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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."
...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--
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.
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.
...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.
Sometimes it is nice to NOT have journalling. 1982. Caltech High Energy Physics VAX. Sunday morning. I am working on a program that has a config file in /etc. I want to delete the config file. Out of habit, I automatically type "passwd" after "/etc/". Oops.
Solution: run to the VAX, and hit the power switch. I caught it in time! /etc/passwd was still there after the fsck. :-)
Alas...the next time, I didn't run fast enough, and lost the file, so had to restore it from backup.
The next time after that, the other sys admin got tired of that, and so made a hard link to /etc/passwd so that we could just link it back after I'd remove it. That was fine until I accidently copied something to /etc/passwd instead of rm'ing /etc/passwd. :-)
So, finally they made a cron job that checked /etc/passwd every few minutes, and if it was good, made a backup, and if it was missing or appeared to be trashed, restored it.
The Microsoft motto: "we're the leaders, wait for us !"
Don't forget to think different.
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
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 ?
See, seems to me that the proper solution to this problem would be to remove your root priveleges...
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.
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.
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!
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."
if you peek around /etc/security/time.conf, PAM (which redhat uses at least) will manage access control for you that way.
Any application that uses PAM will automatically time-locked accordingly.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
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
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."
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.
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.
delete the config file. Out of habit, I automatically type "passwd"... the next time... The next time after that... fine until I accidently copied something to /etc/passwd instead of rm'ing /etc/passwd...
/etc/asswd
At that point I'd just rip the fscking 'P' off your keyboard.
delete
Error: Unable to delete asswad between chair and keyboard.
Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
Oh. I get it now. You just have the order wrong:
That makes perfect sense now.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
kdm. Easy to configure, many useful options. You can even configure it to log you in automatically. Switch on your machine, go make coffee, come back, you're logged in and ready to start work, your previous session restored.
kuser can do this for you. Linux distributors often provide their own tools for this, for example SuSE, whose admin tools are handily integrated into the KDE Control Centre.
Play around with kicker, the KDE panel. It does most of the stuff that Longhorn thing does, plus lots more stuff which they haven't done.
I expect Gnome does some or all of these things too; I picked KDE because it's what I know.
Rik
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.