Slashdot Mirror
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."
...Windows 2005 will be Macintosh 1997.
Dude, where's my packet?
git with the program dude.
Here is a mirror.
I Didn't get a chance to fix the links to the images, so Here is the directory with a dump of them.
(And where is the Coward option?)
--sig fault--
I didn't know what it was... hopefully this'll be useful for other people.
From whatis.com
A journaling file system is a fault-resilient file system in which data integrity is ensured because updates to directories and bitmaps are constantly written to a serial log on disk before the original disk log is updated. In the event of a system failure, a full journaling filesystem ensures that the data on the disk has been restored to its pre-crash configuration. It also recovers unsaved data and stores it in the location where it would have gone if the computer had not crashed, making it an important feature for mission-critical applications.
Not all operating systems provide the same journaling technology. Windows NT offers a less robust version of the full system. If your Windows NT system crashes, you may not lose the entire disk volume, but you will likely lose all the data that hadn't yet been written to the disk prior to the crash. By the same token, the default Linux system, ext2fs, does not journal at all. That means, a system crash--although infrequent in a Linux environment--can corrupt an entire disk volume.
However, XFS, a journaling file system from Silicon Graphics, became a part of the open-source community in 1999 and, therefore, has had important implications for Linux developers, who previously lacked such insurance features. Capable of recovering from most unexpected interruptions in less than a second, XFS epitomizes the high-performance journaling filesystem of the future.
The earliest journaling file systems, created in the mid-1980s, included Veritas, Tolerant, and IBM's JFS. With increasing demands being placed on file systems to support terabytes of data, thousands upon thousands of files per directory and 64-bit capability, it is expected that interest will continue to grow in high-performance journaling file systems like XFS.
sig.
Microsoft's equivalent to OS X...will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."
And OS X users have had for months...
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years
And Windows users have had since... 1994? NTFS is journaling, and was WELL before e2fs was... (any of you old-school Linux users remember pulling the plug or hitting power on your Linux box back in the day and immediately screaming "OH SHIT!" when you realize you probably just corrupted a whole slew of data? I do.)
In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years.
The big question is if like NTFS it will be proprietary. Even after years of reverse engineering the NTFS nut still hasnt been cracked, and if FAT32 support is not included then people may be put off from dualbooting longhorn and another OS.
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.
Apart from this image the new trend of making next generation operating systems which have giant interfaces really worries me. I always felt the advantage of running 1600x1200 (or 3200x1200 in my case) was to have more workspace, not a higher resolution interface. When OSX came out I installed it on my iBooks, then immediately uninstalled it primarily due to it's absolutely intrusive interface (secondarily due to lack of support for the software I was using at that time. My PC recently suffered an HD crash and I couldn't find my Windows 2000 Pro CD so I installed XP (yeah, I tried linux... Redhat to be exact, and the out-of-the-box ceased to function after two reboots), and came across a similar issue... the interface is too big, too audacious, and clamors for attention.
In Vegas the person with the biggest, brightest, flashiest sign will make the most money... but when it comes to OSs small, fast, and unobtrusive is the key, too bad nobody else sees that.
sig.
Back in the days of Windows 98, when rebooting every couple of hours was the norm, it would have made a lot of sense for M$ to introduce a journaling FS, so that users don't lose data all the time. But now that Windows users too have pretty decent uptimes, I wonder if it is such a big deal, since journaling has a performance penalty.
...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.
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.
You pull the plug on your linux box and corrupt a "slew of data" and someone else is a "retard".
Move out of your glass house before throwing stones.
3d effect play simmilar roles. the tranparency and shadowing of foregroung and backrgound windows is something you immediatly grasp abd grasp without think about it becuase your brain already knows how po process those clues. like wise throbbing or size changing 3d icons can be subtle ways to grab your attention. Dialog boxes that drop down out of windows again clue you into what window they are refering to.
now done wrong they could also be wizbang distractions. This is of course what has always distinguished say apple products from others. Apple tends to follow a consisten and understated GUI that just directs your eye where it needs to go.
3d effects can clrify what is or is not a button, and even what you are supposed to do with it (twist, rock, slide, press)
no you dont need 3d. heck you dont need a gui. Dos didnt have it even though it did have a graphics mode.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Microsoft motto: "we're the leaders, wait for us !"
Don't forget to think different.
So how much money does Microsoft pay Fisher Price to design there GUI?
No journaling file system guarantees that any unsaved data will be preserved in the event of a system crash. Data that's in RAM in the disk write cache is lost in the event of a crash. That has nothing to do with the file system.
Journaling file systems are transaction based. If a transaction fails partway through (IE the system crashes) the state of the disk is the same as if the transaction had never started, and is thus always consistent.
You would have to be doing something extra weird to risk corrupting an entire ext2 volume in the event of a crash. Also the article doesn't mention that ext3 IS ext2 with a journal added, it's not a totally different file system. In fact an ext3 file system that is cleanly unmounted can be mounted as an ext2 file system, FYI.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
From the article, underneath a screen shot:
.NET managed code application, but it crashes frequently.
Explorer.exe is now a
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.)
You're only as smart as your brain.
None of the things you mention about cars get in the way of, or slow down driving.
The things humming mentioned get in the way of computing.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
New parental controls let parents determine when and how kids use the computer.
This is one of the things I truly hate about windows : control, control, control !
They drive it so far that a parent (me) has to control how kids use the computer. That's insane. We have 1 iMac at home for our kids (age 10,7 and 5) and they have to figure outTHEMSELVES when and how to use it. If they have a quastion, they can ask away. If they have a fight, i turn off the machine. It took 3 weeks to find a balance, and now they manage perfectly. No control needed.
Control is like a handbrake on kids efforts to solve conflicts. You'de be amazed how intelligent the remarksof a 5year old can be if he is forced to find his own words. Quite often, he's capable of handling his big sister better than I ever could !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Just like Enlightnment E17? Or like Transluxent? Or just as DirectFB (yeah, I know it's not OpenGL, but who cares?:).
So who is "innovative" now?
:wq
NTFS was a journaling filesystem from the start; even before NT4 came out. It was a journaling filesystem before Reiserfs or EXT3 even had a single line of code written. You can set it up to fully journal the filesystem data as well (it only does metadata by default). It did change with NT 5, but the journaling capabilities still existed in prior versions. More documentation can be found here
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
It doen't look too similar to me...
n g
f
Mac OS X:
http://www4.macnn.com/team/osx/osx_consoleLogin.p
Oldschool Mac OS 9 (foreign):
http://www.macopoli.com/Sito/Schede_figg/Login.gi
Now, if the Longhorn login window "shakes its head" when an incorrect login/pass is entered, *that* would be copying.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, find a Mac and try logging in with a bogus login/pass combination... the login window jitters side to side for a moment as though it's shaking it's head in a "no" fashion...... something straight out of NeXTSTEP/Openstep).
"Windows Longhorn will offer sweeping changes over its predecessors and be the most significant release of Microsoft's desktop operating system since Windows 95"
Isn't this how they describe EVERY iteration of their desktop OS's?
The article goes on to describe a bunch of features that would make little or no difference to most users.
Regardless of what you think of their technology, you have to be amazed that they can get so many people to pay ever-increasing amounts of money to "upgrade" their systems to the latest OS.
Winmodems are designed to use M$ Windows system calls to offload processing power from the hardware to the CPU. Same with Winprinters. This is why they have "Win" in the name. Why the hell should there be a law against this? I can still buy any REAL modem and it will work flawlessly with Linux. If your hardware doesn't work with Linux, get hardware that does. Start checking the HCL before you go to Best Buy.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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.
Macintosh: I made that stuff back in - ..but I already...
Windows:
Now slow, I say, slow down there just a second, boy, and lemme talk a little sense into ya! (If that boy don't stop talkin' he's gonna sunburn his tongue.)
Macintosh:
Windows: Whoa there boy! (Nice kid, but he's about as thick as a whale omelette.) You can't, I say, you can't just take credit for things that ya didn't do! (This boy's about as sharp as a pound o' wet liver.) You can't just keep crowin' on about how young you feel and how hard you work. You just gotta start bein' the best boy you can be and show those folks you can do it just as good as them!
Now go on, I say, go on boy, an' show 'em what you're made of! Now git!
Macintosh: Ah..yeah. Later.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Where did I say a 3d accelerated desktop is required to accelerate 2d graphics?
:)
And why do you think I've never heard of 2d acceleration? What did I say to imply that?
But to say more on the topic, 3d is a superset of 2d: So 3d acceleration is necessarily also going to be able to handle 2d acceleration, while 2d acceleration cannot necessarily handle 3d acceleration.
Here's a trick: Lets say you have to manage 15 windows. With 3d acceleration you can take advantage of the Z/height buffer to keep track of all of them, since they all live on different levels. Without 3d acceleration, you have to create a data structure and window managment system, which necessarily requires the CPU and memory subsystems to deal with all the windows.
See, if only for that, 3d acceleration trumps 2d acceleration. There are more situations like that too
GPL Deconstructed
I wasn't impressed by the screen shots, and the features seem pretty weak in general, but the one thing I did like was the parental controls. Is there anything like this for Linux? I just implemented a bash script in about 30 seconds that did this. It simply changes the users login shell from /bin/false to /bin/bash between two given periods. Pretty basic, I know, but I really like the idea of parental controls within the OS, limiting time spent and what not.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
In their quest to show as little information as possible into as much screen real-estate as possible, Microsoft has set a new record.
"Oh! I have an idea!" said one Microsoft senior engineer to his underling, "Lets make all the fonts and icons bigger so we can ditch that accessibility control panel and replace it with a "My Yet Another Other Stuff" folder. "Oh yes!" shouted the underling, "and that way we can perhaps hide how painfully slow we make a super-computer crawl."
The new big feature of the filesystem is not that it's journalling.
They are integrating the filesystem with their SQL engine so that files are easily searchable with the multiple GB hard drives everyone will have by the time 2005 rolls around. The big feature is that it's a database filesystem called WinFS.
I guess the submitters of the article don't even read the articles anymore! Gotta love the quip at the end of the summary--makes him look even more moronic. NTFS has been a journalling file system since its inception. Many years before ext3 reared its ugly head.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'd just like to add to that...
/tmp and /home/public (FTP/SMB area) partitions, and EXT3 on more critical ones.
XFS, while I love it for its performance, journals metadata only. So files won't be lost, but their contents may be. ReiserFS is very similar. EXT3, while much clunkier, does data journaling as well. For these reasons I use XFS on
Jeremy
"In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."
4 years from now Slashdot will have a headline about how KDE's 3D accelerated desktop finally reached version 1.
"Derp de derp."
This nice article can be a good start for collecting some cool ideas for Linux WM's. I'm using blackbox and although I like its minimalist approach the future of desktop computers is clearly in the 'eye candy and preformance' department. I think even Apple's X interface GUI success shows that. So maybe we should get humble (again) and look in to windows/apple WM's and try to get few good ideas for Linux WM. I think Linux WM is aboslutley behind the Apple/Windows people. Lets face it: all good WM's with bad GUI's will have a serious Windows/Apple competition.
Dude, read the post. He doesn't think a 3D accelerated desktop is required to accelerate 2D graphics. And 15 windows on different levels is not a 3D desktop. I can cascade 15 IE Windows and the way the human brain interprets them they are on different levels, one on top of the other, yet they are still 2D.
The NT line has been using NTFS for over a decade now.
The submitter of the article was simply an idiot looking to mention "Linux" in some way in a Slashdot article summary.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Dude, you should use a RAM-based filesystem for /tmp. You shouldn't rely on /tmp being persistent across a reboot.
I believe (if I'm not mistaken) ramfs is the way to go for /tmp. It's a RAM disk that can push to swap as needed. The reason you want to do this is that most temporary files exist for less than 30 seconds. Thus, there's never any reason to touch the disk for these unless there is simply not enough RAM.
If a RAM-based fs doesn't turn your crank, then just use the one that performs the best for losts of short-lived small to medium-sized files.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Recently, there was a Slashdot article [slashdot.org] here about a "piles" feature that Apple had patented in June 2001 that sounds very familiar. Screenshot of piles [mac.com] here looks different, but the concepts appear similar:
:-) (double click an end point when you want to follow a link)
It doesn't much look like Apple's "Piles" but more like PARC's Hyperbolic Tree, of 1994. This bit of software was spun off into a company named Inxight. Navigate their website using a Hyperbolic Tree. (good to see they eat their own dog food.)
If M$ finds a good use for Hyperbolic Tree navigation in Longhorn, more power to them. I have played with it off and on since 1998 and have found that without a mega-huge (as in 1600*1200+) resolution screen, you can't get much out of it.
Yes, NTFS is a journaling filesystem.
The poster made might not be aware of this.
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."
I resent idiots who use "M$" as if it's insulting or clever in any way.
How dare a company make money! Let's put a dollar sign in their name! That will show everyone how mature Linux users are.
Your idea for laws that prevent hardware deals is fascism at its worst.
"Sufferin' succotash."
When I tested Longhorn a couple of months ago with M2 (i think it was), shortly after booting I noticed that it was consuming 306 out of the 320 megabytes of RAM in my computer. With no programs running besides whatever happened to load on startup with the default configuration.
I don't care how good or bad the shell is if I am only left with 14 megabytes of RAM to run my programs after booting.
Actually, ext3 is backwards compatible with ext2. In essence, ext3 is ext2 with a .journal file for journalling. You can mount an ext3 volume as an ext2, but you loose journaling.
tmpfs is actually even better. I resizes itself as need, so it only takes up as much memory as is needed.
Spencer Ogden
Yea, but it looks like butt and doesn't run the only OS I really care to use anymore.
That's just wrong on several levels.
First of all, the file system is not consistent after a crash: journaling file systems need to replay the journal in order to make it consistent. This is no different in principle from non-journaling file systems (which, traditionally, also have incorporated various features to permit recovery), it just happens to be faster.
Second, I/O APIs usually do not define a notion of "transaction" at the file system level, and even if they do, there aren't a whole lot of guarantees you can make that are particularly useful. In fact, journaling file systems and transaction-based file systems really are very different things. A journaling file system can be used to implement a transaction-based file system, but it can also be used just to implement fast recovery.
Third, for performance reasons, very few journaling file systems journal file content; they only worry about meta-data. And NTFS falls back a step further by making particularly weak guarantees. For example, if I create files "a", "b", and "c" in that sequence, with three separate programs, after a crash, any combination of those files may be present, and their content may be arbitrarily messed up.
So does ramfs. The difference between tmpfs and ramfs is that tmpfs is swappable, whereas ramfs is pinned in RAM. tmpfs is definititely the preferred choice for /tmp.
Journaling file systems are, what, a couple of decades old? Microsoft didn't invent them. Apple didn't invent them. The real question is: what took either of them so long to incorporate them?
In one of the captions: "The taskbar, Start Menu, and sidebar are almost infinitely configurable. " Where infinity is approximately equal to four. -- The Gecko of Mysteries
Snarfle.
NTFS is a journaling file system, and Longhorn has a more advanced journaling file system that Linux can't not match. The new file system will classify files for you, from word document to mp3 files. You only need to type in keywords like "Picture taken in Feburary by John" it will show up a list of picture taken in Feburary by the name John. It is too powerful that Linux is still way behind.
If you're interested in backing up Reiser partitions, check out PartImage. It does a fair few different file systems, and is GPL.
This is not true. ext3 and ext2 have the same disk representation but they don't share code, at all. The fact that ext2 is mature doesn't really help ext3. People think ext3 is just ext2 with a few hacks to add journalling but it's actually a block level implementation of a journaling filesystem that just happens to use the same disk layout as ext2 for convenience. Your statement is sort of like saying that the NTFS code in Linux is mature because Windows has had NTFS for a few years now.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
Seriously, the colors are cool but strong colors effect productivity. Light hues or grays which the standard Windows desktop is modeled after is actually designed to make you productive. Just ask any physcologist or go to any modern school. Dark gui's however do excite emotions which Microsoft wants so people buy more of their products. Amazing!
I wonder how modifiable the gui is.
http://saveie6.com/
So, when you save a picture, do you have to fill out a questionaire? I can picture it now:
.jpg extention. This must be a picture. If you're not comfortable with extentions, I can hide these for you in the future. Please take a moment to fill out this questionaire in order to save your file.
Clippy: I see that you're trying to save a file. I see that this file has a
1. Is this a photo? yes no
2. Did you take this photo? yes no
3. If you didn't take this photo, do you have the legal right to save this file to your hard-drive? yes no
4. If you didn't take this photo, please type in the Name and Social Security Number of whoever did take this photo. (No information is being sent to Microsoft at this time).:
5. If you're ready to save this, please click Yes. If not, please click No. If you'd like some time to think about it, click Later. If you'd like more information about Microsoft's revolutionary new file system, click Help.
OK. Please stand by as the information about this file is verified with Microsoft (note: you need an internet connection to proceed. Click Set Up My Internet Now to commit to a 12-month subscription to Microsoft Windows (formerly MSN) and to activate access to your hard-drive.). Once we've verified your legal right to save this file to your hard-drive, you'll be given a short (5-7 minute) questionaire to provide further details about this file to make finding it easier the next time you plan to view it with Microsoft Photo Monkey. Thank you for choosing Microsoft!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
In the short period of 2 years since the initial release of Mac OS X, Apple has produced 2 major and numerous minor upgrades with significant performance improvement and lots of new features, in addition to shipping an impressive array of innovative hardwares (iPod, Xserve, Xserve RAID, LCD iMac, 17" PowerBook with slot-loading DVD burner, FireWire 800, BlueTooth, 54 mbps 802.11g AirPort Extreme, Gigabit Ethernet) and highly sophisticated software tools such as iLife, iSync, iCal, Keynote, Safari, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, WebObjects, FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks, Rendezvous, QuickTime 6, iTunes Music Store, and so on.
But what has the biggest software company done in the same time frame? Surprisingly, very few. Other than the countless security patches plus a Win XP Service Pack and Windows 2003 Server, the only things that come from Redmond are hypes.
Longhorn is officially a 2005 product with very few features to brag about, and may well be delayed to 2006 or later if the track record of MS is anything to go by.
It's just incredible that a small hardware company like Apple has somehow developed a bigger and better software portofolio than the most powerful company in the world , and frankly embarrassing when considering that MS is 60 times bigger than Apple.
Am I the only one who thinks there's nothing lower on the food chain than a Windows fanatic? Like the guy on that webpage, or the creepy wind-bags in PC Magazine? As a Linux Geek, at least I have a clue as to how and why things work; rather than a boner from the latest cute icons and wallpapers.
Cripes.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
hahaha, once again linux users proud of a feature even os/2 had before them.
pigfukr
Oh. I get it now. You just have the order wrong:
That makes perfect sense now.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Actually, I'm not. I've never posted here AC-style. I'm willing to back up my opinions. I _have_ heard of 2D acceleration. Simply put, you can't make the damn thing move as fast or look as good with only 2D composition.
like:
... most developers are content with those features. Until developpers of toyish things like SuperKaramba, and things like hacking advanced graphic features into XFree (which you need to be 45 years old to do in order to understand X and be allowed to commit code) are as important and paid as well as as apache developers and kernel hackers, the new OSS Unices (commericial Unix being mostly dead on the desktop) will be as ugly as the old ones. Yes I am in the camp that says OS/X is NOT Unix and it is NOT "a BSD" (it uses BSD userland that's about it). The engineering workstation market used to be Unix terrirtory but those days are long gone.
* a convenient login widget
* easy to use admin tools for login access
* more convenient and innovative UI metaphors
Instead open source continously copies a 2-3 year out of date commercial UI. OS/X and Longhorn beat Linux hands down on the desktop - even if they didn't have applications the UI and much of the underlying technology is better for consumer use.
Now, granted, BSD and Linux will blow OS/X and Longhorn out of the water on serving static webpages, running MySQL, Zope and sending e-mail
And re: on GUI elements of desktop dominance no one seems to consider advanced storage and filesystem features like ACL, EA, indexing and database features, etc. as all that important. ReiserFS might enable this sort of this 10 years in the future but it doesn't provide it at the user level.
(1) This UI is crap. Flashy and distracting.
(2) Check out MS' media-player thing on the 'dock'? Can we say "appicon"?
Really, where is all this innovation MS is talking about?
That spider-web like file-system navigation? Nothing new. There were 3D versions of stuff like that back in 1994 with Jurassic Park.
The problem MS and Apple face is that there really isn't anything much more to do. WindowManagers are already pretty much ok. Maybe a few tweaks here and there would fix minor flaws. However, nothing particularly major need be done. It's sort of like the design for the trashcan (real-life). When was the last innovation in trash-cans?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Look here for one of several knowledgeable accounts of the history behind Microsoft's TCP/IP stack that are floating around the web.
Please be more careful before you declare that something has been proven.
Some people here have pointed out
that this '3d' effects desktop will not
cause a performance hit because it
will use the GPU that is currently under-
utilised.
This is clearly wrong. If anyone of you
is thinking that you are NOT using VGA
acceleration then please try running the
XFB server on the framebuffer device.
All current desktop environments do use
the 2d acceleration including things
like BitBlockTransfer (Blitting) and
resizing and drawing polygons/lines
etc.
By definition a 3d environment will
require more resources, especially
memory and CPU overhead to keep
track of 3d properties. Even if
texture mapping is somehow faster
than blitting still the 3d algorithms
are generally way heavier than 2d
primitives.
Anyway, I strongly favour the idea of
better GUI but frankly everything has
a certain cost and 3d GUI is definitely
not cheap in CPU/GPU/memory terms.
P.
It's quite obvious that windows was developed for the end user in mind and might lead the market for many years to come in the PC market.
On the other hand Linux was built for the developer in mind and strangely enough still leads the market in the server area...Don't you recall the recent slashdot article that quoted the microsoft exec saying that windows 2003 is still playing catch up with the thing linux has had since it's arrival?
Different users in mind. Different leads in different markets