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MS Says Longhorn To Arrive 2005
Lawrence Person writes "According to this article in PC World, Microsoft 'publicly confirmed 2005 as the release year for Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.' And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip..."
I wouldn't mind if they delay their release. The longer they wait the more chance Linux has to succeed.
It's just like IE vs Netscape - Netscape took too long with Mozilla and now IE is everywhere.
To the all Gnome, KDE, X, OpenOffice, Linux, glibc, and all other developers. You now know you have TWO years to make Open Source better. KDE 3.2 prealphas looks promising, but X's rendering system needs a huge lift and OpenOffice needs to get a lot faster and stabler.
And of course, we all know tha(t) Microsoft release dates never slip...
It's fun to snipe, of course, and it's nice to feel some kind of safety/security in the fact that they've been very late on many things and/or delivered with bugs.
But don't get too comfy. If you're a competitor or someone who'd like to see them go down in flames (or at least severely humbled), the important thing is beating them to the punch, and jeers from the sideline don't help win a race.
Tweet, tweet.
Slashdot editors amended story titles and corrected blatent typos.
WinFS replaces the NTFS and FAT32 file systems used in current Windows versions.
Does anyone here know if FAT32 support will be maintained, as keeping write support from linux for many people will be important.
Given XP came out in 2002, ..
this is probably the biggest gap between releases of windows since win 3.1.1 and win 95
It will be interesting to see if this is infact as big a jump from win xp as win 95 was.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip...
Can anyone name a company as old as MS that hasn't ever slipped on a release date? A company that has released as many products as MS that hasn't ever slipped on a release date?
If you're gonna take a shot, make it a good one.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
i dunno about that. jeers from the sideline have screwed up many a race when it distracted them :-)
IE 3 and 4 sucked too. IE 3 is horribly slow at rendering while IE 4 freezes every 10 minutes AND eats more memory.
"But seriously, isnt this just a tad bit too far in the future to look toward? Or is this just to get people to quit emailing/speculating about when its coming out. "
I think it's damage control. The screengrabs of the beta that leaked are misleading in a few ways. In some ways, it looks pretty far along (i.e. a buncha new buttons there) in other ways it looks rather buggy and incomplete. (MS's stereotypes alter people's perceptions towards the negative)
By announcing that MS is taking another 2 years to work on it, it makes the beta images not seem so bad. "Ah, we're talking REALLY early here. They have quite a bit of time to really clean that up. That's good, I guess I should buy XP today."
"Derp de derp."
It's really rather sad the way I have begun to look at Microsoft releases. I used to actually look forward to them because generally they were a great improvement over their predessors. Windows 98 was a great upgrade from 95. From a purely technological point of view, Windows XP had a lot to say for its stability. The licensing scheme, however, was disturbing.
As Microsoft tightens down more and more on their licensing, I begin to dread anything that comes out of Redmond. I would embrace the improvements and innovations if it weren't for that tightening sensation of the noose around my neck. I will likely not even touch Longhorn unless I absolutely must. The cost and licensing look to be far too prohibitive, and I fear to give too much control to Microsoft lest I find all of my creations suddenly removed from my control.
At current rate, Microsoft is quickly digging their own grave. My company, formerly a very Windows centric shop, is starting to talk more and more about moving to UNIX due to the cost of upgrades. Longhorn may actually prove to be the breaking point at which, due to overly restrictive licensing, the corporate world starts seeking a cheaper solution.
It is sad that we must fear technological innovation because of the abuses that seem to abound as a result, and Microsoft is doing very little to help in this regard.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip...
For the love of Pete, do you guys ever stop to think about how sophomoric this site seems when EVERY post about Microsoft is littered with anti-MS sentiment? Ooh - they spell it "Micro$oft", that's hilarious.
We get it. Slashdot loves Linux; hates Microsoft. Grow up.
All those poor people who bought the Licensing 6.0 crap sure will be disappointed. Anybody who paid for that 3 year license back in 2001 (up to July of 2002 actually) will be entitled to all upgrades until, um, 2004. Or July of 2005. Nice to see that MS won't be releasing their next desktop OS until after the 3-year license expires.
Congratulations! You just paid MS for three years of nothing! (Well, the servers are entitled to Windows Server 2003, but that still doesn't justify the cost of the licenses for all the desktops.)
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
What, $9.95?
Yes, almost.
$9.95/month
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Lots of companies (including my employer) don't set their upgrade watch by Microsoft. We (a PrettyBigCompany I won't name) stayed with Windows 3.1 until 1998 when we transitioned to NT4 on the desktop. We will most likely switch to XP sometime this fall. I can pretty much guarantee you that we won't be moving away from XP until 2008 or so.
Of course we're just now finishing switching from Token Ring to Ethernet and from Netware 4.11 on Pentium Pro 200's to Netware 5.1 on dual Xeon's across the company (over 300 facilities nationwide). Yeah, if you're a tech company staying up to date is a cool thing. When your company makes and sells Stuff then you don't upgrade just for the heck of it.
(oh, and if anyone knows someone at Cisco in charge of their 3500 series ethernet switches, do me a favor and smack them around - they fail regularly whereas my old token ring concentrators Just Worked)
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
"Have you all seen Longhorn? It doesnt seem to have any improvements."
Typical FUD from an anti-MS zealot. Of course you haven't seen many improvements in Longhorn. (there are some already, depending on your point of view). It's a freaking beta, with two years left before becoming gold. There will be plenty changed before its 2005 ship date arrives. I would sincerely doubt the Longhorn betas now and whatever it is called in 2005 (we'll call it Windows 2005 for the sake of simplicity), will resemble each other except perhaps in minor ways.
Tell me, did the Linux 2.5.1 kernel closely resemble what is the latest 2.5.x kernel today?
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
>>Next thing you know they'll use JCL.... Is anybody else disturbed by this? One of their shittiest technologies (SQL Server -- I think my Rolodex benchmarks better and a bank vault in Baghdad is more secure) as the basis for a filesystem. Hoo boy.
When was the last time you checked benchmark results of SQL Server? For example in tpc-c it owns every damn category 1P servers, 2P servers,
8P, 16, 32,64 and clustered results.
Check for yourself http://www.tpc.org
Same for TPC-W.
I know this is slashdot, and this will get me modded down for defending the uglies over in Redmond, but....
A lot of companies other than microsoft let their release dates slip on a frequent basis, because, quite frankly, software development, even lousy stuff with a poor security record, takes a long time. You can project a release date, but that is mostly an optimistic guess to appease the investors. You can threaten your techies all ya want, they will not code much faster, and if they do, they will make more mistakes, shit, even microsoft knows that.... least I hope they do.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
by 2005 Linux will have become a mainstream OS if it continues at this pace.
I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. Just because Linux is already the equal to (or better than) Windows in OS capability on the desktop doesn't mean that it will be anything close to mainstream in just two years. Microsoft has a lot of things that will keep themselves dominant for the foresalble future, including existing user momentum, locked-in vendors (both hardware and software), and a very loyal following. All of these advantages are only magnified when they can spend millions at the drop of a hat to reinforce them.
We've learned over and over again the the best product doesn't always win.
Now it's not all doom and gloom. I think that Windows will continue to own the home market for at least the next five years (probably longer). But the enterprise is where Linux has a much better chance. Here is where Linux's advantages of security, open code, and TCO are far more important than in the home market (who are mostly interested in games, touchy-feely simplicity, and an abundance of high-qualtiy apps that can be pirated for their personal use).
Microsoft's only chance with longhorn is to pre-install it on every machine, if they lose their monopoly there Linux and even Apple will kick their ass.
You've got it exactly correct: it WILL be pre-installed on every machine, just like today. It's obvious that the judicial system isn't going to punish Microsoft for strong-arming box makers ("Put Windows on all machines, or we won't allow you to put Windows on *any* machines"), so they will happily continue.
This is my opinion, but currently Linux is becoming easy to use. 2 years from now it may be a complete success on the desktop or a complete failure, but considering every piece is in place I dont think Microsoft can afford 2 years.
As I kind of stated above, yes they *can* wait. They have billions in reserve, and according to their numbers they continue to pull in millions in revenue every day. They have reserves to be able to stick out this fight for a *long* time, even if they make a critical mistake (a dubious assumption: we may hate MS, but they ain't stupid).
Yes, Linux is easy to use, *for what it does*. But one of the things it *doesn't* do well is replicate Windows. And, for better or for worse, "Windows" is what most people seem to want, not "an OS that is easy to use".
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Bullshit. 7 years ago, I was running a multiuser linux system (Debian 0.96 on a 486DX4-100) and X ran quite nicely on my S3-968 video card with 2MB VRAM, thank you very much. These days, things don't seem to have moved on, or run that much faster on my P3-1GHz and P4-2GHz.
People like you said the same stuff about WindowsXP, WindowsXP turned out to be Windows2000 with a new skin/theme.
Yeah, and: uPNP, IEEE1394, USB2, fast user switching, RDP, soft firewall, P4 optimisations... a lot of these were incremental, but just because MS aren't rewriting their VM or IDE subsystems every 6 months doesn't mean that nothing ever changes. Linux is very much still in the experimental "fast-growth" stages, particularly on non-X86 architectures.
Jon.
You left out the part where Microsoft goes to Netscape, Inc. and tells them they are willing to "carve out" the browser market share, and when Netscape says "No", Microsoft uses its OEM deals to punish Netscape and restrict it from being bundled with new systems.
The "integration" of IE was just a ploy to try and legitimize the illegal act that Microsoft attempted which was collusion to control the market, then leveraging of monopoly power to restrict fair competition. The technical quality of IE and Netscape's browser had NOTHING to do with the legal issues.
But, yes, Netscape made mistakes. If anything, Microsoft may have saved itself a LOT of aggravation by simply competing fairly and legally.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip...
1. It has already slipped from late 2004 which was a previous ETA.
2. If it slips, it slips. That's better than thinking the release date matters more than the quality.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Limited HTTP handling, not IIS in the kernel. Similiar to what linux has in 2.4/2.5 series kernels.