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I believe they originally planned to have it as an entirely new filesystem but that they wouldnt be able to hit the mark with it...

The article that i got some of that information from was from The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30670.html

Also, there is more information here: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_prev iew_2003.asp

Was it part two?

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said acquiring the license from SCO "is representative of Microsoft's ongoing commitment to respecting intellectual property and the IT community's healthy exchange of IP through licensing. This helps to ensure IP compliance across Microsoft solutions and supports our efforts around existing products like services for Unix that further Unix interoperability."

Okay... didn't we already learn about M$ borrowing other people's technology and getting burned with the SQL Server and Timeline issue.

I think this is a large case of Bill covering his butt. If SCO has the cajones to go after IBM, then they're building a warchest to go after him next. It's a smart move on M$ part, but it gives me the strange idea that I may be seeing some familiar "new" features in Longhorn.

There's always ZDNet. if you don't like /. Even better you could enjoy Thurrott's exciting Supersite. You know, the internet is full of sites... hudreds of thousands... sick of one... vote with your feet (or mouse).
I dwell /. and like it *because* it's a souped up interblog... and *I* love M$ bashing, bought a Mac and like to hear *biased* news and for once feel like someone who digs Britney Spears entering a media store ;-)

> but it seems that the further along we get I like their OS's less and less.

Two words: classic `theme'. I use it all the time if I've to use an XP box, and I have a feeling it'll be there even in the final Longhorn builds, if only so that the Windows system team can keep their own sanity :)

Btw, it's pretty easy to customize Classic look-n-feel and get back the Windows 95 shell (in Windows 2000, I could even switch off Active Desktop using TweakUI, I'm sure this'll work for XP as well).

M$ mounts still look pathetic. Another poster says you still have the dreaded c:, despite the ability to use other drives as directories. I doubt you can set up a 50 MB root partition and have all go well from there, so intelligent disk management has not yet arived in Redmond. Nor has easy management arived. I count four non obvious interface level navigations and seven mouse click to change a mount. Editing /etc/fstab is trivial by compairison. They still have "My Documents" type stuff like "My Music", undoubtably placed someplace obtuse like "c:/windblows/users/defaultpeon/desktop/my documents/". File navagation? Some things never change.

The article refers to a UI feature called "stacks". From the article:

"But there's more new to My Contacts than just the Carousel view. In My Contacts, you can arrange contacts by Name, Email, Work Email, Personal Email, Home Phone, Work Phone, or Online Status, but you can also utilizing a new feature called Stacks. Because you can't actually work with stacks in 4015, it's unclear what the feature does, but you can stack contacts by the same list of criteria by which you can arrange them, and you can also unstack them. Stacking and unstacking might be related to the Carousel view but, again, that's unclear right now."

Here is a screenshot of the view.

Recently, there was a Slashdot article here about a "piles" feature that Apple had patented in June 2001 that sounds very familiar. Screenshot of piles here looks different, but the concepts appear similar:

"In addition, sources said Panther will finally mark the debut of the much-discussed "piles" GUI design concept, which Apple patented in June 2001. According to the patent, piles comprise collections of documents represented graphically in stacks. Users can browse the "piled" documents dynamically by pointing at them with the cursor; the filing system can then divide a pile into subpiles based on each document's content. At the user's request, the filing system can automatically file away documents into existing piles with similar content."

Adi Gadwale.

"Graphically, an icon representing your user sits at the center of the carousel, and lines, or spokes, branch out from the center towards your contacts."

Image Here.

Now take a look at this. I'm not saying it's practical, I'm not saying it's good. But it's different and it could be integrated into an OS. This sort of innovation is what Linux should be doing!

From the article, underneath a screen shot:

Explorer.exe is now a .NET managed code application, but it crashes frequently.

Well it's good to know that Windows hasn't changed that much. (yes, I know it's an alpha, but explore.exe crashes have happened to me in every final version of windows that I have used.)

Not to bash Microsoft in general, but the dialog in this screenshot demonstrates incredibly retarded user interface design.

"OK" to terminate the application.
"Cancel" to debug it.

???

And this isn't new either, AFAIK the same dialog has been around since the Windows 9x days.

Its a scaled down tablet, which is just a remote access screen for XP boxes, which I guess won't be as popular as full-on tablets which don't have to be within wi-fi range, but the fact you just asked for it means there is a potential market :)

It's interesting that you suggest this because this idea has been bouncing around Microsoft headquarters for years, and this is actually the direction in which they are heading. MS's next major OS, code-named Longhorn, is expected to deliver exactly that. They refer to it as a "task-oriented UI" because you don't think about what program you want to run, but rather what you want to get done. It's actually an interesting concept, something people used to do quite a lot with menu systems back in DOS, and something Microsoft is planning to re-introduce. In a few years, we'll get to see whether it flies or not. :)

Except that about damn time, Microsoft turned off HTML stuff, crippling Outlook from being able to download even images.

Check out Beta 1 of Outlook 11.

The real risk is now user stupidity.

NT was built on the i860 first, then ported to the i386 arch. More accurately, MS engineers emulated the i860 untill the chip was ready.

MS did this to make their new OS more or less platform independant. They didn't want to get 'stuck' on the x86.

Slashdot story here . Article here .

did anyone else see this? (right side of TV in background.) there is a spy in their midst!

that a pingvin I see? Man, I didnt know that Linus had spy's inside microsofts hq!

Looks like one of our guys is on the inside. Caught him on film. He's infiltrated the war team. Check him out, in the background by the TV...

See it here

The stuffed mascot in the background looks an awful lot like someone else we know ;)

A quick search of google came up with this.
Info about next gen windows.

So this little black box at CES is what exactly?

You can see the little TiVo logo just below the DVD tray.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Read the following about details on DRM usage within Windows XP Media Center Edition. In most cases no DRM will be used at all. It is the responsibility of the provider to use CGMS-A (copy generation management system/analog) to mark a program for DRM.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_med iacenter_copy.asp

Forever suck?

Mac OS has not *always* been inferior.

Until Windows 95, you really had no choice except a Mac to do desktop graphics and printing.

Macs had high color
Macs had multiple monitors
Macs had TrueType and PostScript
Macs had color management

So it took until 1995 for a PC to catch up for that (you use Photoshop in Classic Mode, so there's your history for you). So if it was the year 1994 and you had to do graphics, there was no alternative except a Mac... Oh, sure, you could use Windows NT 3.51, actually, but... people didn't.

So until 1995, realistically, Adobe had to survive on Macs and Windows NT. You couldn't have your Photoshop on your Windows 2000 computer without Adobe thriving on the Mac. So say thank you to all the Mac users who kept Adobe alive long enough for Windows to catch up enough for a Windows port to be possible.

What else... Mac OS released without any truly innovative ideas? At the time a mouse, a windowing system, and a desktop metaphor was pretty innovative. Photoshop, released in 1990, couldn't have existed on the PC since Windows 3.0 wasn't available until 1990! The first graphical Mac was unleashed in 1984... of course Windows 1.0 was available the very next year in 1985...

So what else does that show us? Word 1.0 for DOS was available 1983, Word 1.0 for Mac was available in 1985, and it wasn't until 1993 that Word 6.0 (for Windows) was released. Word for DOS had or Word for Mac had only been available up to that point.

Then there's Quicktime...

Okay, so all that is OLD hat. Microsoft (eventually) will catch up, history is showing us.

So what did Apple do new with OS X that is innovative, you ask?

How about security? Of course security is a nasty beast to define, because it is only visible through the lack of exploits. No exploits, no news. Do I think OS X is more secure than Windows XP? Yes. Why? Partially because the core OS is open source, partially because the core OS is heavily related to BSD, and partially because the core OS has been in use since 1989 with the release of the first NeXT workstations. Windows, while similarly old, is not similarly aged, with IE exploits, IIS exploits, ActiveX exploits, and other exploits. OS X gets around IE exploits by not integrating IE, though there is an HTML library available. It gets around IIS exploits by relying on tried and true OSS servers such as Apache, BSD-telnetd, BSD-sshd, and BSD-ftpd. It gets around ActiveX exploits by relying on a scripting technology, AppleScript, that has been used successfully since 1993 to automate prepress, print, publishing, and graphics businesses. Oh, and they don't integrate AppleScript into the html rendering engine, though there is a third party AppleScript plugin available. Yes, there have been AppleScript viruses, just like there are VisualBasic viruses...

But Apple doesn't suffer nearly as badly because Mail doesn't auto execute AppleScript viruses which aren't embedded into the HTML that s rendered by the preview pane.

Alright, so this is sorta cheap, innovation by not being as *bad* as Microsoft.

There's legitimate innovation as well.

OS X 10.0 had it's compositing engine. Vector based, PDF based, output independent. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a continuation of NeXT's PostScript based DisplayPS. Windows already has something called GDI+ and WMF, but I do not believe they are currently used.

OS X 10.0 introduced iDVD, to match the earlier release of iTunes and iMovie, allowing the sufficiently well of Mac owner the capabillity to make DVDs within 20 minutes, though burning them probably took an hour or so.

OS X 10.2 upped the stakes with *hardware* accelerated display technology. Big deal, you say? It's 3d hardware accelerated. Microsoft is hoping to catch up next year with Longhorn.

OS X 10.2 also added new networking technology that doesn't yet exist on Windows, though UPnP is close. Rendevous, otherwise known as ZeroConf, is a peer to peer network discovery protocol.

OS X 10.2 added bluetooth support, which Windows XP adds later this year.

OS X 10.2 added full tablet and handwriting recognition, which doesn't appear until . Also, you will probably need a new PC, where OS X only requires a tablet, such as a Wacom tablet, instead of a new computer.

Anyway, it's really only your loss, not mine, if Apple OS X doesn't somehow suit your needs, and likewise your gain if Windows XP can suit yours (but not mine)

...no seriously, then they might actually follow the standards that are out there (i.e. their supposed use of 'proper' XML in Longhorn).

Actually, maybe not. If they do have an O'Reilly Zoo, maybe the animals/books have been re-engineered into abominations... and then they follow what has been rewritten to produce anything.

Well I suppose Long"Horn" could be an animal derivative; the bit that MS chops off and gives to the customers.

If you look under the special shells folder, there is a link to the music folder. Look at the meta-data view on the bottom right hand side, you'll see "License Description: This content has no restrictions". We all know that it's coming, here's the first look. How long til we'll see something like "License Description: No access allowed for this user"?

If you look under the special shells folder, there is a link to the music folder. Look at the meta-data view on the bottom right hand side, you'll see "License Description: This content has no restrictions". We all know that it's coming, here's the first look. How long til we'll see something like "License Description: No access allowed for this user"?

Multiple desktops!
This is one of my favorite features with *nix systems, anytime you're running more than a few apps using one desktop even with minimizing gets just plain unmanagable this is one feature I'm very M$ glad has learned from *nix.

No, I'm afraid that this is not the case. While it is true about the Location Bar not showing the drive letter, this is not new. Windows 98-XP show a similar behavior if they are using recent versions of Internet Explorer. There is a configuration option that allows you to select whether you want the full path (including drive letter) displayed or not.

If you look at this screen shot, you will see that the location bar displays My Computer\yada\yada. However, if you examine the contents of the directory in the pane below, you will notice the hard drive, which is displayed as "C:" along with its usage statistics.

Microsoft's drive letter analogy/concept has a deep rooted history. Users have grown accustomed to this analogy and it is highly unlikely that Microsoft will cahnge it in the future. Most average users that are used to drive letters find the mount point tree that is used in Unix to be almost incomprehensible.

Now, having said all that, it is really impossible to tell what the future holds. Remember that Longhorn is supposed to use a new file system. This new file system is not yet functional in the alpha release so there's no telling what it will actually look like. None the less, if I had to bet, I'd bet that drive letters will continue to be used in Microsoft OSes for a long long long time, regardless of the underlying file system.

The Road Ahead

The guy who wrote the review, Paul Thurrott, has a lot of contacts within Microsoft. The stuff he writes is almost always accurate (I regularly read two of his sites, WinInfo and the SuperSite for Windows). He was the first journalist to report on the merging of the Odyssey and Neptune projects to form Whistler (better known as Windows XP). Basically, he knows his stuff.

uhm, maybe you should look at the article. He is referring to this dock, not the taskbar.

Check this screen shot.

It shows a My Hardware "window".

Are we gonna see "everything is a file" concept in Longhorn too?

Notes on the Longhorn Alpha

It's always humorous seeing other news agencies pick up stories days after they've first run in WinInfo or the SuperSite, and my Longhorn alpha build preview is one perfect example, with a variety of legitimate news Web sites suddenly discovering Longhorn build 3683 after I wrote about it ten days ago. Two items arose in the aftermath of this event. First, this build is old, and doesn't even slightly resemble the Longhorn we'll be using years down the road (heck, it barely works), let alone more recent builds. Second, much of the email I've gotten about this and other leaked alpha builds revolves around where I got it and whether I can distribute it. I won't generally answer email of that nature, sorry, but to answer to one bizarre query, no; I wasn't responsible for the leak either. There's something about leaked Windows builds that gets people in a tizzy, but remember: We're on the XP train now and will be for some time. This Longhorn stuff is really just a shell for technology tests at this point. It isn't something anyone would actually use day-to-day.

Instead, read about some of the new features and improvements to Windows that Longhorn introducts by reading Paul's Longhorn FAQ. I especially like the SQL Server .NET-based file system - "Originally slated for Blackcomb, I've now verified that Longhorn will ship with a new SQL Server .NET-based file system, originally code-named "Storage+". Based on the "Yukon" release of SQL Server, this file system will let Microsoft's search tools work across a wider range of storage devices, including the file system, Active Directory, SQL Server databases, and Exchange Server data stores." Sweet!

Not only that but we are now adding pictures of OTHER PEOPLE to Windows?

Explain to me why I would want to look at a picture of someone else using a camera?

An analog clock? I thought Windows was supposed to be easy to use! What are they thinking? (yes, that was a joke).

"the real deal is if they put wince on a strongARM and use RDP + 802.11b to get to the x86 on your desk "

Check out mira.

Write ONCE media.
If cameras and PDA's were the target, this was the first fatal flaw.
(multisession sure, but that just eats up even more precious space)

EXPENSIVE MEDIA
($11.66 each, $0.46/MB. Compare that to MD- DATA2 650MB discs at $2.00 (And they're rewritable)

Digital Rights Managment, included FREE! for those who can't govern themselves.

Trying to fill a niche that the might of Sony couldn't for 10 years

Proprietary transport. With no S/PDIF digital out. In other words, NO FAIR USE.

UGLY and EXPENSIVE players.

Media -begging- to be lost.
How long do you think you could keep from losing this $11 gem??

I could add many more reasons but I have to get to work! ;)

Maybe we could keep this list growing and send it to the (out of work) CEO...but then again, I'm sure they already knew what a horrible format it was before unit 1 shipped. This is a blatant attempt to copy Minidisc's design and burden it down with DRM (as well as package and market it to kids) ---NEXT!

-=Chud-Wretch

Since that link to winsupersite.com is a little dated, have a look at the Paul's new review of Windows XP Media Center Edition (updated 11 Oct 2002) as well as his new writeup on copy-protection and DRM in Windows XP Media Center Edition (updated as well).

Since that link to winsupersite.com is a little dated, have a look at the Paul's new review of Windows XP Media Center Edition (updated 11 Oct 2002) as well as his new writeup on copy-protection and DRM in Windows XP Media Center Edition (updated as well).

As an AIW 8500 owner IMHO that is it's single biggest problem. XP Media Center Edition does not have this problem however. See:

WindowsXP Media Center Review
and
Screenshot of the series screen

As an AIW 8500 owner IMHO that is it's single biggest problem. XP Media Center Edition does not have this problem however. See:

WindowsXP Media Center Review
and
Screenshot of the series screen

The 'some sort of Windows XP' he is talking about is problaby the Freestyle interface Microsoft is developing. Put simply, it is basically a shell for XP which has huge icons so that it can be viewed from a distance. Its a bit more than that though.

Also related is 'Mira' which is more for Wi-Fi type devices.

The 'some sort of Windows XP' he is talking about is problaby the Freestyle interface Microsoft is developing. Put simply, it is basically a shell for XP which has huge icons so that it can be viewed from a distance. Its a bit more than that though.

Also related is 'Mira' which is more for Wi-Fi type devices.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/ms_broadband_n etworking.asp

I thought I would include a review I read a few months back on freestyle. Minus the DRM stuff, I was pretty impressed with it. I just think it would be really nice to have all of my videos and music in the living room. I'm sure it still plays mp3's; it seems the only DRM issues are with the recorded video. If I remember correctly, there was a big to do about replaytv allowing unrestricted access to the video on the network. If the DRM is not livable, then it won't sell. I would buy one just for the radio remote control and access to my music from the stereo in the living room, not to mention pictures. Computers are great, but they are not very good in social situations. No one wants to cram around the computer in the back room for too long. Anyways, I think it has a lot of potential as long as the user interface is good.

oh and microsoft will support 4 64bit archs (-;

AMD -> x86-64
Intel -> IA64
?
?

to quote http://www

so what would it be surley not Alha as thats end of life and not PA-RISC

that leaves MIPS PowerPC and ?

regards

john jones

Wait until they make a version that's been tested and optimized for Mira. This is the ideal form factor for pen computing, etc.

Check this site out on removing windows components.

Paul Thurrott's Windows SuperSite has had this information since January. He mentions the codename release as 'Longhorn/Blackcomb', I suppose referring to 2 different codenames, or maybe he was unsure (?). If the following link, he also mentions the OFS (new file system). Check it out here: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_prev iew.asp

I don't know if anyone put a link down the WinSuperSite so there it is. It has screenshots, some fake, some real, and a long description of the operating system. Worth a look.

Find it here.
Apparently it's from the 2002 International CES. The page it's from is in Japanese, but has several other pics showing front/back/side.

Oh, here's one more, even closer up, from SuperSite.

Yup, XP was codenamed "Windows Whistler". Captain Crunch, anyone? :)