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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.'"
...discussion about this on the Register.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
Uh, if "those things" refer to getting the work done, I already have that down pat - once you're over the learning curve, it's done. Vi is vi is vi (unless it's vivivi - the editor of the beast!).
However, it sounds as if "those things" actually refers to something else, namely the ability for some other entity to complete erode my privacy, have unprecidented access to my system (it is mine, like it or not), and leaving me open to unheard of security issues.
Thank you, but I prefer that *I* keep track of how I work, who I talk to, what I look at, how I make *my* documents, and with whom *I* share them. It's not up to the system to decide which data belongs to me since to do so it must analyze my things. To insinuate oneself either personally, or impersonally through the operating system would be simply rude.
You wouldn't tolerate your officemate or the person in the next apartment or even Richard Stallman rifleing through your desk/sock/nightstand drawers. Why should you tolerate it from Microsoft (or Apple, or Sun, or RedHat)?
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.
And in all that time you never learned to spell properly?
Pre-announcing a product and starting the hype five years before it's expected to be released..."
Starting with the "Longhorn" release, Microsoft will unveil a new naming scheme to enhance the "Windows" brand name. No longer will versions numbers or years be tacked onto the Windows name, instead, Microsoft is shifting towards a more descriptive naming convention.
When Longhorn finally hits the shelves, it will come in 3 flavors, a 'personal' edition for home users, a 'corporate' edition for businesses and a government release.
Pricing has not been set but early speculation would indicate that licensing fees will be rolled into federal taxes to ensure everyone is paying for their license and not using a pirated copy.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
You say that like it's a bad thing! Really, if my computer could figure out that X10 popunders don't work on me, that I neither need larger breasts or a longer penis, and that I don't need to MAKE MONEY FAST, that might be worth something!
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
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.
I'm fine with my computer tracking what I do and working to anticipate my moves -- this kind of pattern matching is what computers are good for, and we're getting to the point that most of the time we've got the spare cycles lying around. But for any such system there better be two things about it:
Anyone care to lay odds on Microsoft giving me those two items?
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.
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.
It's an excuse to openly defy the court. Another doomsday plan. Brinksmanship. "You have to choose between either letting us eat up the rest of every industry one by one- or intentionally destroy poor us by sabotaging this stuff that we've bet the company on! Are you ready for that?"
This reeks of doomsday plan. Like hell they don't learn- that's been working OK for them so far. The question is, since MS must inevitably over-reach and collapse (when they pick a 'bet the company' plan that's too extreme, and call the world's bluff with it), when would be a good time for them to blow a gasket? They _can't_ continue this tactic forever without becoming the most wild exaggeration of every rabid slashdotter's worst nightmare. And, like Stalin said of the Pope, 'how many divisions does he have?' Microsoft is not prepared for a serious conflict with, say, a country, in the event of a power struggle, which is the ultimate destination of this sort of thing.
I daresay the bigwigs at MS have exit strategies, though. Or, and this is a disturbing thought- maybe they don't. Maybe their world really IS an elevator with no top floor, and no down button. If so, they are destined for great disappointment. Everything ends.