Slashdot Mirror
New Longhorn Screenshots Leaked
Badgerguy writes "The Supersite for Windows has some shiney-blue looking leaked screenshots of LongHorn. The new screenshots of the 'Aero' interface mainly seem to be concerned with Digital Media integration - which has become deeper still. A new 'SyncManager' screenshot is up there (copying of iSync?) as well as some pictures of LongHorn prototype hardware, which looks like a cross between a desktop PC / Notebook / Tablet PC. "
**For the Windows users that are going to inevitably say "Well my XP box never crashed and I don't have to reboot for a week! I play mad gamez and it stays good! So it's stable, you are just a open source zealot!", just shut up. When the big kids talk about "stability", they mean that a server remains stable indefinately while performing multiple critical tasks. If one task fails, the OS is capable of maintaining peak levels of performance despite the failure of one component/application/process/whatever. Not having to reboot your Win2K Server for 20 or so days when all the box was doing was providing file sharing and running a small Active Directory domain for a measly 100-200 users is not "stable". That kind of stability was surpassed by UNIX over 20 years ago (and every other mainstream OS since, as well). This post was first.
Even as Slashdot Subscriber, the site was slow/unresponsive. I'm surprised Slashdot people are that interested in Longhorn. So anyway, here's a mirror.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
This was more of an 'awe' presentation based on those screens, the flapping windows with low CPU usage still looks impressive
I remember when screenshots of WindowsXP was released (codenamed Whistler?)...
I *specifically* recall seeing a very Windows XP looking screenshot, but with a GNOME foot in the bottom left corner
Does anyone else remember this? Do they? I've been bringing this up since and people just look at me like i'm nuts.
do() || do_not();
The new screenshots of the 'Aero' interface mainly seem to be concerned with Digital Media integration..
So er.. much like Apple then. For a change.
Nice to see MS playing 'keep-up' as usual.
Every time new screenshots come out I'm reminded of my 13 year old kid sister. When I was 13, I knew a decent bit about computers. I had played Zork and could throw together a program in basic if I wanted to.
When I ask her how things work on the computer she has now, she's used to XP and having almost everything explained in simple, child-like steps. If I ask her to save something "to the hard drive" she doesn't know what this means.
While I applaud the M$ goal of making computers as easy to use as toasters, a ever widening gap is occuring thanks to pretty UIs that leaves those of us who know how things work under the hood in a separate world. I only hope that with Longhorn you can disable the absurd glossification and get it to run 10% faster. Or maybe to have ssh built into the telnet command line. That would be nice.
Iknow we've been saying this for years now, but um...
I mean really. The prototype machines look much like an iMac with it's screen pushed down to the desk, and that wallpaper doesn't look ANYTHING like Apple's default.
Okay, so there are only so many form factors to make an LCD/Keyboard desktop-type computer, fine. But the rest is just more innovation taken from Apple. Apologies if any OSS predates anything I've mentioned about Apple in this case.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I wonder how much influence gnome and kde have had on the Windows GUI designers...?
It looks so radically different from two versions ago (2000).
Does anyone else find this new interface Microsoft is leaning towards as being a eye sore? God the huge buttons and bright colors.. I thought XP had some ugly colors and fonts.
yikes
DP
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
I suppose it probably is unavoidable, so long as even Slashdot, the biggest, most popular advocate of Windows' main competition, Linux, treat it as such.
Way to fight the power, fellas.
As each new Windows release comes out, I'm surprised to see the new release looks even more like a toy than the last release. What's next, a dancing Hello Kitty?
Anyone else notice that in one of the pics it says "Here's room for text but I don't thing we need it."?
Did Microsoft hire a Slashdot editor?
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
Talk about bloat. One of the screenshot diplaying what I would think is a fancy Device Manager has the computer listed as a 80Ghz Xeon with 20GB of RAM.
::)
Is that what's going to be required to run Longhorn?
(P.S. I know it's just what the developer typed in as a placeholder)
-- taking over the world, we are.
looks more like KDE than Windows
Since when does the mouse pointer show up in screenshots? Print Screen in Windows doesn't capture the mouse.
this built on MSN Chat Technology? Do the masses really need to have interfaces that look could be named "Sony's My First Desktop"?
OK.. so that's the special needs version. Where the professional users edition?
its a good thing buttons, images, and text are all getting larger. i've been far too satisfied with my 19" display.
finally, and end to the tyranny of productive screen usage!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Update the GUI and people will forget about the insecurities and DRM being pushed down their throats...
Butt ugly interface, poor user interface design. Microsoft, you ain't no Apple.
I don't want Zoloft-inspired colors, and yet more areas to shove UI controls and informational boxes. At this rate, I'll probably buy another Mac the next time I upgrade my home computer(s).
I sure hope they're using Longhorn to describe 'next year's Microsoft offering'. How many more years are gonna go by until they release something called 'Longhorn'? I remember hearing about that when the public betas for 95 were going on. (Which was actually Windows ME with features to be turned off.)
It's not like I care...I hope to never come into contact with any such software if I can avoid it...but this just bugs me.
Can someone set me straight?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
For me to POOP ON!!!!!!!! :p
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Now we know what KDE 5.0 will look like.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I know we've been saying this for years now, but um...
They're not ripping off of Apple at all!
I mean really. The prototype machines look much like an iMac with it's screen pushed down to the desk, and that wallpaper doesn't look ANYTHING like Apple's default.
Okay, so there are only so many form factors to make an LCD/Keyboard desktop-type computer, fine. But the rest is just more innovation taken from Apple. Apologies if any OSS predates anything I've mentioned about Apple in this case.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
...but Aero crashes.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
to have a field day isnt this what they told microsoft not to do? It's not like they will allow Real or Quicktime to replace the "interagted" player. O well so when is the next SCO story comming out i havent had my afternoon dose?
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
There's an iRock. ohPuuhleazzz...
Bigger icons and bigger text on a shiney blue background. Reminds me of Gnome, which reminds me of KDE, which reminds me of OS X. At least with Bob they had true innovation going for them. Bring back Bob!!!
'Same speed C but faster'
Whether you like the interface aesthetics or not (big deal, you can switch 'em back, no doubt, just like I do in XP), there are some nifty looking new features I saw before the site just got too slow to keep looking.
I notice in the audio properties box, you could dynamically mix the volume level of any running application - that's friggin cool. Now I can watch a movie or something and not have every IRC notification in the background blare over what I'm watching, I can turn it down.
Oh well, bash away, I'm sure you all hate it for completely non-technical reasons.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I completely agree, I need to be entertained with adult graphics, movies, photos, etc.
If you look at this screenshot of the hardwware and devices config [http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/lh-wi nhec-03.png] it has a link for "buying a new device". Is it just me, or is this a way for Microsoft to selectively advertise and push the hardware products or stores that pay a referrer fee?
Doesn't this screenshot look a heck of a lot like the TiVo logo? I thought it actually was the TiVo logo when I saw the thumbnail and worried for a second that TiVo had sold its soul. Microsoft might want to rethink that screen, though, if they don't want a trademark fight.
"Even as Slashdot Subscriber, the site was slow/unresponsive. I'm surprised Slashdot people are that interested in Longhorn. So anyway, here's a mirror."
Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who will last the longest of all? Apparently not you. Your computer's on fire. Better get down here quick.
nm
I know they have really shitty design interface people, but would someone, for the love of god, tell them that pastels are really bad for eys strain over significant time intervals (or with that ugly shit, 10 seconds)? Please, ditch the pastels. I'm NOT a machead, but Apple's done a good job of picking colors with slightly lower saturation levels, with the result being a very pleasing interface. WinXP (and evidently this crap) make me want to slit my wrists.
Also, what's with the 800 pixel menu bars? Were these screenshots taken from a computer for the legally blind or will those using windows really have to look at that shit?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Honestly, if MS released a brand new operating system that looked identicle to XP, but was just ultra secure and ultra stable, would it sell?
Or would managers and housewives just say "its the same thing!"
Plus you want to keep pushing the GUI that made it popular in the first place. Why give Linux a chance to gain in the desktop market?
**For Linux Zealots that are going to inevitably say "Well if MS is going to sell secure and stable OS everyone would want a copy!, just shut up. When the big kids talk about "selling software" we are talking the major buyers, here. Which aren't necessarily the tech saavy.
Yes, that last paragraph was an insult to the parents obvious troll-paragraph. I run a SuSE server and an XP box. Both have been up the same length of time without a crash.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Ya, I'm talking to you, Gnome and KDE developers! You better get busy catching up to this new "desktop standard"!
The graphical screens seem to be more and more CPU/memory intensive. I remember having performance problems on my 1.6Ghz pentium 4 with 256 MB RAM and solution as per MS knowledge base was to change the graphical settings and make screens look more like Win 2000 from Win XP !!
But MS always leaves more to be desired by making an OS such that it obsoletes the increased processing power in 1 or 2 years... so that the cycle or upgrade remains...
--Sig
I am telling you, you won't believe this !!
... has to be the first one on the page where it has the Microsoft Microvault which was marked unavailable in the screenshot. Reminds me of Seinfeld... "I'm putting it in the vault."... especially Seinfeld, because stuff comes out of the vault all the time.
I'm assuming this is the DRM portion candied up?
T.
This space for rent.
The OS with a GUI just like its security...full of holes.
Jonathanjk.com
or is it two...
bluecurve
I cannot stand this extra fluff they have been piling on since Windows XP. When will the fluff end?
I ASK YOU, WHEN WILL THE FLUFF END? PLEASE END THE FLUFF!
There better be an option to turn it off and go back to the old classic look.
Not that I'm going to buy it... because that would be unheard of around here. Yeah....
You talk like there's a *wrong* time to grind your axe when I comes to M$. :P
:(
I have to agree with the parent though. They are moving toward higher media integration, which is copying Apple to the hilt. Interoperability and security have ALWAYS been low on their hit list. They don't care if what they make works with anyone else, because they have so much market saturation that they can more or less say "screw the rest of you".
*sigh* I always have to explain to people that 90% of the OS's out there are great, standards driven, and work well together...there's all sorts of free software out there, that you can even modify the source code to make work the way you want.
The problem is, Close to 90% or more of computers are running Windows instead. I still have some people I encounter that have never heard of the concept of a computer without windows, and get downright defensive of the concept of a computer WITHOUT windows.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
cool
This has got to be the first time you managed to *NOT* dupe another article. Right on! Keep it up! Good Show!
In particular, look at the one in the bottom-left of the first batch. It's a simple autoplay dialog, but it takes up 640x492! There's no excuse for that kind of waste.
I know I'm probably in the minority, since I'm not one of those people that maximizes EVERYTHING (my roommie runs IE maximized at 1400x1050!), and I'm not opposed to a little eye candy, but why should a simple dialog with all of five choices take up that much space?
...Apple's gonna gain their market back.
Seriously. This OS is going to be bloated horse shit. We all know it. Even the people who were interested in Whistler know this is horseshit. And of course MICROS~1 is going to dump support for their old OSes. So where are users and developers going to go? Simple.
Apple.
I can't wait to download it. Erm, I mean, buy it. Yeah, that's it...
I like it, it appears to be very clean. Certainly a bit heavy for a Fluxbox user, but still very nicely arranged. I skipped XP, but I will most likely try this one.
look like my default OS X background picture. I wonder how THAT could have happened?
Any word on how they'll avoid a Fischer-Price look-and-feel lawsuit?
Reminds me of the sort of front end you'd see on lab lockdown software in an elementary school. How come closed source OS developers (MS and Apple) don't want to provide variety to their GUI? Why does it fall to third party folks to write hacks that let you customize a system. Yes, 95% of regular users will never think beyond their desktop pic and screen saver but for the rest of us...make it an admin thing or something. I don't care what you have to do to keep grandma from fscking up her machine, just don't lock the rest of us down.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Anybody notice that in the hardware & Devices Screenshot, the CPU is an Intel Xeon @ 80 GHz?
here's a temp mirror MIRROR
Right click.
Display Properties.
Appearance.
Theme.
"Windows 2000 Classic"
If Windows is sooo irrelevant and terrible, then don't use it. You don't even have to talk about it. Why the big deal?!?
Microsoft users don't sit around and bitch about Linux all the time. There ARE things to bitch about you know... Every OS has it's bad points.
Nice to see they finally got the OPENSTEP 4.0 tabbed dock/shelf in the UI.
It seems to me M$ is about making the PC more like a consumer electronics device (TV) which is fine for most people I guess. The problem is (like a new model car), if anything breaks down, you're in no position to fix it yourself. Old model cars and specific types of computer OS's are easier for the layman to learn what needs to be done I believe ...
Oh, and I'll take my new Gnome UI any day thank you.
The new screenshots of the 'Aero' interface mainly seem to be concerned with Digital Media integration - which has become deeper still.
In a related story, a hungry pack of US DoJ antitrust lawyers were spotted in downtown Washington, DC today vigorously licking their chops.
The fact that one of the supposed screenshots shows a BeOS-icon tells me that somebody was a little too creative with PhotoShop...
I dont know about you buy appearance does count for some people. They are what we call "mac users"
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier.
They don't have to win over anybody? They just need to avoid losing them. Ultimately that will most likely happen through continuing to make people need windows rather than choose it on its merits.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I say the next big GUI innovation be codenamed Pyro...or maybe Terra? It will have a completely blank screen and a $ prompt. Users will be required to KNOW how to use a computer in order to use the interface until the user proves some form of competence...in which case "startx" gets chmoded to let that particular user in.
Somehow i read shiney-blue looking bluescreen of death. Its weird how our brain prereads an article for us.
The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -- Unknown
After I saw the screenshots, I can be sure. This is the oficial death of OSX. Microsoft has really hired the best professional desktop designer experts of the world this time. Bill is not kidding.
i rarely have much of an opinion on the look of the gui, and this is no different. the buttons are too big, and the colors are the next itteration of the crappy xp default colors, but whatever
what seems important is that they are furthering the shift to task based computing that began with win xp.
this really gets me thinking, though, that ever OS that m$ has put out since win 3.1 seems like a half baked version of the next one. they put one out and the next one always makes me think "oh, that's what they were trying to do with the last one." and then there's some half assed features that will be implemented in the next one. quite a business model.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
If you say that Microsoft can't improve on the interface of Windows, then you have certainly not used the interfaces available on MacOS (for any version, not just X). It's a heck of a lot easier to navigate around MacOS, and I don't say this out of experience; I say this because Apple specifies a Human Interface Guideline that Microsoft does not have for Windows (even Microsoft has to follow the HIG when they make Office v.X). Everything is placed in a tree-like heirarchy that is easier (compared to Windows' interface) to find things in, especially if you haven't had experience with the interface. I personally still use the classic view in Windows 2000 and XP, just because their new interface is NOT better than the old one. Their changing the interface only makes it worse and bloated, which requires more exploration and getting used to than it should be. With MacOS, nothing needs getting used to. If you want to change something, you just follow the yellow brick road. It's as simple as that. Microsoft has yet to make that step into improving the simplicity of their interface. You don't complain only because you've used it since Windows 95 and classic view is an option that you can find after having getting used to the insanity of the placement of functions/options like that.
Apple came up with "Aqua", Microsoft is now attacking back with "Aero". I guess Apple will have to come back with either "Fuego" or "Terra".
Just what I don't need! Shave of all the bullshit and maybe it'll be nice! I'll be pretty happy if they make a little checkbox marked "Fuck off with all ye crap wizards and let's git to configurin' this piece 'o crap!" (irish accent optional) so people can finally make changes to settings without having the deal with 20+ "wizards" you couldn't care less about. If they drop the price down to what it's actually worth, (~20 euro, 25 if I get a pretty box with it) I might even buy instead of waiting for the ISO!
Hate me!
A new 'SyncManager' screenshot is up there (copying of iSync?)
What a disappointment it must be for m$ that Apple has not come out with a new desktop for them to copy. Still, if they keep pushing back the release date of this OS, Apple might release something in time for them to imitate it.
It never fails to amaze me that although m$ tries to copy the look of the Apple UI, they are unable to copy the intuitiveness that Apple seems to have down pat. We are all used to the windows UI and everyone has become accustomed to it, but it is far from obvious that I should click on the start bar when I want to shut my computer off.
Mod me as a troll if you must, but it's still true.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
i would be interested in viewing the source code to the new ui and see how much it has in common with the gpl'ed kde interface... hmm, suprisingly similar in the crystal-like theme, trans taskbar, windows, and more... but i guess they don't have to worry about getting caught since their source is locked up tighter that fort knox... (i guess it is to keep their os code so security minded, hmmm, right.)
Nowhere in the article does it say these are actually leaked screenshots. It does say "Here, for the first time, is a gallery of UI prototypes that I believe accurately portrays the "Aero" user interface in Longhorn" I don't think we should qualify this as actual leaked screenshots.
.adios/losers ~snake
mental capacites of age two and up!
Am I the only one who thinks something's wrong when the shiny, pretty UI is indistinguishable from the shiny, pretty desktop image?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/lh-win hec-03.png
The Information under the PC seems pretty far out... "Intel(r) XEON(tm), 80GHz RAM, 20GB1 Ultra ATA Hard Drive, Windows Longhorn Professional"
Plus you want to keep pushing the GUI that made it popular in the first place.
No, what made it popular was that everybody's software runs on it. Macintosh was ahead of Microsoft for a long long time when it came to the GUI. People kept buying Wintel boxes because that's what they had at work and, generally speaking, they were cheaper.
Look at an early 90's macintosh GUI and compare it to windows 3.11 and tell me that the window GUI would win over anybody. Then compare it to windows 95, and it's closer but it's still in favor of apple. Basically at 95, the GUI became good enough to not detract from the system but it was hardly something that would convince people to use it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'm not impressed with it the screenshots for longhorn, they dont show all the transparency and other options longhorn includes.
Where are the Gui's you see in Anime? The ones with multiple overlapping, transparent windows that pop up with information, and a nice loading screen and color videos. The closest thing ive seen is the frame buffer xwin replacement. OSX is pretty close, but use the 1 window model.
-
screenshot of me playing around with icewm.
So it now claims to support PDAs and vibrators... how many versions of window will M$ need to get it right.
An even more stable winXP for home use would have been a better OS. Cause we know those damn patches ain't cutting it.
--Chag
I don't know about the rest of slashdot, but I'm sick of the GUI looking like it was built for a 4 year old. As the population ages, the less we need these over-simplified 'Fisher Price' interfaces. Ugg...
...*man* I don't care!
Besides, who is going to be able to see the fancy new UI when the machines are down for 5 days at a time due to multiple worm infections.
Quit playing with the fucking UI and run some fuzz testers on your code, morons.
Why the hell is winblows looking more and more like Nautilus and Mac OSX????
Oooh wait thats right Microsoft Innovates
Nice to see Microsoft jumping on the "we can use those BeOS icons" bandwagon. (Look carefully.)
blog |
I think not... Windows had syncing technology long before people began trying to sync Macs with anything (be it cell phones, or PDAs, etc.).
As did Linux...
Will they be changing the look and feel of the Blue Screen of Death (tm)? Maybe it'll become the Pastel Screen of Discomfort.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"Play songs by artist."
We're sorry, you do not have access to these artists.
"Play songs by genre."
You have not been approved by the RIAA to listen to the specified genre, your IP address has been logged and a Cease and Desist order has been autogenerated and submitted to your ISP.
"Play songs by year."
By attempting to work around our digital security, you have violated the DMCA. Please turn yourself in to your Zip code's Patriot Justice Center or insert your credit card now.
---
WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
I wound you up like my little bitch, didn't I? I would say that I'm at least decent-to-good. I might not be the best of trolls, but I was good enough to make you get in a huff like a little girl. ;)
Interesting things here. They had pictures of many items, including a picture of a Dell which leads me to wonder if were looking at paid product placement, programmer placeholder, or a picture that would come include with a driver? Perhaps such pictures would be part of an OEM customization kit? I also noticed that the option for copying music from a device was to use windows media player. Last I checked, copy and paste works just fine, so is this some kind of DRM thing? That would certainly not be compatible with Ogg Vorbis. I didn't see a simply copy from option without using Windows Media Player, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done as just another disk.
The one thing I saw that I really liked was a data syncronization utility. The ability to keep your contacts in your PDA, phone, email and whatever else all synchronized without using multiple computers strikes me as a good thing. Presently you usually need dedicated syncronization tools, and they tend not to play well with each other. Now since Outlook Express isn't going to given out anymore, and there not about to include Outlook itself, it makes me wonder what they are planning to do address book wise, and how this ties into syncing, presently a pain with phones and PDA's typically needing different software.
- Fischer-Price
- Lego
- First year art college
- Intern
- Drone
- Staff
- I have work to do
- Past deadline
- (There is no CowboyNeal option)
Plus an advanced tab that lets you customise things that need customising, instead of things that don't, and then save the settings to the server and replicate them across the entire fleet.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
When I ask her how things work on the computer she has now, she's used to XP and having almost everything explained in simple, child-like steps. If I ask her to save something "to the hard drive" she doesn't know what this means.
/. is because, no matter how much we try to deny it, we probably envy the strides made in UI that just aren't being done in Linux (yet).
And to non-geeks, this is a bad thing. To the rest of the world, it's not a big deal. They don't really care if their hard drive has 8MB of cache and runs at 7200RPMs. They don't care how much space is on their hard drive as long as they don't get a scary message saying they've run out of it.
And they certainly don't mind getting told, step-by-step, how to do certain tasks.
The reason that "leaked" screenshots of the new version of Windows gets posted on
Case in point: you're 13 year old sister doesn't need to know about xcopy or directory structures or file trees in order to save or retrieve files. And better yet, a grandma can do the same thing and while we see them as childlike step-by-step shortfalls, the simple fact is that UI brings computer efficiency to the masses. Is it as efficient as we are (or can be)? Of course not. But it lets them use something that they had not been able to use before (I'm speaking mainly of the grandmas at this point).
Either way, I think that dumbing down is a great thing. Because this gives users a choice: You can go step by step and make something work. Or, if you're curious, or if you're a Power User (tm), you can turn that off and work with more control and finesse than thought possible. I know the Aero interface will be disabled the instant
I install the newest Windows, but at least it's there for those who need it.
And those are the people you seem to have forgotten in your posting.
Who says they aren't? UI design and security are not mutually exclusive.
Given their history, I'll assume that they aren't until they prove that they are. I haven't seen any announcements about Longhorn's newly designed security. Instead, we hear about DRM, multimedia capabilities, and pretty screenshots. Sorry, Microsoft lost their "benefit of the doubt" long ago.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next hot new GUI innovations : "Fire" and "Dirt".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is a complement. The Opensource community is always accused of copying and not innovating. Now MS is the one copying.
ok ok I admit Next was first with this.
http://saveie6.com/
Don't worry, I think it has been established now that most if not all innovative features in UI these days are done by Apple, and the mimicked by OSS and Microsoft.
When the new Longhorn DRM hardware comes out, I'm going to buy a top of the line standard hardware computer so I have a computer that will last me many more years. I will never, ever buy the Longhorm DRM hardware unless there is a way it can be turned all the way off.
Just wait to see the nice new purple/green/blue 3D Flash BSoD they'll have for you. I mean, users will WANT to crash their computers. At least they are trying to fill a niche in this saturated market. Yummy BSoD.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
It's like somebody at MS looked at OS X and noticed that things were shiny a lot and dialogs were sparse, and decided that the answer resided in making *everything* shiny and sparse.
Hello, you've missed the point!?
[The article minus the pictures]
The Road to Windows Longhorn 2003
UPDATE. On August 19, 2003, I obtained the first legitimate depictions of Microsoft's planned Longhorn "Aero" user interface! Jump ahead to see what it looks like...
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2003 trade show in New Orleans in May 2003, Microsoft finally revealed its roadmap for Longhorn, the next major Windows desktop version, and the successor to Windows XP. Longhorn, as readers of this site know, will be the most dramatic and exciting release of Windows ever, and the most important update to the product since Windows 95. As I noted in my first Longhorn preview, published almost a year and a half ago, Longhorn has long been wrapped in mystery, with conflicting reports about the product's features and an unprecedented number of purposefully forged screenshots, video clips, and technical documents. In that first preview, I played the role of debunker, forced to document the many Longhorn fakes out there, explain why they weren't real, and then detail the information about Longhorn I knew to be correct. This year, things are becoming more clear, thanks to a suddenly open and communicative Microsoft, and the all-to-obvious fakes are fewer. So here's what we know about Longhorn, circa mid-2003.
How we get there, when it happens
During his WinHEC keynote address on May 7, 2003, Will Poole, the Senior Vice President of the Windows Client Division at Microsoft, revealed the roadmap for Longhorn, setting the final release date of the product firmly in 2005, two years from now. "I'm sure you're wondering, when does all this stuff come to the market and how does it fit into our roadmap?" Poole asked during his keynote address. "Longhorn is the big goal for us from an operating system perspective that we are putting all of our effort behind. This is a huge, big, bet-the-company move, and it's one that we are very enthusiastic about what we're able to do here. The breakthrough work that we're going to do in Longhorn is going to really change the landscape of what consumers, what businesspeople see when they look at a new PC. So the road between now and Longhorn is not super short. We've got some work to do. It's going to take us a while to get there. And what you'll see is there are a couple of major milestones, a couple big road signs there." Here's how we get to Windows Longhorn.
2003
We entered 2003 with a variety of products and technologies that point the way to Longhorn, including Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP 64-Bit Edition 2003, and Windows CE for Smart Displays. In March 2003, Microsoft held a developer preview of Longhorn at its Redmond campus. "We went through the developer preview in March," Poole said, "[and] we got some great feedback to understand what people want to see from a pure development perspective in the Longhorn platform." This is actually a crucial distinction and explains why all of the three major Longhorn milestones in 2003 (the March developer preview, WinHEC, and the Professional Developers Conference) are developer-oriented. Unlike other post-Windows 95 releases, Longhorn will be important to all of Microsoft's customer segments--consumers, businesses, and developers--and not just one or two of them. (By contrast, Windows XP was largely a consumer update only and Windows 2000 was largely a business update only).
After the developer preview, the next major milestone was WinHEC, held last week in New Orleans. At WinHEC, Microsoft publicly revealed for the first time various aspects of the Longhorn infrastructure, including graphics, drivers, and other low-level technology. This document is largely the result of my week-long sojourn to WinHEC, during which time I attended private demos, numerous meetings with Microsoft and its partners, and several Longhorn-oriented sessions.
Next up is the October 2003 Professional Devel
> The whole "XP" thing is insulting. I'm not a child with a 5-minute attention span who needs to be entertained with childish graphics, "movies", or any of this other BS.
I do.
Give me a choice between an operating system with a command-line and an operating system with a graphical interface, I'll pick the graphical interface any time. I've spent too many days configuring Redhat over SSH to appreciate command line OSes.
'/usr/bin/apachectl restart'
Damn, didn't work.
'/bin/apachectl restart'
ARGH! Where are you apachectl?
'locate apachectl'
Oh.
'/usr/sbin/apachectl restart'
Menus are a good thing. Standardization is a good thing. Having to relearn how to interface with each and every application due to a command-line interface is a bad thing. Too much knowledge required to do something simple.
I absolutely love that M$ is going in exactly the wrong direction, increasing its foot print, increasing the hardware requirement and driving their customers to Linux.
Most computers are owner by MIS shops and their corporate customers. People started getting PCs at home to be compatible with the office.
MIS is sick to death of being stuck with viri, worms, security holes,multi-media instead of useful productivity software and of people having web browser that can play MP3s and movies on their desktops when they're supposed to be at work. (/.ing being a case in point, why are we typing this crap when we're being paid to deliver some code instead?)
Linux is secure, tailorable, runs on existing hardware and is not bloated with geegaws.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
C'mon, it's been all day and no SCO news? What's going on?
... is turn it off. This stuff is for tarts. Give me the classic view which is fast and efficient. Turn off the shadow and fade effects; basically make it so that from power-on to is achieved as fast as humanly possible....
Here are links to a couple of articles with more screenshots.
0 8/longhorn.php
l onghorn.php
http://www.justechn.com/reviews/articles/2003/05/
http://www.justechn.com/news/articles/2003/05/06/
Windows is getting easier and easier to use .. in fact, by the time the "Play My Music" button is the size of your monitor, theres no way you could mistakeningly hit the wrong button!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Lots of posts are complaining about ripping off Apple, but I consider that to be evolutionary. Taking the good stuff from Apple and implementing it for use in standard x86 hardware is great. Too bad MS can't even steal right..
This looks like the stuff on Stardock, but most of it's better....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
These have got to be mock-ups. Tell me that Microsoft employees know the difference between a GHz and a GB. Look closely at the wording under the picture of the PC
The security and stability features seem to be coming along very well, they look nice. It also appears as though they are going to get even more performance from the hardware. It is, however, all ultimately irrelevant. Security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility within Linux has been at acceptable to good levels since Linus hit puberty. They aren't going to win any more of the non-desktop market by making it look fancier. Linux should instead be focusing completely on interface - you know, all of the things that are allowing Microsoft to kill Linux on the client side. In other words, they should attack the competition by improving the things that they are bad at. Drastically lowering prices wouldn't hurt, either.
:)
P.S. OK, that last line makes no sense, and please don't take this post seriously
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
In a word...
Buttfugly..
In several words...
Appears to suffer from panelitis.
Just MHO.
(Disclaimer: I used blackbox and wmaker for 5 years until recently. I'm now giving xfce4 a go-round).
(Secondary Disclaimer: I also don't like XP nor Aqua. Maybe i'm just a bitterly angry young man or something).
do() || do_not();
What exactly is Microsoft steering the desktop towards? Who wants or needs more digital media integration in the OS? I can see some uses for a home computer, if they're trying to go the Entertainment Center route. My guess is that in 2005 or whenever it will STILL be easier to burn the video you want to watch onto a DVD or video CD and pop it in your DVD player. I have a s-video cable running from my 'puter to the TV now, and it works, but its kind of a pain in the ass, and the solution doesn't lie in tweaking the OS, it's more like a remote control device such as the one that came with my TV capture card which I haven't bothered to program since it's just a lot easier to get up off the couch and double-click the matrix icon in my Kazaa folder.
But what use, if any, does this digital media integration have in Microsoft's largest market, the business world? I can see that maybe PowerPoint presentations will become spiffier, with video footage spliced in and stuff, but that doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the OS. And beyond that, most people are NEVER going to put AV segments in their powerpoint presentations. It's cool at first but the bloom quickly fades. So, my question is: How do any of these digtial media enhancements actually enhance Windows, how do the ADD VALUE to the product, what kind of USEFUL functionality will they provide? Very little if you ask me.
It seems to me that they should be more focused on building a better mousetrap, not adding niche features to a rickety mousetrap. For example, if I'm playing Enemy Territory in 800x600 and my desktop res is at 1024x768, and I ctrl-shirt-esc to jump out to the desktop to queue up more songs in Winamp, I can't see winamp because my screen in still in 800x600 and winamp is in the lower right corner, off the screen. And you can't alt-tab to it either. Now maybe that's winamp's fault, but something like switching between apps is what a OS is supposed to be good at, and I can't do it, so I don't really give a rat's ass about a more integrated digital multimedia experience if I can't even perform a simple act like listening to my MP3s while fragging nubs!
Longhorn still includes the classic style. And the sidebar can be turned off easily. So you just have to deal with the new task bar :)
As they said on the Simpsons, "It's the Shinnin', boy, do ye want to get sued?"
-30-
I wonder if providing pictures of your product and logos will become part of the Windows software/hardware certification process. I also wonder if MS is going to make non-partnered products appear with some kind of friendly warning or desparagement, thus making Joe SixPack think that they're unsafe to use or won't work completely. I bet that $15 digital camera's drivers or that $5 mouse's drivers are literally going to look like shit and not just work like shit in the future.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Hmm... interesting how one of the UI screenshots needed call-out text boxes to tell us what we were looking at. Does anyone else think that's a bad sign? Note that Mac OS S screenshots displaying new UI functionality in Panther don't need such explicit "point to the widget" explanation.
Another interesting point from the MacOS user experience: the original incarnation of OS X's Aqua interface was candy-colored almost to the point of distraction. From those Longhorn screenshots, obviously the Windows UI folks saw that & said "I'll bet we can out-shiny that!" However, in the two years since the original Aqua, the OS X UI has been toned down considerably based on real user's feedback & common sense.
How long before Longhorn's Aero interface does the same? Two years after it's (finally) released? Screw that; even my X11 windows served back to my laptop from the Solaris box are easier to work with....
--Mid
I run a SuSE server and an XP box. Both have been up the same length of time without a crash.
You live in New York, right?
*rimshot*
"These days" == "since 1984" ?
It looks great. I can't wait until 2010 when they finally unveil it./sarcasm
what? another new version of windows? I like 2000. It runs all my engineering apps fine, it's svelte, and it doesn't get in my way. Though I'm currently trying XP / Gentoo (and xp it will be gone as soon as I find my 2000 CD). Why not just update XP with a simple patch or offer a new theme if you want it to look ugly? Though I suppose I'm offering another "good enough" argument....
Now we have a good guess on how KDE 5.0 could look by default. KDE's configurability means you can customize its looks quite a lot. Hopefully Longhorn's too, but in my experience Microsoft is not very fond of configurability.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Every WinXX release since 3.1 has been incremental improvements under the hood, with a lot of eye-candy changes to make it look like more has changed.
The default XP UI is still clunky for non-tech users, and some of the glitz to Longhorn might be good for them. They've almost reached the simplicity of the old mainframe fill-out-form and submit interfaces that IBM had by the mid-late '80s -- the rest is all eye candy and gloss.
Maybe this time they won't force me to spend hours figuring out how to shut off all the eye candy so I can get some work done instead of spinning cycles on feedback that just annoys the cubemates and strains my eyes. Maybe I won't need to upgrade the CPU just to maintain UI responsiveness.
Then again, it took how many years for Longhorn to reach the point where they'd leak screenshots? Any bets on whether the "hurd" beats this latest Microsoft cash grab out the door?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No, you just suck. You are an embarassment to the rest of us. And don't smile at me.
But since I'm feeling nice today, I'll help you out. Here's why your troll sucked:
The interface seems to be coming along very well, it looks nice.
Too obvious. Nobody's that stupid.
It is, however, all ultimately irrelevant. User interface within Windows has been at acceptable to good levels since Windows 95.
First, again, too obvious. Second, the irrelevant bit really sticks out.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier.
Doesn't even make sense, and it's not subtle enough for you to get away with. They have 98% of the dtop market.
Microsoft should instead be focusing completely on security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility - you know, all of the things that are allowing Linux to kill Microsoft on the server side.
This was the only decent part of your troll. When trolling, always put something in that gets your audience agreeing. Makes them susceptible to getting hooked. You should've started with this.
In other words, they should attack the competition by improving the things that they are bad at. Drastically lowering prices wouldn't hurt, either.
What's that? Where's the punchline? You're supposed to follow up the hook with the subtle punchline that either pisses them off or convinces them of something ridiculous. You just say something irrelevant here.
**For the Windows users that are going to inevitably say "Well my XP box never crashed and I don't have to reboot for a week! I play mad gamez and it stays good! So it's stable, you are just a open source zealot!", just shut up. When the big kids talk about "stability", they mean that a server remains stable indefinately while performing multiple critical tasks. If one task fails, the OS is capable of maintaining peak levels of performance despite the failure of one component/application/process/whatever. Not having to reboot your Win2K Server for 20 or so days when all the box was doing was providing file sharing and running a small Active Directory domain for a measly 100-200 users is not "stable". That kind of stability was surpassed by UNIX over 20 years ago (and every other mainstream OS since, as well).
What's this rant? You can't flame in a good troll, it makes it too blatant. Where are you going with this?
This post was first.
Great way to ID this as a troll. Could have been stylistic at the end of a really long, subtle troll that actually had the audience going. Here, it just confirms what was already obvious - that this is a poorly-crafted troll.
Since I'm feeling really generous, I'll show you what you could have done instead. Not my best work, but better than that tripe you did:
User interface within Windows has been at acceptable to good levels since Windows 95. Instead of twaking the UI, Microsoft should instead be focusing completely on security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility - you know, all of the things that are allowing Linux to kill Microsoft on the server side. Then we would have the security of Open-Source software with the economic benefits that comes from supporting large corporations like Microsoft instead of unemployed programmers.
See? 1) hook 2) explanation/normal post 3)punchline (here, the bit about feeding large corporations).
Now, that's a post designed to start a flame war without most people just bailing on you. Want some more help, you let me know.
which (1) is a useful command.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
OSS innovate on the UI and not copy Apple? Highly unlikely.
I haven't looked at many of these screenshots, but it seems like the concept of "clickable" has been completely destroyed. Things which are clickable appear just the same as those that aren't. This is not helpful.
You can thank the world-wide web for that. Thanks to the WWW, developers start to count on "a sense" end-users may have for what's clickable and what isn't. Anyone who's browsed the web for long enough knows what I'm talking about -- the clicking force. When you visit a webpage, clickable things often appear no different than things that aren't clickable. You just have a sense of what's clickable and what's not. You can't explain it, but you feel it.
It is bad that developers count on this, since not everyone has this "force" and it's hardly fool-proof.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Seems that Microsoft is falling prey to a basic design problem: how to innovate in UI without copying apple. This looks exactly like any Mac interface, with the exception that it's got more blue than i can shake a stick at. It would be REALLY INTERESTING, and also MY IDEA, if you could change the whole thing from blue to green, black, red, etc and have all the blue's change hue accordingly, so that all the gradients look more or less the same. That's what mac allows you to do to some extent, and forcing people to pick blue is just going to inevitably cause everyone to be blind in the blue hue range.
blue blind person: wow... nice grey eyes!
me: they're blue.
blue blind person: whatever!
wouldn't that be GREAT?!
stuff |
This interface is ugly. I honestly think that the UI has sucked bad since XP. I'll stick with OSX.
I shudder whenever I see a topic that has to do with a GUI, because I know it is ineveitable that the Apple lovers on here will compare it to their favorite. I am glad that Apple did such great work, because imitation is the highest form of flattery. The reason I shudder though, is that it is all so redundant. Just look at the screenshots and make an insightful post on what you think of the design based on its own merits. You would at least think they would all be satisfied that MS is learning from others and trying to make their product better, but people on here can't even agree on that. Two highly modded examples:
Butt ugly interface, poor user interface design. Microsoft, you ain't no Apple. I don't want Zoloft-inspired colors, and yet more areas to shove UI controls and informational boxes. At this rate, I'll probably buy another Mac the next time I upgrade my home computer(s).
I know we've been saying this for years now, but um... They're not ripping off of Apple at all! [winsupersite.com] I mean really. The prototype machines look much like an iMac with it's screen pushed down to the desk, and that wallpaper doesn't look ANYTHING like Apple's default. Okay, so there are only so many form factors to make an LCD/Keyboard desktop-type computer, fine. But the rest is just more innovation taken from Apple. Apologies if any OSS predates anything I've mentioned about Apple in this case.
So is it "innovation taken from Apple" or "butt ugly"?
To me it doesn't look like much of a difference from XP. If you really want a cool looking interface, there are a lot of third party companies out there that can really allow you to customize the way your GUI looks to fit your own personality.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Overall, I think the GUI looks great. The colour choices are a bit odd, but they're okay, and of course, we can change them if we want. Same goes for the window title bar, but for the love of God, could they have made that thing any bigger by default?
This GUI is very different from previous windows systems. It also contains a lot of new APIs that makes it likely to believe that many applications will have to be upgraded to run well on the new system and we can expect that that new software will be similar in style to the OS itself.
There are also new file and networking systems that make an upgrade difficult.
Given the big differences I expect that users will need a lot of training before they can be productive with the new system. My guess is that a KDE or Gnome desktop would look less foreign to existing windows users than this new windows.
Especially, since Gnome and KDE will have evolved considerably by the time Longhorn is to be released.
I also believe that most users don't like their OS control panels to become advertising areas for hardware and software venders. To me the GUI looks more web like than current windows versions. This is probably a mistake. This development started already in IE 4 that introduced the active desktop, but I don't see many people running that weblike interface today. And most people I know set windows XP in classic mode.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
The problem with the "fisher price" interface is that newbies aren't the only one's who will be using the interface. Unless of course "developers, developers, developers" are considered newbies.
But then again maybe those former 5% developers are going to be abandoning the platform and moving to a more "developer friendly" platform.
It's obvious to anyone who takes a decent glance at the product history of MS that they could never sell a product simply because it's faster, more secure, and more stable than previous versions. It must look cooler and have more features to be released.
When I first heard of what sort of things Longhorn would bring to the UI(m0er pretty graphix0rz), I thought it was idiotic, and just wouldn't be enough of an improvement to sell the OS to anyone(except the OEM market - IF Linux doesn't manage to shape itself into a major competitor in that market by then).
So far I don't see anything to change that opinion. The only real UI improvement I see is more text telling you what you can do in each screen, and more application-shell integration.
That's not really enough progress, in my opinion. The computer market is not growing as fast as it used to, and I think a lot of existing users, even if they aren't particularly tech-savvy, will feel absolutely insulted at an interface that babies them along, because they already took the time to learn how to do these things "themselves" on some level.
Also, it took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was going on in that volume control help dialogue. I get the impression that their excess of features is spilling over on itself and making it LESS usable than before. It looks bulky, not sleek and trim the way I think most people would want it.
Ok am I the only one who things this is a TROLL?
**For the Windows users that are going to inevitably say "Well my XP box never crashed and I don't have to reboot for a week! I play mad gamez and it stays good! So it's stable, you are just a open source zealot!", just shut up. When the big kids talk about "stability", they mean that a server remains stable indefinately while performing multiple critical tasks.
Longhorn is a workstation or desktop product. Your complaints may be valid if this was a story on Windows Server 2003 or the next beta of the server line but this is the desktop product. For the desktop improving the GUI is always a legimate goal.
To me your post is a bit of a Troll. Let's slam Longhorn on its merits(or lack of) as a desktop workstation and not a fscking server ok?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
After viewing the new screenshots, I'm left wondering if Micro$oft's developers finally read Apple's Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. Apparently, they've decided to integrate its superior and clean data-centric layout into the Aero interface.
Note how Micro$oft is going the way of large, smooth, photo-realistic icons, and border-less toolbars--all too reminiscent of Apple's Aqua.
What else will they borrow next?
k.h.
'which' certainly is a useful command. Thanks for replying.
(My knowledge of time-saving linux commands is pretty spotty.)
I wonder if Rhino3D can sue Microsoft for Windows "Longhorn".
Here, for the first time, is a gallery of UI prototypes that I believe accurately portrays the "Aero" user interface in Longhorn
People don't have the time learn or to be able to handle everything in the world. People don't have the capacity to learn everything. What is important to you, is not important to somebody else. People in other industries unrelated to computers talk the same way about the subject they are master of.
Tell me, do you do all the work on your car, or do you hand it over to a mechanic? Do repair all the plumbing, mains, gas, water, etc in your home, or do you get the relevant tradesmen in? If your lawnmower brakes down, how much tinkering do you do before you decide to take it to an expert? If you have a dying 40ft tree right by your house, do you cut it down yourself, or get somebody else to take care of it? Personally, I don't care to spend my time doing all those things. I would rather spend my hard-earned cash on other things.
So what about these leaked screenshots?
Eye candy rarely improves functionality, and never with a corresponding increase in performance.
Right, because two of the icons/images in this look nothing like this (or any of the icons from previous versions).
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I can't be the only one that this looks a lot like Mandrake 9.0 too.
I guess the MS Look and Feel people visited the testing lab and found it too their liking.
We can finally compete with the MacHeads. Look Redmond is copying our look and feel now, look at that Mandra..err Longhorn background, try than new and improved CLI. Remind you of anything?
hehe
Some time when you're bored you might try reading the man pages for some of the commands in /bin and /sbin. You might find some really cool things you never knew existed (although on my system which is in /usr/bin...).
A solution to the problem with music today
The one in the upper-right isn't ripping anything off, but the one in the upper-left corner is definitely mimicing iTunes's icon.
I don't use Windows, but several of my less geeky friends do. Just about every one of them has stated at one point or another that they hate the "new interface" of XP--especially Explorer. It's not surprising to me. Microsoft keeps designing interfaces that, by default, hide more and more information from the user while adding chubby new graphics and context sidebars. I get asked questions like "how do I make it just show all the files and directories on my hard drive?" Longhorn seems to be a step further in the direction of hiding more details to make the UI not user-friendly, but rather idiot-friendly. It may be more immediately useful to someone who's never touched a computer before, but it certainly isn't always efficient for the typical user. And if you look at those stupid interface studies that supposedly compare XP to KDE, you'll notice that most of them study near-illiterate users.
Chalk up yet another reason to convince people and businesses to switch to Linux / Free Software.
Make the icons as big and fat as possible. Make them shiny and cute. Then it will all look so much less threatening to your grandma, while the rest of us just get irritated at being patronized by our computer.
If they were copying Apple, they would at least put the icons on the right side of the desktop!!
What exactly are you complaining about? If there is a good way to do things, why should Microsoft do things another way just because it's the way Apple is doing it?
When cars first came out you had to be a mechanic or a very good friend of one to actually run one. Now, few people know if they have dual overhead cams in their engine. It just goes. People who (want to) know about cars, 'supe' them up removing parts and tweaking settings. Why shouldn't it be the same with computers?
If you had to be a mechanic just to drive, how many cars would be on the road? Don't look at dumbing down the user knowledge requirements as a bad thing.
Maybe you should install your Linux OS according to POSIX standards. There was an init script written years ago for apachectl. That stuff should live /etc/rc.d somewhere
Did somebody else notice thet they stole some BeOS Icon?0 2.png)
(Status @ http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/aero-
This looks like a TOY to me and not a powerful desktop computer. MS is REALLY trying to make a PC into an appliance. What is the point of having processor speeds, hard drive storage, graphics cards, etc go up in power/performance the way they have been, and then turn around and try to turn the PC into a limited functionality appliacne. I am glad I left MS a long time ago. The sad thing is that while they may for now have 90%+ of the desktop, they don't have that monopoly in the server room, and Linux is ever increasing on servers. This Fisher Price GUI just doesn't sit well for a server OS. Instead of this useless "eye candy" they should be tightening up security and stability to make a better server OS that doesn't propogate worms/viruses at the speed of light.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Thanks for replying.
You're welcome.
btw, if you run bash you can try "`which apachectl` restart" which both locates the binary in your path and runs it.
As an aside, that's the kind of thing that makes me love the command line. You can do much more than with an UI, provided you know a little about how things work.
People should choose whatever suits them best, but we shouldn't keep our young from learning the command line. Usable (even under XP/Longhorn) for ages and probably forever.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Glad these leaked now KDE will have a jump on things!
Just joking, move along.
I thought it looked remenisint of Blue Curve?
Don't get off the boat. Absolutely, goddamn right.
Well, a lot of people are complaining that the new design is ugly, wastes screen space, etc. Mostly, I agree. But I did notice one thing that was actually a useful innovation!
:)
On the volume control dialog, they have per-application volume settings. I think I would find that amazingly useful; I know when I'm watching a movie in mplayer, it seems like the audio is quiet (just the way it was recorded), so I turn up the volume, and then the sound effects in gaim become uber-loud during the movie. Yeah, bad example, I can mute gaim so it doesn't interrupt the movie, but my point still stands. If you don't like that one app is being too loud relative to another, you can control their volumes independantly. That's cool! I wonder how long it'll take OSS to implement this
What's with the big Philips logo underneath the media player? Is Microsoft now allowing third-parties to brand their add-ons within the operating system? So now people will get ads from third parties WITHIN the OS as a FEATURE? It sounds like a ploy to detach people from the idea that they bought a private computer, but instead a service brought to you by Microsoft and Partners.
I hated getting a new office PC with XP on it. I know the IT guys would not choose it if they could lease the new PCs with Win2k instead ... but they can't. Sure, you can turn off the fancy UI, but when you go map a drive for somebody else, it stinks. Why would anyone really buy this stuff if they weren't "forced" to take it with their new Dell/Gateway/Compaq/IBM? Somehow it reminds me of the MPAA complaining about the text messaging. Everybody sends out the early warning that XP Home is junk, but with Micro$oft's deal with Dell and the rest, people get it anyway.
Hi.
Who fucking cares.
When Apple finally decided to add that second mouse button, did you pitch a tent in your pants about them copying MSFT/IBM?
Noone cares. If they find that people prefer this style of interface, who cares where it came from?
PS, "Apple" nor "Microsoft" really thought anything up, rather both bought research from the same sorts of folks who gave each the same answers. People want a computer thats easier to use and friendlier.
So go innovate something, you're so friggin creative. Maybe you're just what we need to make linux less of a joke.
This could easily be compared with the games industry, where it's a rare title indeed that can get by without excellent graphics, whether they be 2D or 3D.
It makes life harder for developers... we either need to have a flair for graphics - which in my experience most of us do not - or we are faced with hiring graphic designers. In the commercial world this is acceptable, but it's much harder in the free software world.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
I use my roomates Mac at the house to surf, and there's nothing particulary intuitive about it. Stuff that's instinctual for me in windows I have a somewhat hard time doing in OSX.
Does that mean the XP interface is more intuitive than Aqua? No - it just means I'm used to XP so I perceive it as easier!
That Control Panel sets up and monitors automatic synchronization of data to removeable devices. You'll notice the other things listed there are a Pocket PC Device, an Portable Media Player, and the Offline File Store. Also, in response to the grandparent poster, it doesn't say it's unavailable, it says it's "not connected".
Have you met Trapper Keeper? Trapper Keeper can do everything...
Isn't it? Texas longhorns are cows aren't they?
I'm definately saying a big "FUCK YOU" to microsoft. because that "design" totally sucks ass
...it's all graphics and other such pretty click click unnecesary bullshit.
(all graphics, no content) yuck.
Whatever happened to usability/effeciency and optimisation?
It seems that just isn't being taught these days
Makes my stomach churn!
Ummmm....what second mouse button?
... who thinks the "Longhorn Hardware" looks a lot like computers of the future would have looked like circa 1975-1980? They look like something out of an old Popular Science magazine to me! I just can't understand why a company the size of Microsoft can't have an industrial design team with the quality of Apple. I guess that's because Apple takes ID to the core of everything they do (i.e., the recent discussion on the quality of the box that G5's get shipped in).<br><br>--AB
Or menus that actually stayed up when you clicked them... the ones where you had to hold down the button drove me insane.
... From the point of view of getting consumer and CEO sales. People will look at it and say ' that looks really cool, much easier to use... look how well it integrates with my MP3 player. Mmmmm I fancy a copy of that'
You live in New York, right? :)
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
BIG ICONS.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
My God! This is ugly! Oh My Lord, please, give me Enlightenment or give me death!
- Please, ignore everything written above.
Obviously, the aesthetics of cars is a very subjective thing, but I think it can be universally agreed that if Microsoft made a car it would look like this one. Warning: only look at that link if you're sure you can bear to look at a car far worse than the Honda Element. It's no concept, you can buy one of those from a UK showroom for just shy of 15 grand.
It's harder to pick a good looking car to represent my OS of choice (Mac OS X), but I think this one is pretty good. 225bhp from 4 cylinders, 30 miles to the gallon, 154mph on the flat.
Saying all that, the Windows UI isn't all that bad, it's just unintuitive. If you take the time to learn it and deal with its weird actions sometimes you can get by.
Something, i don't know exctly what, reminded me of Mandrake in those screenshots. Just a feeling.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux Zealot.
Microsoft might be able to maintain market share by integrating things like 3D animations, better audio/video support and possible voice recognition in their software. If they do this right it could take up to another year or two for OSS to catch up again.
I really think this task based UI is a horrible direction to go in. It limits what you can do with the computer to following a few preprogrammed rabbit tracks. I could see how this is a great interface for Kiosks and such as you can perform your task without having any previous experience with the machine, but not for a general purpose machine.
Think of it this way. The UNIX environment is one of the most powerful work evironment that I know. It is based on the theory that you have data and a bunch of small tools that operates on this data. There are an infinate number of ways to combine an use these tools, creating a very powerful work environment.
Traditional Application-Centric WIMP interfaces (like Mac, Win, KDE, etc) are not quite as orthagonal, as tools are limited to use within certain applications, often resulting in programmers having to reimplement the common tools in each application, and users having to relearn how to use the tool for each different application. So you essentailly have a bunch of independent little orthagonal systems that the user can work in, but any simularity between simular tools in different applications is up to the discresion (and limitations) of the programmers.
It seems that MS is completely abandoning the concept of orthagonality in the new longhorn UI. It looks more like a glorifed ATM machine than an environment for creative content generation.
The Humane Environment project that Jeff Raskin is working on appears to have far more potential. It is an attempt to (among other things) bring the (unix-like) concept of small tools to user-land. Ie there are no applications, just documents and tools (or commands) that operate on documents. They appear to be focusing not on minimizing the amount you need to learn for a task, but rather on maximizing the amout that you can do with each peice of information you learn. For example once you learn how to use spell-check, you can spell check any text anywhere. Once you find a tool that you want in a menu, you automatically know the short-cut (hold down the command key and type the name you saw in the menu), as well as how to use the command in a script - another powerful feature of Unix. But imagine if everything you did on your system be it manipulation graphics, sound, or text, etc, was scriptable. And you didn't have to learn a different language for each application (because it is systemlevel scripting, like unix sh), and you didn't have to relearn all the functions (they are the same commands you use interactively), and the original programmer didn't have to do anything special to facilite this (all commands are scriptable, just like UNIX).
This is the idea anyway - they still have a way to go. My only concern is that the project may end up getting too focused on the low level user-interface details, rather than the high level posibilities. That the atomic parts of the UI might become so different that it is not given the chance that it deserves. Or that the developer community might get so caught up in perfecting every detail of the atomic interactions that progress is slow, and other developers are scared away.
Anyway, I really hope Microsoft shoots itself in the foot with this one. It would give us a little more time to come up with something genuinely different and better, rather than just try to present an incrementaly better clone.
I work for tech support for a ISP. Oh my god.
I thought WinXP and it's "Categorial" Control Panel was hard to explain and keep track of for users.
This is a new form of hell.
Does MS specifically *try* to make support's lives miserable? Dear god. There's something to be said about some stability. Between Win 95 to 2000, at least I had the capability to tell people "Oh, go into control panels, and double click the one that says "Networking"" when I needed to get someone's DNS settings fixed.
XP it wasn't that simple -- I had to make sure the user had their control panel in "classic" view, and I'll be damned if Microsoft didn't "help" me by making the button to switch between the two a fake hyperlink. At the very least, they could have made that hyperlink underlined so an average (or below average) user could figure it out, but no, they won't even go that far.
Longhorn looks like it's going to be even worse. Now I'm going to have to waste money buying Longhorn right when it comes out (or waste time and a CD-R downloading it) and waste time memorizing it so I can walk people through the brain dead Fisher Price system designed for 5 year olds. And I'd be willing to wager money that they'll make it "helpful" by hiding DNS, IP, et all settings under 50 pages of wizards and candy sheets.
I already had to answer phones for 2 weeks for Microsoft for free because of MS Blaster, and will have to for another week or two because of SoBig.F.
Now, come next year, I'm going to have to memorize an OS that looks like something from Clippy's wet dreams?
I'm sick of cleaning up Microsoft's messes.
On the flip side, it looks like they've stolen enough MacOS X and Linux GUI ideas to make it so slightly above average users won't need to bother me, so I guess it's not all that bad. Some of it is almost interesting, like having sound volume -- FOR EACH PROGRAM. Some of the extended stuff looks like it might be pretty useful, if a bit sugarcoated.
So, in Summary:
1. Tech support is hell.
2. New GUI + Confused Users = bad news.
3. Longhorn looks interesting, but I don't want to have to support it.
4. 3 may change depending on future screenshots.
The Translucent Screen of Death in MacOS X.2 is waaay cooler looking than Microsoft's current BSoD. M$ needs to do something about this to keep up.
Meanwhile, my FreeBSD system just keeps running...
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Seeing that screenshot with the Phillips logo made me wonder if they would have a "logo placeholder" for companies when they write their drivers or if they'd charge extra to show their logo instead of some standard text. I wouldn't put it past 'em!<br><br>--AB
The ability to transfer the latest and greatest Virus from my Longhorn PC to my Longhorn Media device is just what I have been looking for.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
This reminds me of old Popular Mechanics issues where spies would go around taking pictures of new model cars with crap covering fenders etc to camouflage the new curves etc.
I never bought a car based on its looks or its horsepower or the stylish seats or dashboard. I bought the most reliable and comfortable (for my height). I know this makes me some kind of weirdo but I love my car (now 4 years old) and I'm happy with my Linux.
I'll probably play with the new Aero system when it arrives at the local Future Shop just like I eye a slick car on the lot (slick meaning Ferrari class, not the latest from the Big 3) but all I have to do is "emerge world" once I get home and my Gentoo [obligatory Gentoo whoredom] system will update to the latest free software that does everything I want.
I spend the cash I save on doing fun stuff... like vacations. Why does anyone care about any of this?
If they can scale it, and they know the resolution, then it should intelligently pick a default bar size (in cm, not pixels). And I guarantee that in 3 years, people will still be using 640x480. They are now, even with monitors that support 1600x1200.
Come on, guys, don't be so damned critical. This thing won't be out for another two years.
I'm not trying to be an ass (really! I swear!), so to make things fair apply my comments to XP as well, to which they apply equally. If anything, I was willing to give MS the benefit of possibly having learned from the pastel debacle. Obviously not.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"It makes life harder for developers... we either need to have a flair for graphics - which in my experience most of us do not - or we are faced with hiring graphic designers. In the commercial world this is acceptable, but it's much harder in the free software world."
It's no harder in the free world than it is in the commercial. The reason it's hard is because in both no one wants to listen to them. Who in their right mind wants to be treated that way? Commercial or not. Note the phrasing "faced with", making it sound like a punishment.
I have heard of many types of leaks related to the Windows code, but never a GUI leak.
Notice how I generated over 30 replies already, to a completely worthless post. You need to go back to troll school.
from Playskool (tm) for the look and feel???
Longhorn approved PDA
Longhorn/RIAA approved MP3 player
Longhorn control panel
Longhorn/RIAA approved CD player
And, last but not least, introducing the ALL NEW Longhorn approved WORM..
GRAPHICS CARD requirements to run a base OS.
I quit. I'm taking my S3/Virge linux install and going home.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
windows 2003 server we are installing....Another layer of UI on top of functions spread all over the place....more show than go but we've not found any place that it really hurts....yet
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Microsoft has once again proved that even though they're now capable of slapping some paint on an old house, they still can't fix the foundation.
I honestly can't believe how complex they've managed to make even simple tasks. These screenshots, aestetically, look great... but they still bury functionality in the wrong places, and put simple tasks under 3 different sub-menus.
How does this help anything? It doesn't. But what does it prove? They're scared of Apple's OS X. They copy basic concepts of functonality and pleasing look, while missing all the fundamental reasons why Apple's OS works like it should. SIMPLICITY. I'm not saying OS X is perfect, but Panther looks like a great stride and will be available in a month or two. Longhorn... which should be called "Shoe-horn" won't be out until mid 2005.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Well, I'd say there's different kinds, first - and mao whateverthefuckhisnameis's was horrible. I usually go with the "well-reasoned post with a little tweak at the end." You seem to go with the "ludicrous post that makes tons of retarded assertions" bit. Both work, different styles.
I'll grant my example wasn't my best work - obviously you'd have to fill it out a bit to get it through. But I think it at least gives the retard the general framework.
My post comes off as an honest opinion, which is how it should sound.
Absolutely. Like I said, if I was going to post it for real, I'd have made it a bunch better. But I don't want to give the kid free material. ;)
Honestly, if MS released a brand new operating system that looked identicle to XP, but was just ultra secure and ultra stable, would it sell?
MS Windows has always sold past a certain point in time, regardless of fucking quality. Because MS has a recognized illegal monopoly which hasn't been remedied.
Jesus Christ.
This will never get posted, because I'm just an AC. But what the hell.
The problem with MS at this point has nothing to do with how shiny the GUI is or how stable the OS is. MS has sold its OS without consequence for some time. Stability, security, usability--none of it matters.
We could argue until we die about whether or not Linux GUIs are comparable to those of Windows or MacOS, and then our children could continue the argument about whether or not Windows is as stable.
The issue isn't that Windows isn't stable, or that it has the best GUI. The issue is that we will never fucking know given the status quo whether or not users really want the added GUI features, because there are no consequences for MS that would motivate them to build a better GUI.
Honestly--really--does anyone here want more bloated GUI? Does anyone here know anybody who wants added bloat? Let's rephrase that for MS apologists--does anyone know anyone who wants the added GUI features?
I don't know anybody. The Joe Sixpacks I do know get pissed because their system is so laggy, and are astonished whenever I manage to speed it up by getting rid of the crap.
Of course, you'll come up with some anecdotal answer otherwise. And you might be right. But right now, all you'll be doing is accepting MS Longhorn post hoc as satisfactory, because you have no other realistic choices of OS. And all I might be doing is complaining about it.
I get so frickin tired about these arguments on Slashdot and elsewhere about whether or not Linux has a satisfactory GUI, or Windows has satisfactory security and stability.
The question isn't "if MS built a universally recognizably stable OS, would it sell?" Because of course it would sell. It sells right now. Because it has a monopoly.
The real question is "if MS were forced to compete in a diverse OS market, what other OS features might we see? Would MS then sell?"
When will we stop equating "satisfactory" with "optimal"?
What other market is like the OS market? If the OS market were like cereals, you would walk into the grocery store and see only corn flakes. Your choice would be "do I want the new corn flakes or not?" We would be having arguments about whether or not the corn flakes are crispy enough. A group of people would be saying "people like corn flakes; they don't need or want other cereals that might have dried fruits or some other wierd thing in them."
Sound silly?
Of course it does. It's not about MS being good enough. MS will never be as good enough for me, because I know there would be something better if it actually was forced to legitimately compete.
And you can't prove me wrong. If you want to, demand consequences for MS.
I get so sick of these screenshots being released every couple years, when we have the same discussion in which we rationalize why we have little choice of OS.
I installed Red Hat 9 today, and I must say, after looking at these Longhorn pictures, that some desktop pictures starts looking like Red Hat Gnome default-interface.
is a HoloDeck before I die. Dumb down everything.
One poster was right when he said "Who gives a fuck! We are still thinking about the comand line like it was 1956." I agree. Computers are visual and should eventually become touchless. You will visually and verbally be able to dicate your wants to the computer.
Still, all I want is my HoloDeck so I can see what it's like to be Ron Jeremy.
Why doesn't MS just let 3rd parties deliver the user interface. I think it would be much more tolerable to pay Object Desktop a few bucks for an upgrade to their latest stuff than to pay MS for a "new OS" that is really just a new desktop.
This is really just a way for MS to sell more copies and upgrades. Sure does make it a pain for everyone to have to upgrade their machines OS just to update the window manager.
(And I actually like Windows)
I actually think there's some truth to this. Far too many MS applications still use those tiny 16x16 pixel icons which looked decent sized on yesterday's 14" monitors, but miniscule when running anything above 800x600. Not only are larger icons more aesthetically pleasing due to the higher detail, but in my opinion they present a less intimidating interface by being more easily identifiable and just a bit easier to click.
I'm sorry, but first, you lack any talent. No one is mad at you. You aren't generating discussion. You don't have a million freaks. These are all requirements of an excellent troll.
P.S.: trying to troll a troll? strike three, yeeeeeeer out of there!!
No doubt, longhorn has a lot of polished widgets, images, etc... however the UI is cluttered and inconsistent. When I look at those screenshots I have to think about how things are supposed to work, as opposed to simply knowing how things work.
MS needs to look at what Apple is doing. Longhorn is a mess.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Windows strikes me as a dumbed down interface, which is a bad thing. Dumbed down interfaces are different from intuitive ones. Intuitive interfaces are consistent, meaning that the same actions provide the same results in different situations. Skills are also highly reusable, meaning a little learning provides a huge payback.
Dumbed down interfaces, instead, are not consistent, and the only way they can deal with this fact is to continually present menu upon menu of options to the user, like a complex ATM machine. "Power users" are the ones who are *used* to the inconsistencies because they've bothered to take the time to figure them out. They know how to work around them and speak the 'lingo' of the interface. (An intuitive interface, however, should speak the *user's* lingo, not the other way around.)
For example, Apple interfaces do not typically need wizards, while Windows programs are often FILLED with them. Why? For one reason, becuase there is no simple, consistent way to edit program preferences on Windows. It's not always in the same place, and thus the user can't be expected to learn how to do it. On OS X: "(Program Menu)->Preferences". Easy and intuitive. Always in the same place, which provides positive reinforcement, and which leads to an increased feeling of control and repeated use of the skill. Drag and drop is the same thing. After I got comfortable with Mac, I started using drag and drop all the time (although I never really understood the point when I worked primarily on Windows). The idea is that, usually, if you're moving around data drag and drop just works. Sure, there's probably another way to do it, but why learn that? Just drag and drop. Easy. No five-page wizard "Import" screen. The end result is a few key skills which are very reusable and help the users not to feel like "dummies" and do not present unnecessary complexity to the user. And I've met many a person who felt they weren't in control of their computer and that it made them feel dumb. That's not a success story, in interface terms; that's a failure.
Tiny things in interface design make a *huge* difference between whether or not you are able to take control of your computer, or if your computer takes control of you by 'helping' you make all your decisions. Most Windows/*nix users don't see this because they're so used to dealing with inconsistencies that they consider them to be natural. I know because the Mac amazed me solely by its consistency. I thought "wow, this just makes sense. Why hasn't anyone else done this?" I still haven't found an answer. =)
it seems to be leaps beyond anything that Apple has done recently
Are you serious? If you follow the link provided, then you'll see an "executive overview" of the recent build. Here it is:
1) an enhanced desktop experience that includes advanced 3D graphics capabilities and driver functionality.
2) a new display driver model that will feature radically advanced functionality, stability, and reliability.
3) a radically redesigned user interface with a dynamically composed desktop featuring compelling new visual effects like graphically tumbling, rotating, and warped windows.
4) hardware accelerated and resolution independent anti-aliased 2D scalable graphics that will expose functionality based on the capabilities of your system's 3D video hardware.
5) a rich 3D graphics architecture that is integrated directly into the Windows UI.
Here is my brief overview of when these features were available in MacOSX:
1) Jaguar 10.2
2) Puma 10.0
3) Puma 10.0
4) Jaguar 10.2
5) Jaguar 10.2
Which part of the longhorn preview was innovative? Don't forget about espose in Panther!
-- As soon as I have an interesting sig, you'll be among the first to know!
With such integration of instant messaging services into the taskbar do you really think anyone is going to use anything other than MSN Messenger?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
It'll be selectable by choosing "Default".
You know what?
What a waste of vast, vast amounts of screen real estate. The excessive whitespace would be bad enough on its own, but to layer on an equal amount of empty bluespace...?
The new Control Panel looks like an e-commerce website or something -- I half-expect each device to have an "add to cart" icon next to it. Hateful.
You might want to check out Cygwin. It gives you a very Linuxy interface and toolset to your windows box. I have only tried it on w2k and xp, no idea if it'd work on anything earlier. You get a "real" bash shell, with most of the commonly used command line tools you are used to in Linux. You can also compile many (but not all) linux apps from source to run in Cygwin. It has a package manager with many precompiled progs. You can run X in it. I am pretty sure you can run an ssh daemon in it too.
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
Okay, I realize that this was mostly about the screenies, but WinFS sounds like a BAD idea. Here's why:
In the event of a huge problem (like a harddrive crashing) you can go in, find the right Mozilla files, and voila, you have your email.
As it is, Outlook is MUCH harder to retrieve email from. With WinFS, the obfuscation layer will only make it that much harder to retrieve critical data in the event of a crash.
And PLEASE, spare me the comments about it being more stable, and therefore you won't need to do that! Only an absolute fool thinks that they will never have to try to retrieve critical data. Even with regular (nightly) backups. Even constant real-time backups.
So when I hear the words obfuscation, hidden and protected, I get scared. It's a terrible idea.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Try to give telephone support to someone if you don't even know how the OS looks.
It also is nice if people are able to sit at different machines and don't have to relearn or reconfigure everything.
Customization is fine as long as it's not just a weak excuse for not setting up stuff properly in the first place. And sometimes it's better if beginners don't have to deal with it.
How many Slashdot readers actually figure they'll be using Longhorn on their computers in 2005? Versus how many will have either switched fully to Linux or Mac OS X due to total disgust with Microsoft? I know I plan on having a Mac (as my main rig) and Linux installed on a legacy PC and perhaps dual booted with XP for any leftover PC software that can't run decently in emulation mode on either of the previously mentioned operating systems...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"It's like having an ugly girlfriend. You can put all the makeup on her you want, but she's still ugly".
Quoted from an NFL player commenting on a particular team's astro-turf I believe. I can't remember the player nor the team in question.
One of my biggest beefs with windows has always been how desperately they try to hide the actual file structure on the system, to the point where you don't actually know where some stuff is. Why is My computer the start of your HD and not C:. I am a mac user and barely ever use windows, although I'm competent enough in it, but I can't stand it when I have absolutely no idea where files like My Documents or the desktop folder of a user that you are not logged into actually are.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
With all the Viruses, Worms and Adware currently attacking systems.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to integrate some sort of security scanner into the system?
Eventually I guess they might make you pay a subscription for virus updates. But to start
with, it would make an excellent selling feature.
_AND_ its not like they were REALLY punished last time they prosecuted for Anti-Trust.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
The Windows interface just keeps getting more and more wizard-driven, while the Mac interface eschews wizards in favor of consistently applied methods of controlling the computer.
One of the additional advantages of a consistent interface is that it allows beginning users to get things done, while also allowing more advanced users to adapt the OS to their needs. For example, most Mac users don't take advantage of all of the customization capabilities of the Dock. But once you delve into it, you realize that the Dock can do far more than just serve as an shortcut repository.
This fundamental accomodation of beginning and more advanced users is a strength of the MacOS that isn't often discussed, but as MS continues to make Windows more and more task-based (i.e.: wizard-driven), the advantages of the Mac approach will become even more apparent.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Nice try mao. See, it would have been really funny for you to burn me here, acting as if you were a master troll. But you didn't know where to stop, so it was too obvious. That's your problem. You need to be a little less obvious.
I'm sorry, but first, you lack any talent. No one is mad at you. You aren't generating discussion. You don't have a million freaks. These are all requirements of an excellent troll.
You make two mistakes mao. First, many "freaks" is the sign of a poor troll because everyone saw through it. Second, you assume I post through my regular username. Idiot.
P.S.: trying to troll a troll? strike three, yeeeeeeer out of there!!
First, I'm not trolling you, I just don't want to see such amateur attempts as it's insulting to the craft. Second, it's quite easy to troll the trolls. I'll show you sometime.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
shillage buy robbIE.
.asp for va lairIE's whoreabull pateNTdead PostBlock(tm) devise?, used against the truth/to protect robbIE's payper liesense stock markup bosses/corepirate nazi 'sponsors'. yuk.
we haven't had any of that virotic BugWear(tm) on any of our desktops for several years.
that's right, after the walking dead (& their phonIE scriptdead ?pr? whoredoggIEs) finish exterminating themselves, & sadly enough, some of us, it won't take long to clean this cesspool of greed/fear execrable up.
we're calling it the planet/population rescue program (formerly unknown as the oil for babies initiatve).
the Godless wons are helping by continuing to show where their hearts lie.
what's wrong with folks selling their kode? if it causes convenience, & interoperates with all the other kode on the planet, we say, no harm, no foul, so long as you fail to employ gangsterious/felonious practices to asphyxiate the 'competition'. sabotaging your free version of anything is a tad dastardly. if there's value added, without FUDging up the compatability, we'll pay. same with music. no more gouging dough though.
fortunately, mr stallman et AL, etcetera, is now offering comparable/superior software, to the payper liesense spy/bug wear feechurned models, in almost every circumstance. there'll be few, if any more softwar billyonerrors, as if there's a need for even won. tell 'em robbIE. you are won of the last wons whois soul DOWt, right?
back on task.
what might happen to US if unprecedented evile/the felonious georgewellian southern baptist freemason fuddite rain of error, fails to be intervened on?
you already know that too. stop pretending. it doesn't help/makes things worse.
they could burn up the the main processor. that would be the rapidly heating planet/population, in case you're still pretending not to notice.
of course, having to badtoll va lairIE's whoreabully infactdead, pateNTdead PostBlock(tm) devise, robbIE's ego, the walking dead, etc..., doesn't slow us down a bit.
that's right. those foulcurrs best get ready to see the light. the WANing daze of the phonIE greed/fear/ego based, thieving/murdering payper liesense hostage taking stock markup FraUD georgewellian fuddite execrable are #ed. talk about a wormIE cesspool of deception? eradicating yOUR domestic corepirate nazi terrorist/gangsters will be the new national pastime.
communications will improve, using whatever power sources are available.
you gnu/software folks are to be commended. we'd be nearly doomed by now (instead, we're opening yet another isp service) without y'all. the check's in the mail again.
meanwhile... for those yet to see the light.
don't come crying to us when there's only won channel/os left.
nothing has changed since the last phonIE ?pr? ?firm? generated 'news' brIEf. lots of good folks/innocents are being killed/mutilated daily by the walking dead. if anything the situations are continuing to deteriorate. you already know that.
the posterboys for grand larcenIE/deception would include any & all of the walking dead who peddle phonIE stock markup payper to millions of hardworking conservative folks, & then, after stealing/spending/disappearing the real dough, pretend that nothing ever happened. sound familiar robbIE? these fauxking corepirate nazi larcens, want us to pretend along with them, whilst they continue to squander yOUR "investmeNTs", on their soul DOWt craving for excess/ego gratification. yuk
no matter their ceaseless efforts to block the truth from you, the tasks (planet/population rescue) will be completed.
the lights are coming up now.
you can pretend all you want. our advise is to be as far away from the walking dead contingent as possible, when the big flash occurs. you wouldn't want to get any of that evile on you.
as to the free unlimited energy plan, as the lights come up, more&more folks will stop being misled into suck
like Gnome.
fucking whaaaaa. it's a fucking musical note symbol. No one is ripping anyone off.
Obviously MS is run by its Marketing (MSM) department - how else can you explain the fact that their GUI looks like a PowerPoint presentation and the kernel looks neglected; well, more like a rotten apple infested with "bugs" and "worms"
In the perfect world, Windows GUI would run on top of Linux's kernel and services, all the hardware would be made by Apple.
When I saw those screen shots, the first thing I thought of was a scene in Friends where Joey says something really stupid and Rachel looks at him with pity and says, "It's a good thing you're pretty."
So how long will it be till windows-UI-wannabe KDE begins cloning the interface? Come on OSS developer! MS has been good to you. Start cloning you great big developer!
That's more right than you know. To me, it looks like a super-mutated version of MSN.
And I say this as someone who spent 6 months not too long ago doing freelance design work for that same company... trust me, those aqua-like buttons, all the gradient mayhem, drop shadows on absolutely everything... it's all MSN.
Used to drive me nuts, too. MSN, a web company, chooses nothing short of the entire spectrum of colours in gradient form for all their branding, right down to a logo that incorporates that same spectrum. So much for 'web safe colours'.
(It's like the iMac all over again. The idiots looked at it and thought 'i guess transparent computers are popular now', without pausing to realize how the iMac's transparency was just one facet of the design. You slap a semi-clear enclosure on your old product and it'll just look like the Princess Phone Radio Shack garbage that it really is.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
One difference in styling between Whistler and Longhorn is analogous to one between Jaguar and Panther: less candyish (less than Luna, I mean). The colors are more subdued. I guess maybe the way-out styling was a bit too much in both cases?
Give me a break, another OS for complete imbeciles WITH BIG TEXT.
While i have to support windows platforms, there is no way in hell that i'm going to upgrade to Longhorn. I'm sure it will be as problematic and buggy as the rest of their software. I think Win2k was the best they have done and WILL ever do.
Microsoft, get it into your thick head that your time is over. Besides you never really made software, you just marketed the hell out of a pile of shit...
I've actually had to do some registry hacking with Windows XP to remove some of this "media integration" garbage (namely shmedia.dll). When I highlighted certain incomplete video files in windows explorer and it tried to grab info and thumbnails and what not it would freeze up and start taking 99% CPU no matter how long I waited. Of course the start menu would be frozen as well since MS apparently can't figure out how to seperate a file manager from the freaking OS. Hopefully they will at least make this useless window dressing optional this time.
So basically you just said that coders have no problem doing what they love with altruistic goals in mind, but graphics designers do. Interesting. Any thoughts on why that is?
"More ways to waste screen realestate"
I mean it does loom pretty at first, but then when you start to think about it, it is just a waste.
I pretty sure you will be able to turn them off, but you never know what people in a big company are thinking.
OTOH I won't even run XP, because of the eula, so I doubt I'll ever see this as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This screenshot really reminds me of QNX: http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/lh-win hec-05.png
to compare, here are some QNX shots (sadly they are pretty small)
http://www.qnx.com/products/ps_photon/index.html
Both have a sidebar on the right with applications, virtual desktops and slider(s) (not shown on that longhorn screenshot, but on some others) and an application bar on the bottom.
Four years. That's how long I've been on Slashdot (yikes!) and this sounds like the same stuff I heard when I started, and *NIX people still don't get it. They didn't get it when Linux on the desktop was unthinkable, and they still don't get it today.
What is it they don't get?
They don't get the fact that uptime doesn't matter for desktops like it does for servers. They don't get that Windows is a desktop OS.
Yes, you don't want it crashing every five minutes; but you don't need a whole friggin year either.
What do you need?
You need 12 hours. That's it.
Why?
Because that's about as long as most office workers will run their boxes. Most will at least log out after that, and as long as you log out you might as well reboot.
Many office workers require uptime considerably less. Many home users only need about 4 (dinner to bedtime).
As anybody who has used a FS/OSS desktop can attest, getting a desktop stable is no easy task. It's not like an Apache server, which just sits there and spends most of its time spewing files over the network.
Desktops are continuously interacting with the users. Desktop applications are written by a lot more people, using a lot of different languages. Keeping an interactive desktop up is at least an order of magnitude harder than keeping a server up. There's just a lot less control over things, and a lot more complexity.
For MS to waste time on ludicrously long uptimes for desktops just doesn't make sense.
Yes. It's nice. Yes. A "safety factor" means that more people are getting the 12 hours they need, and a few geeks who use Windows for long uptime apps (which is kinda like using a wrench to pound nails) are getting what they want. Terrific. But it's not critical to the success of MS.
Now, security, resistance to all these silly viruses, that is important to their long term success. Fixing that will be hard enough without worrying about uptime.
So in a roundabout way I think we agree more than we disagree. The user interface is less important. I personaly always roll back my settings to the simplest, cleanest, interface, which looks a lot like '95. The interface was done a long time ago. Uptime is nice, but not too important. Getting rid of the viruses is. Licensing that doesn't presume guilt would be nice too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
indeed, if you read the rest of the site, they are very worried about "security".
I place this is quotes because Microsoft's solution to "Windows Security" for longhorn is Palladium.
Wait. I thought that Palladium was a technology that "secured" my machine so that Microsoft can make my word docs expire, and the RIAA revoke licenses to my music even if I bought it...
So, like I said, its only "security" not real security.
Although, I have the sneaking suspicion that when all is said and done, there will be Palladium, everyone (on Windows) will use it, and it won't matter anyway because all the smart people will have figured out how to make it so that only they were able to lock things up... not companies like Microsoft or the RIAA/MPAA
Or is it? Search this article for "Oracle."
OSS innovate on the UI and not copy Apple? Highly unlikely.
So, I guess you think Apple came up with tabbed browsing, type ahead and the integration of popup blocking control in the status bar.
You don't need a huge team of people to develop good interfaces. You just need a few smart people who can implement the things they would like to see in their programs.
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
I applaud M$ for trying to do better than the hideous Luna, yet when they have a second chance to do it right, and a chance to learn from their mistakes, they still can't manage to do anything that doesn't look like it was designed by Teletubbies on acid.
Signature.
Wow - the system requirements for this must be through the roof...
lh-winhec-03.png
That's an 80 Ghz Xeon processor and 20 GIGS of RAM!
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
I really wish that most of the people blthering on about this topic, would actually pick up a recent book on HCI and GUI's. I'm a recent entry into the HCI world, and even I understand that the old saying "Someone who tries to please everyone, pleases no one.", applies just as well to GUIs.
Consistent with the standard.
Easy to learn and understand.
Fast to use.
Effective.
Forgiving of user errors.
Attractive to look at.
Comfortable to work with.
User-driven.
Satisfying to use.
Flexible.
Task-centered
[Source]
Yeah! It's a "For dummies" book, but most people's understanding of GUIs and their design is at that level. Especially around here.
Look through that list (and the explanations) and you'll see that there are conflicts between some of the objectives. GUI design is the art of intelligent compromise.
SyncManager has been around longer than iSync has. It is the PocketPC equivalent of the Palm Desktop.
I can understand being wary of Microsoft, but this seems like marijuana-caliber paranoia.
Exactly. It's a shame that since this was posted as an AC is was modded a zero.
and treat it like a SCSI disk in Windows, it'll work in Linux.
Most every player nowadays does this (except for a few Rios and the iPod, and they are MORE expensive than the competition). Usually listed under features you'll see some revolutionary "Carry your files on it!!!" thing or whatever.
I mean, come on, the Nex IIe, for example, is practically free (minus flash cards) and you're complaining?
In short, get a clue.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So you suggest that anytime we encounter a device we don't know we should try to suck it?
I don't think it's productive to define the issue away by claiming that nothing's intuitive. That's hardly a useful position. Suckered you in, though.
All those HUGE icons makes me think of NeXTStep to be honest.
It's cool, yeah, but not impressive enough for me to drop $300 on. Right now it just looks like another theme for XP.
What I'd like to see is something like Visual Thesaurus, where files could be linked not only by their location within the directory structure, but also by their relationship between each other (related by author, date created, content relevance to a search phrase, etc).
Chip H.
Since the advent of WinXP and Microsoft's idea of task oriented UI features replacing the classic paradigm of hierarchial menus, I've been in a bit of a quandary as to whether this approach is actually a good idea. I recently have been working as an admin and found out what almost every windows admin knows: The power user will drop the task oriented view as soon as possible and the newbie will be just as lost as the earlier newbies were in the classic Win UI.
On average not many people seemed to like the task approach as it seemed anything but clear as to what the tasks actually meant. In a company most users will not know the difference between the local harddrive and a server volume. I think, while MS has enough of a monopoly to give any kind of UI it wants and it will get accepted by moron mags such as ZDNet and CNet and the general public, that they should think carefully about their approach to UI functionality. The new UI is almost certainly going to be a resource monster (Given that running XP on a 400 MHz machine these days is anything but pleasant) and a lot of companies will ask themselves if they need this kind of functionality.
I certainly see that Longhorn has taken many ideas from Apple's MacOSX, such as the alpha blending on window corners and controls and menus (not to mention that desktop wallpaper in the screenshot which is extremely similar to the default wallpaper in OSX) which is an attempt by them, I suppose, to capture market share from Apple (as if MS actually needs this) but they're ignoring one of the real strengths of OSX, which is the simplicity of the UI. That's not to say that OSX doesn't have issues, but the overall UI design is much more consitent than in Windows.
But who knows? Perhaps it'll be a fun OS and make everyone (in Redmond) happy.
Dude
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/lh-wi
You mean if you don't have a modern graphics card you'll get worse performance. So far we haven't needed 3D acceleration to make the GUI perform. Requiring it in the future is not an upgrade.
think about driving a car. sure, you don't need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive it, but you do have to know a bit of basic physics not to get into an accident. humans are best at pattern recognition, so as long as you show them how something is done, they will remember. if you have front wheel drive, you're much better off accelerating out of a turn than braking. this is counterintuitive, because "going faster" is rarely associated with safety.
some windows advocates might say that if the wheel is turned, then the brake should actually function like the gas pedal and accelerate instead of decelerate to make the intuitive way safer/more correct. this, however, is clearly absurd. it is much easier to tell people to accelerate out of a turn than making the car completely reverse its standard mode of operation in some special situations.
the exact same thing goes for computers. just as with driving, while "most common" operations can indeed be handled, there are quite a few that need a STANDARD mode of operation instead of hacked/pseudo-intuitive one. it is much easier to tell people that files go in a tree than trying to have everything download to the windows desktop, which might (theoretically) not be in the same place all the time.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
It has been established now in all macheads' minds anyway.
The biggest tragedy of OSS mimickery is that god-awful menubar at the top of the screen. Someone needs to tell Apple that screens aren't 7" diagonal anymore.
Your example is inappropriate. Things like cars, child seats, airbags, children's toys, etc which have "safety" related deffects can result in serious injury or death during normal use.
The same cannot be said regarding "most" software and as such, they shouldn't be held liable for loss of data, theft of data, or performance degradation. For the most part, YOU MUST take responsibilty for placing your machines on the internet. If you want to shield yourself from the outside, then don't go online.
Was the product (Windows) DEFECTIVE? Of couse. Do you run any mid to large sized software that has 0 defects? You're basically asking if software can be made with 0 deffects and I think most of us here will agree that the answer is no.
I think we need to catch and severely punish the individuals who perpetrate these types of internet crimes. Do you sue the lock maker because a burgler was able to pick it and enter your home?
Where do I type "dir"?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
I work at Microsoft. I have the latest version of Longhorn installed (that's Milestone 6 for all you MS folks out there.) The images on WinSuperSite are not screenshots.
Some of the posted images are authentically from Microsoft. However, they are simply UI mockups done well before the LH development effort began. I have no idea what Longhorn will look like in the end, but based on what I see every day when I come to work, I'd be surprised if this was it.
Importantly, many of these mockup "screenshots" appear to be fake. Like I said, I'm not in charge of longhorn UI design, but most of the mockups are provably fake. (For example, some have BeOS icons in them!)
You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.
Unless there are some SERIOUS typos in the longhorn OS, (which I doubt) these pictures are FAKE. Look at the one for the Hardware Devices. It lists the system specs as "Intel Xeon, 80ghz RAM, 20GB1, Ultra ATA Hard Drive, Windows Longhorn Professional." First off, there is no 80ghz Xeon. Second. What does GB1 mean? Third. Wheres the ram? Another problem in a picture are the typos. For the Music Companion propterties, in shows that the MP3 player has 900 on board memory, and 100 meg flash card. It also says that 900 megs will hold 100 songs. What!?! The real one has 64 megs of internal. ( http://www.reviewmart.com/ele-philips_sa220 ) On the Rush Media Player picture, it says "Here's room for text but I don't thing we need it." (No spelling errors there,) What?! This is all a load of crap. Some one went through alot of trouble to photoshop in this stuff. The only pictures I believe are the real longhorn, are the 3 at the bottom.
you're bitching up the wrong tree. This is an article about leaked screenshots of the alledged new GUI. These are not screenshots of uptime or stability. This should have been moderated "off topic".
The truth doesn't care what I think.
I've tried it, and it kicks major ass. It's about 10 times better than using XP by itself: think all of the convience features of XP, with the performance characteristics and interfaces of it's lighterweight sister, Win2k.
Sure, you can turn on theming if you want, it's in there. It supports DirectX9 and everything else.
Also, it's IE is (finally) secure by default, and it has gobs of cool management tools for policies, etc, and not just with TweakUI. Stuff that you used to need a registry editor and google or seperate tool to manage.
It rocks. It feels faster than Windows XP on the same box, and it exposes control over more features through the services/administrative tools.
Okay, I'm done blabbing. This guide explains it better than I can.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Nothing revolutionary about LongHorn. This is just Windows XXP.
Microsoft gets a lot of crap, but Windows is now much better than it was in '95. Dont fix it if it aint broken.
Funny Pics
Hey uh... you know that your sig is NOT an example of Russell's Paradox?
Because the statement has two parts... the first part is false, which makes the second part true, but then the whole is still false even though the second part is true. It's like saying "2+2=4 and 2+2=5." 2+2=4 is true, 2+2=5 is false, therefore the logical AND is false.
Okay, I should get more sleep...
The screenshots are really just the tip of the iceberg. What's under the hood may blow OSX out of the water if they can get it stable.
v iew_2003.asp
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_pre
Basically:
GDI and GDI+ are replaced by the new DCE (Desktop Composition Engine), which provides full 3D support to the desktop. Everything scales to high DPI. Video flies and flaps. It only does cool stuff on signed drivers.
The XFree86 fork has some catching up to do.
Without having read the comments, I'll break them down into the following:
5% Still not as pretty as KDE/MacOSX/the command line.
12% But does it run Linux?
17% So well rendered, it must be virtually crashproof! (15% sarcastically)
11% Here, click on this goatse link!
6% Man, if Bill Gates only had a million dollars for every pretty blue widget...
49% They just violated SCO's intellectual property.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Is it just me or does that look a lot like KDE?
A lot of things can be said for or against the windows UI. Personally, I have few complaints with windows 2000 and lesser in terms of UI. I dislike XP mostly because I prefer things to be compact and streamlined and that, my friends is something XP is not. I dislike frivilous graphics and frivilously large toolbars etc. I understand that some computer users may like that, but an option to shut off "all the fruity colors" should have been made available. Sure, XP is skinnable, but the "classic" skins are still bogged down by the fact that the windows XP environment habitually sacrifices user efficiency for initial usability. Sure, lil' sis can save and open files without any real help, but in about a year once she's matured a bit and knows a little more, will she not be frustrated by the fact it takes twice as long to do it than in other UIs?
Lets not leave out Linux, I enjoy Linux as a hobby, but as far as the most popular UI's go, it's just as bad. KDE and GNOME aren't horrible, but they could be a lot better. It takes just as long to accomplish something in either of them as windows XP simply because you often get too much detail, when I click my task bar, I don't want to be assaulted by the 8000 or so selections that you get even in a fairly bare-bones GUI install. Granted, they can be removed, but not easily. Linux will not take off as a desktop system until it can take reliability and combine it with ease of use. I'll admit right now, I'd MUCH rather install new hardware on a Windows system. Why? because even when installing hardware that I know nothing about and don't have the drivers for is a hell of a lot easier than doing so in Linux.
I know full well that this will get tucked at the bottom and ranked as a one because I'm reiterating a lot of points as well as being simply irrate, but the solution to all of this isn't Linux aquiring a few traits or Windows aquiring (or losing) a few others, what it amounts to is in order for the OS market to work there need to be more than two or three OSes available. (Fanboys, now is the time to mention WHEATONEX or whatever off the wall OS you run, but I'm talking mainstream here, not ecclectic little known ones)
The market should aim to be like that of cars, car companies produce many models, each one with a particular type of user in mind. Small economy cars are aimed at people who just need something reliable to get around, they don't have to be amazingly fast or have a lot of features, it just needs to work and be fairly safe. Larger family sedans are aimed at people who have a lot of things to do, they are more task oriented. They aren't necessarily fast, but they are very safe and very reliable. Trucks are aimed at the purely utilitarian user, they are durable and very powerful, but at the same time they are big and slow. Sports cars are aimed at the flashy user, they are fast and look nice, but they offer little protection in an accident and are really only suitable for city or highway driving, you can't drive them in the winter and you certainly should drive them in the country where stones and potholes will damage them. But most of all, more than anything else, no matter what kind of car you drive (bear with me, I know I'm about to get hit with "but I drive an electric" or "well, I converted my 1987 chevy celebrity to run on LP!") they all run on gas, they all take oil and other fluids. *in case you didn't get it, the fluids are the software in this case, not electricity or something*
The computer industry has a lot of changing to do before it truly matures, first thing that needs to be done is money grubbing organizations like the MPAA, RIAA, and others need to be put in their place and made to deal with the times just like all the other companies out there. Secondly, we need to dismiss socialist computing notions like networking every item in your house. I know it seems cool in Sci-Fi, but it's a bad idea unless computers are 100% safe, reliable, and infallable. Until then, we need to stick with, for the most part, having to flip the light switch ourself.
Lastly, we need to get it out of our heads that computers are just Microsoft vs. *nix, and that something as frivilous as a UI change will change the computing world, it's going to take a total paradigm shift in order to do that.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
I don't know if anyone else noticed, but down in the right hand corner of this screenshot the date says May 29th. Perhaps these screen shots are not as new as we think (or Microsoft just didn't bother to set the clock to the right date).
Syllable is a very promising project to create a Free Software desktop OS. It's somewhat underfeatured right now, but when it gets a 1.0 release, it will be really cool.
Spell it with me: T - E - L - N - E - T
If that is too many letters, try this: F - T - P
And who, exactly, wasn't sending passwords in clear text?
At least get your facts straight before you make outrageous claims like that.
fuck u n00b, I aer teh REAL BESTEST TROLL!1!!11
Fucking lamer. mao owns your bitch ass
I use a Mac, and I've got a logitech optical wheel mouse. To open this tab in Safari to write my reply to you, I clicked the "Reply to This" link with the wheel button. OS X supports all kinds of mice, just their standard mouse only has one button.
Honestly, I have no idea why they do this. I would love to have the option of having one of those cool looking Mac mice with a second button and a scroll wheel, instead of having to use a crappy looking logitech.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...if you are not smart enough to figure it out on your own you have no business using a computer in the first place...nuff said. ;o)
It removes all legal responsibility from microsoft. One could also argue that the sendmail vunrabilites were "Shoddy codding". I plan on asking my superiors if they want to waste millions of dollars to try to prove that I can't read and have a limited grasp of the legal system.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
When XP came out, I wondered if they could do anything more to totally trash the user interface and make it look any more ridiculous.
Apparently, then can.
But that is not all they have done. From the look of the environment, it appears to me that you are going to require one hell of a machine to run it.
I really wish Microsoft would do a couple of things to the OS (besides throw it out):
1) Make the UI completely configurable
2) Stop making radical changes to the UI
3) Completely rewrite the code
4) Embrace Open Source (giggle)
A man can have dreams, can't he?
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
"If you'd like to apply your skilz to create a Printer Config dialog that does everything the Windows dialog does with the ease of the Mac dialog, contact KDE|Gnome and go right ahead."
Well my comment wasn't directed against you specifically. Second as I mentioned way down at the bottom of the topic page. Designers mostly get the short-end of the stick (commercial or otherwise). This isn't just my observation, but many other HCI "experts" have made note of this as well (why do you think a lot of commercial software is the way it is?). If I thought people would actually listen, I would?
I recommend you read The Invisible Computer. Things don't have to be the way they are presently. But the past is deeply embedded, and that's all that people know.
It's all just themes on the same damn GUI components.
Yeah, see above.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm sorry you were doing so well then you stepped into something.
Rather than make a long post, about what's wrong with yours. Let's do something constructive, and timesaving.
Here's one of my posts, and I reference a book at the bottom. It's out of print, but your library may have a copy. It's not perfect, and if you're serious about HCI there's many more, but it's a good start.
I see that as a great 3d interface, available in Linux for quite a while. Rather than reinventing everything, just make several different layers of 2d environments, and stack them. Give them opaque backgrounds with a single interface for navigation on top. By flipping the slides, you can access different sets of open programs.
My favorite implimentation of this is that of OpenBox(and the other boxes). I can wheel on the empty background to switch desktops. No wasteful program runs as a background, and I can move a window from one desktop to another by dragging it across the edge. With this method, I can keep my editor and compile on one desktop, and instantly flip to a web browser if I need to check documentation.
Mac OS 9 and Linux(by which I mean XFree86 w/ a decent wm on any platform) also have the ability to shrink to just their titlebar upon a double click. Not as essential as virtual desktops, but definitely worth the ~30 lines of code it takes to impliment. Panther's Expose uses a different approach by which all windows, or all those of the current application, are resized to fit on the screen. Clicking on one exposes it. The idea has potential.
(Windows has kept the same interface for the past 8 years, but not because it's the best.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
...putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse.
Microsoft Programmer 1: "Hey, did you get around to patching any of those thousands of security holes?"
Microsoft Programmer 2: "Are you kidding? When do we have the time??? These huge, ugly buttons aren't going to add themselves in, are they?"
"Try to give telephone support to someone if you don't even know how the OS looks."
That's why there needs to be two interfaces. The graphical one the customers sees. The command-line the repair tech sees. Why command-line? Simple the goal of a repair tech is to get in, fix the problem, and get out. The only flaw is if there's a physical problem with the modem. Everything else can be hardwired e.g. Phone#, IP address, etc.
You only need phone support when something is broken. I like how Ernie Ball said it:
Q. But there's a real argument now about total cost of ownership, once you start adding up service, support, etc
What support? I'm not making calls to Red Hat; I don't need to. I think that's propaganda...What about the cost of dealing with a virus? We don't have 'em. How about when we do have a problem, you don't have to send some guy to a corner of the building to find out what's going on--he never leaves his desk, because everything's server-based. There's no doubt that what I'm doing is cheaper to operate.
Fewer and fewer people need help to use a GUI and no one needs "support" when things just work right from the start.
When I make a call for "support" because some else's service is not working right, I ask for specific configuration information. When clueless tries to tell me how to open a menue item in IE or Outlook, I simply follow along, saying "OK, OK" and extract what I need. That's not service support, it's freaking Microsoft product support. Though it's a pain in the ass, I don't let it bug me unless they let their ignorance upset them. Think about that the next time you are having trouble with a differnt interface, smart-ass.
To get a clue, you might try reading RFCs or simply use free software. From this you might extract the real and universal from M$ details that currently shroud your and your customer's minds in ignorance.
Customization is fine as long as it's not just a weak excuse for not setting up stuff properly in the first place.
I agree. That's why I think the M$ system of ever changing forests of GUI tabs that don't reveal adequate information to understand misconfigurations, much less fix them, sucks jaged rocks. If they want standardization, why do they keep changing what they put out? When M$ screws up, it's burried in that nasty binary registry and you may never fix it. That is not a proper set up at all, is it? View the source of your missery and income!
Don't you wish you could do something productive for a living? I do, and that's why I use free software. It is set up well, does not requrire support and leaves me free to do other things.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Short-story:
/etc/fstab: /dev/sdXY /your/desired/camera/folder auto \
/your/desired/camera/folder whenever you plug it in if you don't have autofs set up to detect it. If you have autofs, you can try adding "auto" to the list of options after "user" in that line above.
Install RedHat 9.0
(attach USB device)
Browse automagically mounted drive in Nautilis. (appears on your desktop, hurrah)
Long-story:
Enable {SCSI, SCSI Disks, USB Mass Storage with all options, USB controller, Hotplug, kernel module loading} in your kernel config. Rebuild, according to package direction. Pour, serve.
Attach camera via USB. This is enough to get the drivers loaded. dmesg output should confirm it's attached and detected as a SCSI disk.
Then, make sure you have a line like this in your
defaults,noexec,nodev,user 0 0
The "XY" comes from the output of dmesg after you attach the camera... this is just "sda1" if you don't have any other SCSI shit.
And then you can just mount
This works for cameras, some PDAs and a lot of new MP3 players that let you do a similar trick in Windows. The easiest way to get this working is to use a recent distro of RedHat, Mandrake or SuSe where all this is already taken care of for you.
I don't know of any centralized place online where this process is outlined. There is no "USB camera guide" or tool because, as is the linux way, it's handeled by a bunch of smaller things that by default will work exactly as they should, without trouble, provided you care to find out what might be involved.
USB-storage standard, autofs, recent mount command, and hotplug are the extent of what you need. You might also try googling for "usb mass storage linux" along with those other keywords.
Come on, don't be a fucking pansy.
Love, Rei
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now why the fuck is that listed as a camera howto?
Perhaps if those fucking cocks rewrote that shit and listed it has usb mass storage device howto or made a god damn link from usb mp3 player howto to it that would make shit a lot fucking easier. I'm a little too busy to put up with this fucking bullshit man.
anyways, THANK YOU.
I can now PISS ON THIS WINDOWS BOX and throw it in a dumpster.
(well, actually i'll probably just install linux on it and use it for something...)
Linux : new kernel with feature XXX / YYY
Windows : new screenshots !
I waste my time on both, but at least i can boast some real technical involvement to my relatives when browsing the Linux sites.
He just say that they are prototypes that _he believes_ to be accurate. Did he paint them himself?
I don't care how many eyecandy they put into their user interface.... just don't put everything in explorer.exe!
It's true, the OS windows xp seems to be more stable than win 9x. Instead of the OS hanging, it's now the user interface.
Software development 101 : modularize!
Sure, there are more games available for Windows. But how much does that matter, when both platforms have more games available than any human being has time to play?
g ames.com/w ww.macgamer.com/e s.applelinks.com/
Good Mac gaming sites:
http://www.macgaming.com/
http://www.insidemac
http://www.clanmacgaming.com/
http://
http://mac.ign.com/
http://gam
http://www.gameranger.com/
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It's like blaming the gun maker for a sniper attack. If UNIX were in the same dominating position today, it would be exploited similarly. And please don't glorify UNIX. Microsoft did in 5 years what UNIX took 25 years. Accelerated development has its price. Come on you guys ! If not Microsoft, we would still be teletyping, telnetting and what other gory stuff to access the 'Net. UNIX Sucks! Big Time
-------- Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate -- the bombs always hit the ground.
Who cares? The bad news for microsoft is I quit even pirating their software before win2k came out. Teh $ux!
Death Dances Only With The Living
Many countries have laws that specifically prevents agreements that remove such responsability. True, when it comes to non consumer sales, the restrictions might not be as hard though.
A couple of the latest screens/icons look a lot like (RedHat) Linux. Not that thats a bad thing, I guess it goes to show that the Linux interface is just as good, if not better than a Microsoft one, but without the huge overhead of research costs
At least that's my conclusion based on how each of their design generations eat up more and more pixels.
With the epicenter of UI design centered upon 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, naturally Apple wasted more pixels first (see Aqua). Alas, MS seems to be copying that trend.
For example, take this image from the posted screen snaps:
Number 2 above reminds me of the way Win2K changed the default display desktop "explorer" windows. They decided it was necessary to infer the "type" of the folder being displayed, and consume a huge, wide column in the left-hand portion of the window. For Most (>80%) windows, it said something ReallyUseful(tm), like "Folder," with a big yellow folder icon. In a few obscure cases, the icon would differ, and the description in the left-hand column would display a bit more info -- perhaps thumbnail previews of pictures in an entirely image-containing directory.
Regarding Number 3 above: I know the U.S. baby boomers are aging en masse, but how big must these visual cues be? At [probably] half way thru my life, my eyes are certainly no longer those of a teen ager. Yet why do I need 20 blue pixels horizontally to distinguish this window's vertical borders (I counted, each is 10pix wide) from others underneath? The content area of this window is 532 pixels wide, so these borders represent ~4% of the content. IMHO this is wasteful.
But mostly, Mostly, that left-hand column in the windoze desktop explorer meant 1/3 of most folder windows were wasted showing blank/white pixels. Ayah.
All of these nits waste space on my dual 20" flat screen display-driven desktop (driven by a Matrox dualie card).
I paid money (lots) for all those pixels, and they are increasingly wasted in an indiscriminate manner. Blech.
P.S.: Of course, it is windoze, and so various Registry entries may allow certain customisations. Unfortunately, that level of control is also decreasing.
another crappy interface from a monopolizing giant controlled by an obviously psycho introvert who cares nothing for users privacy or productivity, but rather about monetary gains...IMO that is, but i guess people have the right to difference of opinions, unless it's with microsoft's opinion, then you have no right according to their license agreement to have a difference of opinion. what next? will they make this bull... work like an XBOX, on which only microsoft signed software can be run without some license breaking mod, or buffer overruns? oh, and i hate windows media player. if it was alive, i'd have somebody shoot it. i wouldn't do it myself, 'cause then the crap would go flying everywhere. i'm not neccessarily an open source "fanatic", and use numerous operating systems, but instead, i hate people who want to control every square inch of a particular market with no chance for competition. oh, and i hate SCO too. and the presumably dead Saddam Hussein, and his kids. and bin laden. they're all up there. believe you, me. you don't want to be up there.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...