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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."
Windows 2000 - Version 5.0
:)
Windows XP - Version 5.1
Longhorn - Version 6.0
So it looks like Longhorn is actually a full version up. Not that I truly understand what any of that means. Anyone have a changelog?
does this use more or less memory than win2k, winxp?
any benchmarks yet? (Yes I know the OS is only a quarter baked)
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.
Noticed in some of the screens that the Longhorn IE has both a pop-up blocker/manager as well as a download manager (ala GetRight).. Kinda interesting developments--although I suppose we'll have to buy Longhorn to get that version of IE. Heh.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
It's a smart move, after all. Instead of releasing a late alpha version as a product (like Win95) that'll have to be endlessly patched and fixed and improved (Win95 Plus, Win98, Win98SE), they're quietly leaking alpha versions so people can report bugs and they can fix it over two years until they have a 98SE-like stable build to market.
Well, it's a smart conspiracy theory.
You remind of CNN for technology. Unbiased "News". feh.
You must be new around here (checks uid - ah yes, 6 figures).
Slashdot has never been about unbiased news in all the time I've been here; it has always had a heavy OSS bias, and especially for Linux. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although I'd argue that it's not necessarily a good thing, either
If you want completely unbiased tech news, you're in the wrong place. On the other hand, your attempt to draw parallels between MS "leaking" betas and Linux test releases is non-sensical. The former is not meant for general release, while the latter most certainly is, at least for those willing to risk using potentially unproven code on their system.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Damnit, and here I was thinking he was wrong....
/vay'pr-weir/ Products announced far in advance of
[from the jargon file]
vaporware
any release (which may or may not actually take place). The
term came from Atari users and was later applied by
Infoworld to Microsoft's continuous lying about Microsoft
Windows.
See also brochureware.
What hype? Hardly anybody outside the tech world and non-geeks have any clue about what Longhorn is or really care.
Accountants and other non-tech users are being targeted with all sorts of interesting press releases etc... You didn't get any? I think that is because slowly the tech world is turning not against Microsoft but towards the idea that alternatives exist. I am betting that when Foghorn Leghorn (or whatever) is released the non-techies will be tripping over each other to get their companies 'standardized' on it. Then techies will be faced with enormous resistance to any resistance about adapting it.
At the current rate Linux will have competitive marketshare to Windows within a few years.
I was hearing this in 98-99. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. Microsoft is a moving target for linux and every update and bugfix removes more of the complaints ppl have about windows and removes incentive to change. Linux's success counts on MS failure and MS is getting better.
Almost everything I wanted to run from Windows 95 ran on Windows 2000. The stuff that didn't looked like it explicitly asked the OS what it was, and since the answer was "NT", decided that Direct X wouldn't work.
Also, since the Windows 95 line was officially dead, and MS has been putting out for years that they would merge the codebases / features, paying for an ME upgrade was silly.
Longhorn is a continuation of the NT codebase and the NT product. It should be much more straightforward for Microsoft to push people to Longhorn than encourage folks to buy ME.
Two or three, at least.
The best one is letting windows work with their title-bar a bit more. Note that, in the screenshots, explorer has the page title in larger text, a go-to location button, and a location bar all in the title bar of the window. Not that it looks excellent in that case, but there are many cases where it is nice to be able to work with the decorations a bit more. Most things that want a custom top right now just hide decorations, but they look to still be using the same theme on that title-bar as on the rest of the desktop.
Also, during the installation they look to have explanatory help, something most Linux distributions might want to do better on.
I'm sure there was a third good idea I noted, but it's really hard to see. Basically, it's still just a dressed-up version of WindowsXP. I suspect they are still working more on the internals, as they don't really want to design all the GUI crap until they know how much they can do with the internals, such as the Kernel and the FileSystem (especially the FileSystem).
I really hate to explain myself, but you raise significant points and point out misperceptions. Saying microsoft is not competetive is so completely laughable its funnier than the addams family episode I am watching. Microsoft is the default choice. Its Coke and Pepsi. Everything else barely amounts to RC Cola. They are in a bad place because they have allowed their competitors an opportunity to increase their market share at microsofts expense, and they seem to have mismanaged their product cycle.
OSS does have the same problems anyone else does when they add features to a system. Sorry to burst your bubble on this but new features break old code. When this happens both OSS and Closed source incur the same penalty of upgrading and adjusting system configs. In the case of OSS there is just the cost of labor. In the case of closed source their is a labor cost and there is an ass making you pay full tarrif for what you own 99 percent of.
Its not a question of things going away. It is a question of things not working the same way. If you want features that have been dropped please just check the man pages for the word deprecated.
I have gotten office 97 to work on XP. Its no more unpleasant than finding out that the Telnet daemon is not installed by default in redhat and having to get that running.
Free software is nothing mystical. Open source is meerly an improved process of developing software. The comparison between closed source development and open source development is much like the change in mathematics before and after algebraic notation was developed. The mathematics is the same, the results are the same it just became alot easier to read and make contribution. The same is true of open source. The same principles govern, the same results are obtained, its just much easier to see whats going on and to make a contribution.
I'm at a hospital that intends to move 3000 machines to "some alternative" (basically the options at the moment are linux and linux) inside the next 5 years.
We intend to replace a great deal of our server room as well.
The people who communicate with us will need to support our formats, people with larger contracts will be told to ditch Excel.
This particular hospital used to have a MS site license for Windows + Office on every machine here. It's only a matter of time before even more places do this.
Also, I've seen three companies switch to be mostly Mac based in the past year.
I live in a giant bucket.
That's all well and good, but within the same time frame there will be 300,000 new computer users who will experience Windows as their first OS. I'm sorry, but Linux has never, is not, and will never be a mainstream operating system. I would love to see it as much as the next guy, but it's just a hacked up UNIX-like OS built by a bunch of volunteers. Most people do NOT care about the free-software ideology, they just want to turn on their computer, read their e-mail, browse the web, and look at porn/pictures of their grandkids (not necessarily the same people). Why screw around with Linux when Windows comes for free on their computer?
That 1181 error, and its cousin, 1104, are less than well documented, let us say.
I thought it was my project that was having issues, as I randomly tried crap to make it go, both in the dialogue-maze of the IDE and hacking the
I don't know: this is a stock install, and I used the Visual Sudio
But enough of this ranting. It is time to reboot and load a reasonable development OS, because I lack time to dick around with stuff that should "Just Work." , to mooch your phrase, sir.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
ok. so let me clarify. I'm not saying that developers make all decisions about MS product design - far from it. however, someone who's title is "marketing", or "sales", or is in the sales/marketing organization is not making product decisions (although they do make valuable suggestions/feature requests, as they're the front lines in dealing with real-life customers)
:)
.jpg files into the build servers ? or, in the case of Win32 controls - do you think that the title bars in windows are just GIFs that get scaled ? They're programmatically drawn - marketing people aren't checking in code changes to the windows sources!! The security on the windows source code from even a read-only perspective is so tight (following some publicized breakins a while back) that there is no chance that someone in the sales/marketing org could change some content even if they wanted to or knew how..
the PM will solict feedback from various sources and that drives what does and doesn't go into the product. It may very well be that the target "market" of a product is a novice, and thus the settings would be all wrong for someone who was a power user. That is not a decision made by a "marketing" person - that is a PM decision, based on feedback/research/whatever that the PM has put together.
i dont work on the office team, so i cant tell you who the word experts are or aren't, so i dont want to argue about stuff you've heard vs stuff i've heard
re: ui guidelines:
do you think marketing people have access to dropoff
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
There is a reason builds leak out of Redmond- its because, when they are creating a new build, the development team is using it internally. So when you say they are making a version of Windows which isnt really working, you really dont know what you are talking about.
There was a series of articles linked here about six months ago which detailed the processes they use to create and test Windows. It was very impressive, and very professional. After seeing that, I have no doubts about the future of Windows being bright.
Feel free to mod me down for saying something all the MS-haters dont want to hear.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.