loop blocking entry to their site). By now, they get what they deserve and the security community should no longer have to drag its feet (pacing itself with Microsoft) on their account.

Other Activity Center considerations
Microsoft is looking at a variety of other issues with regards to Activity Centers. For example, Web pages are notoriously difficult to navigate with the keyboard, but Activity Centers will need to be accessible to all users. So links in Activity Center won't be underlined, and the ALT+ method of selecting Win32 user interface elements will be supported using proprietary HTML extensions that Microsoft developed for Internet Explorer. Likewise, localization is going to be an issue, as Microsoft derives over half of its income outside of the United States. This also requires a number of proprietary extensions to HTML.

The "iterative" and "task-based" nature of things gets to be kind of interesting. Rather than opening an app, you might pick (from a "start" menu that takes up a third of the screen), for example, a "photo" section (or "activity center," as Microsoft was calling them back in the late '90s). What's that get you? A UI (quite possibly full-screen) that looks a little like a website, with a list of places you might Want To Go Today[tm]. Maybe you want to import photos, maybe you want to print photos, maybe you want to organize photos, etc. Thus the "task-based" part. You click on what you want, and it gives you step-by-step "iterative" stuff, like a "wizard." Or... well... DOS. :)

So... basically, Microsoft is working on making the system extremely easy to use for people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. They're aiming at folks who are going to do one thing at a time, more or less. Perhaps they'll still have a "classic" interface available for people who've actually used a computer for more than a week, since a "task-based" "iterative" interface would be absolutely maddening for many of us. :)

Historically, there's been this zeitgeist of "Windows is somewhat hard to use, but it's cheap, and you can do so much with it!" First UNIX-like OSes became cheaper than Windows, then Macs became price-competitive, and now Microsoft wants Longhorn to be the OS of choice for clueless newbies. Earth's magnetic poles should be flipping any day now...

let me repeat:
you stupid fuck

any account created in step 23 on this install guide is automatically added to the Administrators group with NO password

They were turned down, so now watch what happens, on Longhorn there will already be a "MSN Search Deskbar" on bootup.

Keep in mind that Microsoft has had built-in internet searching via the Windows Shell through the Start Menu's "Search..." function for a few years now, so I don't think this is a huge surprise for anybody.

I also don't think it takes an incredible leap of imagination to think they might put an "Internet Search" control on the new Longhorn Sidebar. Claiming that by doing this they're trying to defeat Google's impending grasp on the desktop is a bit paranoid.

I mean, what else would they put on the new sidebar? A big clock? :-)

Oh, nice. You saw the preview pictures of Longhorn too.

Internet Explorer 7 will add pop-up blocking. I can't wait!

Still IE6.

So while they may have added popup blocking and a download manager, which other browsers have had for years, it doesn't look like there will be any increased support for standards like CSS and PNG.