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The Ideas Behind Longhorn
An anonymous reader writes: "Fortune magazine is carrying an interesting article on the new and improved Bill Gates, as well as some details on Longhorn: 'Because Gates' geeks are completely overhauling the operating system, they'll also have to redesign most of the company's other software products and services to take full advantage, including the MSN online service, its server applications, and especially Microsoft Office, the productivity suite that accounts for nearly a third of the company's sales and profits. If this enormous undertaking succeeds, it will make computers more personal than ever. Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier.'"
Is that it won't play nice with samba anymore, office won't be compatible with openoffice anymore, linux and *bsd won't be able to read the filesystem anymore, wine will not be able to run MS applications anymore, and you are not compatible with privacy anymore.
Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier.
Weren't we just talking about that
?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
But with at least 5 years until Longhorn's release, I think we can count on the world changing so radically in the meantime that Longhorn and Palladium become completely irrelevant. Look at Microsoft Bob, their last "big-bang" approach to engineering a network computer architecture, and how the WWW made it completely irrelevant.
Good form. All of your arguments are transparent enough to need little rebuttal, but I would add one thing:
Do you think trying to reverse-engineer MS's encrypted DRM-able filesystem will be branded as "interoperability" or "a federal crime" under the DMCA?
-Dave
We're on the road to Tycho.
rewind two years
This XP sounds like the answer to all our problems - a simple OS that helps me watch all that rich web content without all those old bugs in WindowsME. It's got a redesigned interface and makes working with a PC a safe and enjoyable XPerience - indeed I will be able to fly. Where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
This WindowsME sounds like tha answer to all our PC problems. It's got multimedia extensions built in and more user friendly software. Now I can handle all my media on the PC without fear of downloading any nasty software from the interweb. Where to I pay ?
rewind two years
This Windows98 really is the biz - it helps me handle all my PC jobs and lets me enjoy the interweb without any of that nasty netscape software. It can play media files and even games. Wow - where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
Oh yes - now this is cool Windows95 finally lets me enjoy the power of my 486. It's got a revolutionary new interface and even lets me enjoy the interweb. Where do I sign up ?
rewind two years
Holy smoke, this Windows3.1 really is the biz - I can use a mouse and just click the little pictures instead of having to touch the keyboard. Finally, I can use the PC with one hand.
fast forward to 2010
Wow - this new WindowsXXX really is the biz. I don't even have to type in my credit card details anymore - I can hire music instead of own it, and rent films instead of owning them - I don't have to lift a finger because all my data is held in the safe hands of MS. It even shows me the news when I turn it on - MSNBC really is a high class newsfeed. It tells me how nice those MS people are and how there are no bugs or security problems with Windows. One of my nasty friends tried using that Linux stuff last month, but we all just laughed at him - he's been taken away now for not supplying his social security details at the checkpoint. He was a communist and a theif. I love my happy world of the interweb - someone else has taken care of it all for me. All I have to do now is click a button to consume the lovely produce of our great society. Only terrorists would use anything else - why else would they want to keep their information secret ? I am finally free from all those confusing decisions.
'Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.' - George Gordon
So "sometime after 2005" means, what, 2006 at the earliest? The big Software Assurance plan MS has been trying to force us into only provides upgrades for the first 3-1/2 years for client software, and four years for server software. But wait, this new version isn't coming out for at least 3-1/2 years, and that's just if all goes well. Like, if the XBox doesn't crash-and-burn, the courts decide that MS was right after all, virus writers get bored with Outlook, worm writers get bored with IIS, and there are no more terrorist attacks. Then, maybe Longhorn will be released just after this first software assurance period ends. Of course Service Pack 1 wouldn't come out for another five months (which addresses the "faulty product activation" vulnerability that refuses to authenticate your license on all versions), and by then MS will start calling them point releases, so we'll have to re-subscribe.
Yes, I know the plan covers other stuff like Office, but the other software tends to coincide with Windows releases (Win95 - Office for Win95, Win98 - Office97, WinME/2K - Office2K, WinXP - OfficeXP). I hope a lot of companies get pissed at MS for not releasing any new software during this first cycle of "Software Assurance."
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
That was the biggest bunch of corporate ass kissing I have seen in a long time. The journalist comes off sounding like a little teenage girl talking about the boy band of the day rather than a reporter. Ugh, that was such crap I couldn't read much, especially after the claims the Bill Gates always knows and shapes the entire industry, and portraying the anti-trust case debauchery in a positive light... But then again Fortune is a publication dedicated to corporate ass-kissing, but this seems to go overboard even for them..
:)
Well, in any case, if Longhorn does do all this and do it successfully, it's good news for me. I mean, if so many people's personal information is made vulnerable in that way, then attacks against *my* personal information might go down. Kinda like Apache not getting as much attention because IIS is such a ripe target. That's not to say that Apache isn't more secure, but certainly the presence of IIS in the market draws dangerous attention from Apache
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Just a thought,
Doesn't this sound a bit like the spruce goose. Build the biggest greatest ever plane. Sure it flew but then what? It seems to me that an undertaking of this magnitude has the potential to become a money sucking vortex within MS.
Sure rewriting from scratch and redesigning the OS sounds great but in five years? Linux has taken 10 years to get to its current state. That includes havind 20 years of Unix development to learn from. I think 5 years is a dream. Especially if you are trying to rethink the whole thing and not build on the existing windows world.
There are a few outcomes from this plan.
1. MS develops the greates most user friendly OS and continues to dominate
2. Longhorn drags on for years and years and is eventually dropped. Collapsing under its own weight.
3. In order to release someting, Existing elements from the windows code base are integrated to make a ship date. Thus continuing the windows problems they would like to solve.
On another note: Does anyone else see the humor in BG going to the boss and saying that he wants to scrap it and rewrite from scratch? How many IT managers would accept that from the development staff? Would BG have accepted it prior to becoming "Chief Software Architect"?
Seriously according to Bill this is akin to designing a 747 and that they have 500 people on the wing alone.
There are 4000 programmers and managers working on this product in the long term , excluding testing and Q/A folks. Assuming a rate of 100 bugs per programmer (typical MS level) per year that need to be Q/A'd and squashed thats 400,000 bugs/year to tackle. And since this will be released in 2.5 years thats close to a Million bugs!
And what is more bothersome is that Bill mentions that the groups don't talk to each other (well it's difficult when you have 500 guys designing the 'wing') -- he says that the fuselage guys don't do lunch with the wing guys. This has always been a big problem in the 'Super star' driven MS culture, and will be exacerbated even more.
The problem with MS has historically not been one of talent, but one of culture and management. I don't see Bill addressing these issues. Perhaps, Bill needs to be introduced to some Software management gurus.
Frederic P. Brooks Jr. meet William Gates Jr. III
Ultimately, tightly knit groups of developers in close contact with the users has a better chance of delivering the goods. Look at BSD or GNU/Linux. They've come so far because of a close knit group. As long as we keep our eye on the ball we will do well. Tackle the issues one at a time and build on the foundation.
For instance, take the filesystem. MS is going after a database filesystem with 500 people on the code. Look at BeOS, 2-4 people worked on the team with Giampaolo at the lead. It wasn't a true Database FS but it did a remarkable job of looking and fucntioning as one. Want to bet that the MS DBFS is going to be top heavy and over engineered and buggy as hell? Or look at security, a tightly knit group of volunteers have made one of the most secure OS's in the world - OpenBSD. And here we have a giant struggling with years of accumulated bad practices- more holes than all of the cheeses in Switzerland. Or look at Quartz and Quartz Extreme from Apple. The core group is less than 15 people led by Mike Paquette have developed a graphics subsystem that has not been matched by the 100+ strong DirectX/3d team from MS.
Ultimately, what matters is a closely knit team which works on building software one step at a time. There are no giant leaps in software, only tiny steps that accumulate over time. This is core to what BSD/Linux has achieved. Apple under Avie Tevenien (sp?) also seems to understand the value of incremental code releases. Release early and release often. This is our biggest advantage. Let's stick to it.
Bill can continue to make his grandiose plans. Heck, let him even get a persian kitty but his plans will take its natural time to evolve. They may have the money but we have the resources.
In the end, it will be lack of good taste and good management which will make Longhorn a spectacularly mediocre release like all other MS products.
The pitfall being that by not trusting the State, anglo-saxons do the utmost to emasculate it's power, whereas the power vacuum left is promptly filled by private croporatitions who answer to nobody, certainly not the people, as the State doe.
As long as the anglo-saxons insist that the State be as small as possible, individual rights will be trampled by big croporations. Do not forget that a strong State is the best guardian of individual rights, simply by the virtue of ruling-in and checking the power of big croporations over the people.
For example, if you lose your job and can get 60% of yout former salary by virtue of the State's unemployment insurance, you can bet that companies don't push their workers around, as people simply quit and take the time to look for a proper job. And when the State provides you with medical insurance, people don't lose their jobs because the collective insurer doesn't threaten to withdraw coverage for all employees when one employees becomes unprofitably ill.
I defy anyone to refute this argument (communism not being of any relevance, it won't be accepted as an argument. A past example, maybe, but not an actual argument).
Call this a troll if you want, but consider: if it was a troll, I'd have done it anonymously...
/. is anti-MS in nearly every respect. I understand and accept that, in fact it's one of the reasons I visit here 100 times a day: I like seeing both sides of an argument before I reach my own conclusions.
.Net installed, Norton Antivirus, ActiveSync, eVC++, Seti@Home, Popup Killer, WinAmp, AOLIM and a PocketPC emulator... and this is pretty much what is always open). My machine is virtually never turned off and I have not seen a BSOD in well over a year, I virtually never experience problems whatsoever, and those that I do on those rare occassions are directly traceable to a misbehaving app, and the OS DOES NOT get taken down with the app.
I understand
But it seems to me that many of you (you meaning the open source community in general) are spreading just as much FUD as MS is, drapped in a cloak of supposed reality.
For instance: I constantly see posts saying how crash-prone MS OS's are and how you get 100 BSOD's a day on your work PC's (those of you that admit using an MS OS in the first place that is).
I'd be foolish to try and say that Win95, Win98, Win98SE or WinME aren't more crash-prone than just about any Linux distro, they are. But the FUD is in not being specific enough: Win2K and WinXP are quite stable. If you find it to be otherwise in your experience, let me point you in the right direction: It's not the OS! My work PC, a 2+ year-old Win2K PIII/500 Dell Optiplex GX1 with 512M RAM, on which I have over 20 gigs of various software installed, I have 10+ different things running at any given time (currently I have Windows Explorer, UltraEdit, CuteFTP, Apache Tomcat, IE, Lotus Notes R5, IIS with
If your Win2K or WinXP machine crashes all the time, perhaps I'm just that much better an admin than you are, but I doubt it. But, rather than be fair about it, you will be quick to bash MS and their "buggy" OS. Bull. Rag on any Win9x you want, I won't argue, but if your going to tell me Win2K or WinXP are crash-prone and buggy, you are wrong, absolutely. (WinNT by the way is somewhere in between in my experience... I have 5 NT servers, database and web servers, with heavy usage, none of them has had ANY unscheduled downtime in about two years, but I also had NT on my desktop for a while and it did blue screen on occassion, once every few months perhaps. Not terrible, but not great either).
How about the secure argument? Well, there's no denying that MS didn't place the emphasis on security that they should have all along. There are far too many buffer overruns in MS software to be sure. But the vast majority of viruses and trojans and other serious security problems are the result of good-old-fashioned social engineering, getting people to open attachments and such. Understand, having an application scriptable is not a bad thing, *IF* the user base is somewhat intelligent (there are exceptions of course, scripts should NEVER run without user authorization, and they of course can under some conditions in Outlook, that's MS's fault for sure). I'm not going to hammer them for giving us greater flexibility.
And what about the FUD? People claim Linux is less virus-prone than Windows. Of COURSE it is! Go out and iterview 100 virus writers and I guarantee you will find the majority hate MS and love Linux and the open-source movement. Which platform do you think they are going to target? DUH!
Windows sees more viruses because it is targeted more, plain and simple. Now, don't misunderstand me: I AM NOT blaming the open-source community for viruses, not in the least. And I am NOT saying that Windows is as secure as Linux, because it's not at a fundamental level. But simply because you see more viruses on Windows DOES NOT mean it is soo much more virus-prone than Linux. That's why I hope Linux does make it's way onto the desktop in good numbers. Let's see if this piece of FUD still stands up at that point. I very much suspect it won't.
Now, what about this Longhorn stuff? MS is trying to do something innovative (although not original) here... they are trying to give you ubiquitous access to any type of data from any location in a common fashion. What's wrong with that? Sounds like a fantastic idea to me. In fact, from a strictly forward-looking mentality, it's the logical evolution. I see so many paranoid statements about privacy, but come on folks, your smart enough to not go down that path! You know as well as I do that if MS is pulling anything fishy with privacy, it will be found out in short order. I mean, how hard is it to unplug your cable modem and throw a packet sniffer on the network to see what the OS is sending out? Geez, MS's worst move would be to do something like that because, and I say this in a positive way, you people will find it and scream it at the top of your virtual lungs faster than Bill Clinton goes down on an interm!
You say they never truly innovate. Then, when you hear about some potential innovation from them, you bash them for it!
It's one thing to be anti-MS, it's another thing to spread your own brand of FUD. It's also another thing to dismiss out of hand absolutely anything at all that comes from Redmond. If something is a good idea, it's a good idea regardless of where it comes from. The United States thought the atomic bomb was a good idea, even though the idea came from Germany (and try to not make the obvious "and Windows explodes just as bad as an atomic bomb!" jokes).
It's funny... I have always hated with a passion Bill Gates because he always struck me as an arrogant cheater who I just could not respect. Be better than that folks, make the community better than that... don't pull the same dirty tricks he has.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
With every article I see on the future of computing from Microsoft, the better an Apple looks.
Is Time-Warner reducing everything to the same level. Fortune sounds like "Entertainment Tonight" with fawning and drooling over CEOs instead of celebreties. Add just enough content to keep you from tossing the whole thing in disgust and you've got a four-page "article."
You'd think that a business magazine might attempt some analysis as to what is feasible, desirable, and what the competition (oops, forgot we were talking about Microsoft) might do in response.
Honestly does anyone believe this is anything more than the usual 3 years early pre development hype? Software companies now take the tack that they talk about developing something before they try and then use the feedback as market research. It's a kind of reality check combined with mindshare.
That's OK. She can use KEdit. Or NEdit. Or KWord. Or AbiWord. Or OpenOffice 1.5 (not quite there yet, but getting close!). I haven't checked StarWord6.0 yet, but it's probably better too.
The MS applications aren't all that easy. Not until after you've learned them. There is a significant learning curve, but it's got a shallow slope. The same is true of most Linux word processors, and they all share the lower part of the same slope with MSWord. Now when you start doing column separations, indexes, tables of contents, etc. they are all different. But that's not the most common use.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Great! Let's see your grandma using Vi.
My gradmother was a telephone operator - she could keep track of routing twenty diferent calls at a time and do it with grace. She could also type 40 WPM, flawlessly.
Vi, if she wanted to learn it, would take he 30 minuits of man vi and some scratch paper for notes.
The older generations fixed their own cars, invented the computer, and overcame polio - all without a talking paperclip leading the way.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
In my experience, grandmothers prefer technology that is simple. Contrary to popular belief, the MS application GUI is not simple. It is quite complicated and extremely cluttered with icons whose meanings and functions are obscure to the uninitiated. People struggle with these 'basic' concepts and tools because they are overwhelmed by the clutter of the interface.
;-)
In truth, KWord is a much better choice for the grandmothers of the world. The interface is as simple as Notepad, and it actually supports some fonts.
It seems counter-intuitive, but most older users I've talked to who've encountered command line interfaces prefer them, even when that wasn't how they were introduced to computers. Why? Because the CLI is quiet. It doesn't overwhelm you with a clutter of options like a GUI does, it just sits there quietly blinking, waiting for you to tell it what to do.
For my grandmother I would recomend vi if she were to ask my opinion. She seems to have dificulty only with the concept of the mouse, and something entirely keyboard based would thus be much easier for her to understand. She's also quite fond of sticky notes, which vi certainly encourages
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Today, we may still snicker at this. After all, we had a thriving, competitive PC industry without Microsoft: Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Exidy, Apple, and many others. Those systems were often way ahead of whatever Microsoft was selling at the same time. All of Microsoft's major successes were invented by others, then copied by Microsoft.
Rather than creating the modern computer industry, Gates single-handedly destroyed most of it. Gates' legacy in computer history is despicable. But the victors get to write history...
Longhorn sounds just like Microsoft's "Cairo" (aka "Information at your fingertips") project from the mid 1990s. It too was supposed to deliver an object-oriented database system with a new UI. Eventually, bits and pieces were released in IE, Windows 2000, and Active Directory, but the reality fell far short of the promises.
:)
btw, one rumor is that the "Windows XP" name is an homage to the Cario project because xp = "chi rho" in Greek letters.
cpeterso