More Looks At Far-Off 'Longhorn'

b17bmbr writes "According to eWeek, the first builds are out, with an SDK. The Register notes: 'Microsoft builds leak regularly, Microsoft knows this, and Microsoft knows that the wider the distribution of the software, the faster it's going to spread all over the internet...The timing is impressive for an alpha build of a product that is not scheduled to hit the streets for another two years, and which could quite easily stretch to three.' Methinks this is just vaporware." And Cleverone writes "Several days before PDC 03' attendees will obtain their copy, screenshots of the new build have already made their way to the net. For those inquisitive few, the build stamp is 6.0.4051.0."

Comments

Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time alternatives to Linux pop up for people to use.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD^H^H^HWindows is dead.

Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Ideas?

[anaesthetica]

I really like the toned-down brushed metal windows in place of the Playskool XP Theme. These are the kinds of innovations that are going to keep Windows ahead of the game in the long-run.

Any screenshot mirrors?

[roumada]

Of course, the screenshots are /.ed already. A machine brought to its knees by Longhorn without even having it installed!

Naming Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see Microsoft is using there old naming scheme...

Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 4051

DRM?

[t_allardyce]

There are some screen shots missing from that site, namely the error message saying "a non-drm enabled media file has been detected and removed from your computer"

Why?

[Simple-Simmian]

Why is the "news" 2007 is a longway off.

Now with snappy crash action!

[Qweezle]

The future is now, because NOW, you not only get 50% less screen real estate because of the fancy clock and sidebar, but IN ADDITION, you get a small dancing paperclip singing Michael Bolton every time your computer crashes. w00t! All hail Longhorn!

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Prof. Anal Killjoy.

Here is another link..

[adeyadey]

Here is another link where you can see the next version of Windows..

Re:Yeah

[dougmc]

It's Windows XP, but with an obnoxiously larger clock and sidebar! Great!

Hmm, it made me think of Hal 9000. I suspect that wasn't an accident ...

This gives us time.

[Adolph_Hitler]

This gives us linux developers time to add whatever improvements are made via longhorn into Linux so that by the time 2006 comes alone, Linux will already have all of the important features and plus its own improvements.

Re:Quick Version Info

[tuba_dude]

Sure, it's right here:

JRH:
-Moved NSA backdoor from explorer.vb to kernel
-Just recieved payment from FBI, finishing touches on their backdoor.
-Looked at networking code from the 32-hour coding session, no security holes found yet.
TODO: Find more caffiene to hide with next time marketing comes to fire me.

BG:
-New easter egg in ie: "ALL YOUR MARKETSHARE ARE BELONG TO US"
TODO: Get a press relase out about security.

Marketing department:
Cleaned up the puke on the UI, left the corrosion patterns there.
TODO:
-Change codename to something less sucktacular.
-Fire JRH

Re:For the uninformed, like myself

[azzy]

Not even Microsoft can persuade people to upgrade from XP to XP. Hence they need a new version of windows. It's all about making money.

and the next step.. er... profit?

Finally!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

A true alternative to the Linux tax!!!

Re:Another chance for linux.

[AntiOrganic]

1. Improve every area of linux possible

Thanks for the insightful plan, buddy!

Re:screen size

[Anonymous Coward]

My monitor is rectangular. Every monitor I have ever seen has a rectangular screen. What shape is the one you use?

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, way to ruin a good M$ bash with facts.

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[typhoonius]

Yes, they're always 10.3 steps ahead of the competition.

DRM

[Alain Williams]

How did they get the screen shots ? I thought that the big thing about this release was supposed to be DRM & Fritz chip to stop this -- or are all of these GIFs going to stop working next week ?

Oh, wait - I get it, silly me, it's Microsoft, so of course: it just doesn't work. SNAFU.

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[SensitiveMale]

Do you see any anisotrophic highlights in the grey window border elements? No? Then it wouldn't be brushed metal, it would be a grey gradient now wouldn't it? Besides, this is an interim UI for the alpha and quite likely the beta. The final UI, much like with XP won't be introduced until the OS is well on its way and close to release.

Instructor: Welcome to MSAA. Would you like to start?

Stubear: Hello, my name is stubear and I'm a MicroSoft Apologist.

Class: Hello stubear.

Instructor: thank you stubear. Welcome to MicroSoft Apologist Anonymous.

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[Frac]

Do you see any anisotrophic highlights in the grey window border elements? No? Then it wouldn't be brushed metal, it would be a grey gradient now wouldn't it?

Why do you think Longhorn is not out yet? Because they're still working on the anisotrophic highlights! Duh!!

Re:Where Could They Possibly Be Getting Their Idea

[Overly Critical Guy]

Not to be overly critical...

That's my job.

Say no to the Linux Tax!!! (Part 1)

[Anonymous Coward]

As you may know, Open Source has always lagged far behind in many 'consumer' type of features. Among the most prominent are 'power saving' modes featured on many of the newer PCs. The subsystems, of hardware, BIOS, and operating systems, reduce the amount of power consumed by the computer when it is not in use, and thus save energy and the environment. However, it is clear that by eschewing these features as being for 'lame desktop Windoze lusers', the open source community firmly establishes itself as standard American energy sucking social reprobates, unconcerned about the fate of the rest of the planet, and not caring one whit if the entire nation collapses just like California did last year. In this article I show just how much energy would be wasted if people did, in fact, switch to linux or BSD.

The way to calculate power consumption of a computer is relatively simple, and will cost about 50 bucks. First you need to get a multimeter that can measure AC current up to a few amperes. The next step is to get a 3 prong power cord. After that get some connector thingies and a wire stripper/crimper. Then take the hot wire of the power cable and split it and make it so you can plug the multimeter into it, in series with the circuit to measure. In this case, a computer.

Next, power is measured in watts. A good familiar yardstick is lightbulbs, with 60 watt being pretty normal to see in ceilings in people's houses. Volts * amps = watts, and since the voltage will be roughly 110-120 volts, (measure w a voltage meter if u wanna be exact), you can multiply the number on the ammeter by 120 to find out how many watts the computer system is using up.

Now, surprisingly, in 'off' mode, power supplies and monitors and so forth draw current. 83 milliamps in my case. .083 * 120 = 9 watts. Thats pulling all the time. Day and night. 24/7. Now, lets say I have this thing plugged in all year. Thats 8760 hours. The power company measure this stuff in 'kilowatt-hours', so how many of those am I using? 9 watts * 8760 hours = 78,840 watt-hours, or 78 kilowatt hours. At 14 cents a kilowatt hour in my district, I have payed 11 dollars to the power company this year for my computer system to do absolutely nothing at all. Not even be turned on.

Now let's say I turn it on! My system draws roughly 0.66 Amps with windows running. When I start an OpenGL game its 0.68A. If i decide to unplug the fan that saves me 0.02A. basically, though, its roughly 0.66 Amps.

If I left my computer on full blast all the time, hard disk going, monitor on, etc, this is what it costs me to be up 24/7. 0.66Amp * 120v = 79.2 Watts. 8760 hours in a year at 79.2 watts makes roughly 693,000 watt-hours, or 693 kilowatt hours. Again at 14 cents per, thats about $97 USD worth of electricity a year for the computer to be on.

But the nice folks at Microsoft, being tree hugging hippies and all, have implemented easy to use, reliable, and safe 'power saving' mode. This mode will make your hard disk stop spinning, and on suitable monitors will turn them off as well. Now, how much power does this actually save? Well, you can measure it. Just wait a few minutes for the comptuer to go into power saving mode.

In my case, when the monitor goes into sleepy mode, (the orange sleepy light instead of the green power light on the monitor case) consumption plummets from 0.66 Amps to 0.27 Amps. All because of an operating system software feature interacting properly with the a simple monitor hardware feature that has been around at least 5 years. Now when the hard disk shuts off, it goes down even more to about 0.23 Amps. Now, with the hard disk not spinning and heating in my machine, I could theoretically shut the case fan off and save another 0.02 amps... but my box doesn't do that. Anyways, there is even a 'more power saving mode', its called 'suspend' mode I believe, and that drops me down to a low low 0.20Amps. I guess it shuts down some circuits on the motherboard as well as the HD and monitor. I don't know.

Re:Say no to the Linux Tax!!! (Part 1)

[Anonymous Coward]

PART 2, continued.

But I should not link Linux to murder, that would be a bit of a wacky stretch. This article is about a serious topic! A pound of coal has 1.6*10^7 joules of energy, and 1 kwh is the same as 3.61*10^6 joule, so a pound of coal has 1.6*10^7j/pound divided by 3.6*10^6kwh/j or roughly 4.4 kilowatt-hours of energy. Pretty crap compared to oil I must admit. But 4.4 kwh is still nothing to sneeze at, as I myself if burned in an oven probably wouldn't produce all that much more, and I weigh 200 times more than a pound of coal.

But how much of that could Linux waste? Let's say As before before, 693 kwh for a computer w/o powersaving (linux), on all year round vs 337 kwh for a computer with powersaving (Windows), 5 hours a day of non-powersaving use. Thus, 693kwh divided by 4.4kwh/pound-coal means about 158 pounds of coal go to run the first computer, while 693kwh divided by 4.4kwh/pound-coal means roughly 77 pounds are needed for the second computer. That's 81 pounds of coal a year some person in a coal mine is hauling up so that Linux can sit there wasting energy.

Now I know what you are saying, 'I don't burn coal to run my computer! My power comes from the power company, and who knows what they do. Maybe hydro or nuclear or maybe they have gerbils running in cages.'

That's OK though, there is a way to get a rough idea of what exactly they might be using. Yes here we are, a chart of how energy is produced in the US. Roughly, Coal: 22%, Nat. Gas: 20%, Oil: 14%, Nuke: 7%, Hydro: 3%, 'biofuel': 3%, other 3%... so linux is probably wasting coal, oil, or natural gas. Maybe plutonium. Probably not solar, wind, geothermal, tides, ocean thermal whatever, biomass, bamboo/wood/sugarcane burning/whatever.

So there you have it. Linux wastes energy .How much energy, though? I mean what's a few pounds of coal between friends. OK a few dozen pounds. Some of us get that much for christmas in our stockings free from Santa Claus. But what if there was more than one person running Linux? What if Wal-Mart gets it's wishes and Lindows becomes used by, say, I don't know, everyone who has a computer in the United States of America?

So how many computers are there in the US anyways? In the US, here says roughly 60 million on the internet[broken link] , Here says 133 million flat out. I like to be conservative and use round numbers so lets say 50 million people switch to Unix, the 'non-powersaving OS', for a year. Then what?

First let me calculate the power consumption of 50 million computers that have usable working powersaving (Windows) and compare it with those that don't (Open Source, like Linux or BSD). Again, in one year: 693 kwh for a computer w/o powersaving, on all year round. 337 kwh for one with powersaving. Multiply each of those by 50 million. That is 3.47*10^10 kwh for the first computers, and 1.69*10^10 kwh for the second. A difference of 1.87*10^10 kwh, or 18.7 -billion- kilowatt hours.

Now, how much is this 18.7 Billion kilowatt hours, all of which would be wasted turning hard disk platters that were not being read/written, and shooting light out of monitors that went unwatched? How much is that in terms of oil, coal, or natural gas? 1 kwh is 3.61*10^6 joules, so in joules the waste is 6.75*10^16 joules. Now there's 1.6e7 joules in a pound of coal, 1.1e6j in a cubic foot of natural gas, 6.1e9 in a barrel of oil, and 3.7e13 joules in a pound of uranium.

Thus, the waste of switching 50 million computers to Linux would be 6.75e16j divided by 1.6e7j per pound-coal, or 4.2 billion pounds of coal. Gas? That'd be 61 billion cubic feet of natural gas (roughly a 3/4 square mile blob of gas). Or 11 million barrels of oil. Or, 1,824 pounds of Uranium

Speaking of Uranium, it's stripped from Uranium ore (rocks), two pounds U per ton of rock, and 1 percent of that the right kind of U for splittin'. So, we would be diggin thru roughly 182 thousand tons (1824pounds*100percentages) of radioactive dirt so that Linux computers can s

That's nothing!

[Valar]

I have a leaked beta of the new linux.

Re:Yeah

[insertionPoint]

It's Windows XP, but with an obnoxiously larger clock and sidebar!

MS Developers get ideas from spam....
Add three inches to your CLOCK size!

Re:Microsoft is in a tough spot with this one

[PetoskeyGuy]

Gee, Hopefully they can get by with only scores of billions they have in cash. Times are tight for everyone I guess. Hang in there Bill.

Re:screen size

[Chess_the_cat]

All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Therefore, unless the monitor is circular or triangular, it's bloody rectangular.

Re:It's the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple gave away their stuff, most of the linux hippies would switch in a heartbeat despite their "Free as in speech" BS.

Apple makes hardware, you moron. Who the hell gives away hardware for free? This is like comparing apples to...uh.... Apples.

Re:IE changes

[KozmoStevnNaut]

"Ah well I'll just get a K9 cpu..."

But as you've already guessed... It's gonna run like a dog ;)

BADAM-BISH!