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Looking at Longhorn
ShinyPlasticBag writes "Paul Thurrott has an excellent preview of Longhorn milestone five over at his Supersite for Windows. It looks like this may be Microsoft's equivalent to OS X -- the next version of Windows will have a 3D accelerated desktop and other graphical goodies. In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."
Can someone tell me why I need a 3d accelerated desktop?
//H, just realized he has another flamebait post on his record. Damn that karma!
Would it be easier for me to navigate my windows if I could move between them as if I played Quake, instead of just clicking on the particular window I wanted?
Would I get more girls if my mailbox spun in cool 3d, instead of just opening?
Would my productivity improve if it took 5 more seconds to open a window just because it had to be animated, instead of just appearing?
Would it be easier for me to read text if all windows were transparent?
Is the human mind better trained to cope with windows if they are rotated 45 degrees along some axis?
I simply don't get the 3d desktop, but then, I prefer stuff that work, instead of stuff that looks good and doesn't work.
I'm too stupid to preview.
...that there are no drive letters in any of the Explorer screenshots? I'm wondering if this signals an eventual move away from drive letters towards UNC-style paths, or referring to volumes by their labels, in a fashion akin to Mac OS.
You'd be amazed at how intelligent the remarks of a 5 year old can be when he sees the goatse man.
Apparently you don't have kids. First of all, 5 year olds are not interested in porn. If they bump into it, the first time they ask 'whats that, daddy ?' and I explain 'those are naked people who like to show themselves on the internet. Some people like looking at that'. 'Oh. okay.(closes window)'
It's by demonizing things that you make them interested. If you teach your kid about it, they understand (on their own level) and fit it into their world. If you don't teach them, they sooner or later bump into it and have to wring it into their world with a concept of forbidden stuff.
Then you are what we call a "bad parent"...
lol. Good one. You can shoot again.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Well, ext3 has the data=journal option which journals _everything_ including file contents. There is no disk write cache.
About this 'transaction based' stuff... the question is does any user application support transactions? If I run 'rm *.o' in a directory and the system crashes halfway through the rm command, is the state rolled back to what it was before the command started? I doubt it. Each individual unlink() call might count as a transaction, but unlink() is supposed to be atomic anyway.
It would be neat if filesystem transactions were available to applications. For example, take the most obvious way to save a file that is currently open in an editor: truncate the file and write it out again. Without transactions this is horribly unsafe, the system might crash after truncating or there just might not be enough disk space to write the new version. But if you could write code to do:
begin_transaction();
ftruncate(fh, 0);
write(fh, buf, size);
end_transaction();
it would be just fine. (Of course, you'd need to check the return value from end_transaction() to make sure everything went okay... you might even check the individual ftruncate() and write() calls in order to bail out early.)
Similarly, shell commands could be an individual transaction. So if you said 'tar x archive.tar' then it would be guaranteed that either the whole archive unpacks successfully, or the filesystem is untouched. Who knows, this might even make shell scripts a reliable way to write small programs.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
NT 3.5 did though. Quit sticking your foot in your mouth. Concede the stupid point already. Yes, Windows NT had a journaling file system before Linux did, mainly because it needed it. All those reboots due to crashes really hose up your filesystem you know. Having a journaling filesystem helps you recover easier.
I think the 3D acellerated desktop is nice from a "let's offload the graphic chores off the CPU" point of view, and I definitely look forward to the added capabilities that'd be involved like smooth rescaling etc, but I am a little concerned that MS is overlooking an under-utilized aspect of the UI. Sound.
.wav file that's playing.
Now, spare me the "No no, computers should be quiet" lectures because I'm not proposing making the noisy or obnoxious. Rather, I'd like for MS to provide more sound options to add. For example, it'd be cool if progress bars could alter the pitch of a
It may not be immediately obvious to people why anybody'd propose this, to them I say "think about the information your unblinking ear could receive." A lot of us listen to music while using our computer, right? Well why not provide some extra cues as to what your machine's doing?
I like to multi-task. I do 3D stuff and find my computer chewing up CPU cycles for minutes at a time. While it's doing that, I fool around on Slashdot or IM or whatever else is entertaining. Sometimes, though, I don't realize when it's done. I just keep an eye on task manager. It'd be nice if I could set up progress bars to generate a tone or drum beat that changes as the process gets closer to finished. I'd like to be able to have scrollbars provide clicking noises to let me know how far they've moved, that way when I use the wheel to move I can have an audio cue to let me know that.
If I put more time into brainstorming ideas, I'm sure I could cook up a lot of useful things to cue sound effects off to. Sadly, though, I don't always have access to them. I'm a little bummed about that. Adding sounds to Opera to let me know things like when a page is opened has given me a lot of insight into what the machine's doing under my active window.
Now, again, before everybody tells me how annoying that'd be, consider that every video game you play has a lot of sound effects, and your computer has a volume control. I'd like MS to explore more audio related UI experiences so I have more to play with. That doesn't necessarily mean I want everybody's computer to sound like R2-D2.
"Derp de derp."