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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."
It's about time alternatives to Linux pop up for people to use.
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.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
The only people really hyped are Microsoft fanboys and Microsoft haters like the ones on slashdot.
It's typical slashbot mentality that Microsoft is leaking builds to build hype and promote this. I bet you think Bill Gates was on the grassy knoll too.
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?
Of course, the screenshots are /.ed already. A machine brought to its knees by Longhorn without even having it installed!
Methinks this is just vaporware.
Vaporware? You think the next version of Windows is vaporware? Somehow I don't think Microsoft is going to hype a new Windows version and then never come out with one. "Sorry! That project got killed! You'll have to stick with XP!"
-- Dr. Eldarion --
We have seen this all before. Remember the hype machine for Chicago? How about Cairo? The finished product never resembles the hype but it keeps the trade press talking about Microsoft's product that will never be instead of competitors products which are shipping now.
Democrat delenda est
More screenshots can be found here.
http://almostsmart.com
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.
Good to see Microsoft is using there old naming scheme...
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 4051
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"
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Why is the "news" 2007 is a longway off.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
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!
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?
Your assuming the recent market trend will stop and MS won't continue to lose desktop market share like they just did for the first time in a decade ;)
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.
Theyr'e talking about a 2006 release for longhorn. Operating system updates have traditionally been nice cash cows for them. The same is true for office. Now, no one feels a pressing need to upgrade their office suites. Office 2003 is not very compelling. Anyone who sends me an encrypted document and expects me to spend nearly a grand so I can read is going to get a rude document back in plaintext.
So, they have their next upgrade is due in 2.5 years, their competitors are upgrading at an ever faster and regular pace (witness apple 4 upgrades in 2 years the latest being 64bit). It becomes a little bit obvious why they are leaking this.
The problem now is they will promise whatever they think the customer wants to hear at this point. When it comes time to ship they will need an OS that delivers features while still maintaining backward compatibility. Microsofts installed base has become the anchor around its neck. If they do big feature changes that obsolete products no one will upgrade, if they don't no one will upgrade.
OSS has the same problem when picking up new features but it doesn't have the same petty extortionists trying to sell the same thing all over again.
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.
Thank you, Prof. Anal Killjoy.
Here is another link where you can see the next version of Windows..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
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.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Things may change by 2007, do you think that in 3-4 years Linux wont have competitive marketshare? At the current rate Linux will have competitive marketshare to Windows within a few years, Microsoft will not be able to bully companies like they do now once Linux becomes mainstream and trust me, 3 years from now Linux will be mainstream. It might not start here in the US, it might go mainstream in China and Europe first, but it will have enough of a market share that Windows simply wont be needed.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
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?
A true alternative to the Linux tax!!!
You have a lot of nerve. Why did you link directly to the forum site? They obviously can't handle the server load or the bandwidth, especially for screenshots.
This is not due out for another two years.
* The interface is not Aero.
* WinFS is not fully functioning.
* Obviously, things will radically change in two years.
There is no way to predict what the final output will be. This build is just to keep the Longhorn name in people's minds.
But, of course, I fully expect people here to treat this like a final product (two years...) and bash away. Because it's Microsoft!
"Sufferin' succotash."
Thanks for the insightful plan, buddy!
Remember the betas for Windows NT 5? I think I still have them, somewhere. Point being, a lot can change in the span of a year, nevermind 2-3.
Yeah, way to ruin a good M$ bash with facts.
Yes, they're always 10.3 steps ahead of the competition.
I don't mind eye-candy if it doesn't bog down the system and waste space. Did you see the explorer screenshots? I mean is there any way they could have wasted some more space?!? When I'm browsing my files I usually want to be able to see more than 5 of them at a time!!! I mean look at it, big useless images, 3 different places to click if you want to search, I'm assuming they'll fill up the rest of that filter frame with something but I can't see it not being a waste. Also what the heck does "Add/Remove Programs" have to to with file browsing?!? I'd go on longer but I don't think I'd ever finish, from a usability standpoint they just seem to be getting worse and worse, They've got to figgure out that when someone wants to look at their files they really do want to look at their files! The files seem as if they're the least important in the window. They're never going to catch Apple in usability with junk like this, and when I'm talking Apple I don't just mean OS X, I'm looking back to OS 7 too (I'd go back furthur but don't have experience with pre OS 7), as far as I'm concerned the buggy hulk of Mac OS 7 is FAR more usable than anything M$ has come out with to date and anything is more usable then the file browser shown in that screenshot.
I stole this Sig
Not to be overly critical, but if you look at the theme of the gui of an OS as an indicator of it's maturity, that's frightening...
I've worked with lots of very advanced OS's with no gui.
Then again, OSX is a good example of a mature OS w/ a slick gui.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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.
And yeah, I'm not looking forward to a possible new IE6 CSS either, that would be like MS Java all over again.
One thing I would like to see in IE is a possibility to have several proxies and IE automaticly selecting the proxy with the lowest latency.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
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.
They are marketing to the same people who buy $60,000 SUVs based on the $10 dashboard clock. This is asinine from a technical point of view, but sadly good marketing. I'm surprised the taskbar doesn't have "Bulgari" embossed over simulated Connolly leather with burlwood accents and bling-bling galore.
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).
Not to be overly critical...
That's my job.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
.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.
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.
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.
I have a leaked beta of the new linux.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
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.
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!
All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Therefore, unless the monitor is circular or triangular, it's bloody rectangular.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
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.
Mac OS X wasn't released until March 2001.
That's 14 months.