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Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX
Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework."
Hmmm. Not many people are purchasing Office '03, and they're not releasing their next OS until '06. Wonder if their cash reserve will sustain them for three years?
Especially when he was just shitting on Outlook about 5 seconds ago with the "clunky" comment.
Marketing, marketing, and still more marketing.
El riesgo vive siempre!
So ".NET" hasn't even really hit the ground running yet, and already it's sucessor is being announced? Too bad the Osborne curse never seems to affect MS when they do the same things that Osborne did.
The goals of this OS seems pretty much the same as the last one. The productivity gains of having a "sidebar" are probably the same as the MSN website sidebar, which is kinda like having a billboard blinking outside your bedroom window all night : a distraction.
An XM-based FS is going to be a meta-data nightmare, with more churning than one thought possible. The pagefile size will need to be quite large to cache all that crap. But they'll use the extra-speedy Intels to compress is on the fly anyway.
Most of *any* speech recognition is going to be from research done on [cough] *nix machines of the past decade.
Revamping the graphics system is just what the DirectX doctor ordered: new APIs! Everything can be antialiased, from busy dancing icons to cursors to controls. yawn.
By keeping everyone busy adopting the new platform, form ignores function and we get the same stuff in a new box. I hope they keep pushing it out. Then again, we're talking about people who confuse an OS with their desktop images.
mug
Geforce FX, WinFX - this is starting to get about as in style as neglecting the leading E on words such as Xtreme and Xpress.
The thing is, WinFX has been called that since some time in 2000, when the team was started.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
"A demonstration of WinFS featured a method to "stack" documents by author in a window, with the heights of the stacks corresponding to the number of documents, as well as file views that showed snapshots of documents, rather than just file names."
... In addition to those snapshots posted of Longhorn over the weekend, isn't it a bit odd that Longhorn is essentially using the brushed metal look from OSX 10.3? The only difference being that MS made the grey a bit darker. Kudo's to the MS UI team.
And ten years before this, Apple patented Piles:
"Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.
To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open."
From the article,
.Net code, which is supposed to help prevent developer errors that can lead to unsecure applications, according to Microsoft."
"Everything that gets written for Windows will be
Everything I read in the article from this to the talk about the file system and how it allows "searching for an array of files...strewn across ever-larger hard drives" and creating all these "smart" programs that "automatically sniff out network connections," really makes me wonder how secure this OS is going to be. Am I the only one who reads this stuff and thinks that a security vulnerability at any point has the potential of corrupting an entire system or even LAN?
Having easy lines of communications between the OS, apps, files and networked resources is great, but who's doing the gatekeeping between all these resources to keep them secure? And how is it being done? Or is it just assumed that once something is "trusted" its trusted to do anything it wants?
Or am I just paranoid?
Microsoft has kitchen sink APIs built on a creaky foundation, but it sure can make no-nothing programmers productive on their platform. I think what they've done with managed code in .Net has been great. None of us will miss COM. If WinFX can bring managed high-level interfaces, it will be cool. I think WinFX is going to give us lots of wiz bang UI with all the nasty and quirky event handling managed. I think we will also get free access to all kinds of distributed and disconnected data, again managed by the runtime platform. I think MS got its first good architecture by stealing java in .NET. When they finally drive all this stuff into the core of their formally shit architecture, they will have done their first good job.
I agree with the parent in spirit, but just to be fair & combat FUD:
Outlook Web Access is built into the Exchange server, not the Outlook client. Further, OWA works very, very well under Mozilla.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Well, the mono guys will keep working on their code and keeping up with API changes.
When the signing thing comes, that's were it'll get weird.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Yeah, M$ and their minions are rather silly and their marketing people tend to confuse things by giving slight variations on the same thing different names (OLE to COM to COM+ to .NET), but hey, whose marketing people don't?
I think our natural enemy isn't M$ marketing, but marketing in general. There's this programming language called Java and Scott's minions decided to call the Java 1.2 SDK Java 2. (Interesting that I'm certified as a Java 2 programmer and the most recent SDK is 1.4.2. Does this mean that I'm a time traveller?)
My point is that everybody ships products with confusing new names in order to generate the kind of hype incrementing a version number just can't. Microsoft may be better at it, but everybody does it. If the marketing department at your company doesn't infuriate you on a daily basis or occasionally make slightly false claims about your product line, they're not doing their jobs.
There is a line, however, where the normal murkiness of marketing spin becomes pure evil and that line is crossed most frequently by the minions of Larry Ellison. Anybody remember the "Unbreakable" campaign? Nothing is unbreakable. Not even the most hardcore Linux zealot wouldn't have the gall to say something like that.
Even Apache spins. I've read some Jakarta project overviews that read like a cross between page 5 of the Windows Getting Started booklet and The Celestine Prophecy.
The point of my rambling post is that even our employers or companies whose technology we actually like are guilty of the same marketing spin. It's part of the world we live in, kiddies. Some people use their marketing spin for good, some for evil. The moral of the story is that even though Microsoft marketing people are dirty liars, Oracle marketing people are filthy lice infested dirty liars.
I bid you all good health and a pleasant afternoon.
I know I'm going to get slammed -5 redundant, but there are just so many things wrong with that statement.
Unless you are an MS zealot, the Outlook program was among the worst examples of a computer program. It was slow to start. It did a few different tasks, and it did them marginally. It took forever to shut down. It hogged resources so the whole system bogged down. It was dreadful!
This part is a bit off-topic, but back when I still used Windows, I recall installing Office, and it was an imparative to custom install only Word, Excel, Access, and Power Point. The default office install was a sure fire way to suck the life out of any PC.
BTW: Did anyone notice that the new Explorer looks suspiciously like a Mozilla skin?
These are all from the PDC build (#4051) of Longhorn:
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Gallery 3
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"World domination."
... or something like that.
Okay. If their goal is world domination, then the community needs to think a little farther ahead. I mean, you can dismiss Microsoft's comments as hype, but give them a little credit, they have a long-term ambitious goal for Windows. It'd be really nice to see that with Linux. It'd be nice to hear "Our goal is to create a new simplified UI for Linux in order to attract a wider user base. To accomplish this, we're designing a new UI standard and making it available so that Linux's popular apps can be upgraded to interact with the new design."
Maybe the KDE team does this, I wouldn't know. But it'd be nice for the Linux community as a whole to stand together and work towards an ambitious goal like that, even plan a release date for it. It may or may not work, it may not quite meet everybody's expectations, but it's a direction for the community to go.
I think you guys would be surprised at what focusing the OSS community would accomplish. Instead of dismissing Microsoft's goals, take it as a cue. There's an opportunity here to dramatically improve Linux *and* earn some free hype over it that could potentially drive people to try it in groves. Imagine the headline "The Linux Community gets serious about competing with Microsoft." It's a fair sight better than "Linux can almost do what Windows does now." now isn't it?
Please don't read this as a Linux troll. I really want Linux to do succeed. The facts have to be faced, though, that Microsoft is a huge impediment to that success. This isn't because they're a monopoly, but because there is the perception that Linux is perpetually playing catchup. I'd like to see the day when the OSS Community leading that parade.
"Derp de derp."
You know, most Linux programs also run on OS X. Don't like Mail.app? Fine, use Evolution, or use Mutt, or use Pine if really feel you need to.
I'm not sure why people have such a hard time understanding that Macs are Unix systems. Practically anything that you can do with Linux you can do with a Mac. You cannot judge OS X based on experiences that you've had with OS 9 or earlier Mac operating systems. OS X is a completely different OS. In fact, if you don't install the Classic environment you can't even run OS 9 apps on OS X.
So, if you haven't used OS X and spent some real quality time with it you have absolutely zero ideas how Macs work, and are completely incapable of judging them.
What about how Windows is bringing out an entirely accelerated GUI (which yes, MacOSX has already done) and yet Linux is still putzing around with the nightmare which is XFree86 and antialiasing of fonts is handled not at the windowing system level, but at the application level? Yeah, that's just fantastic. Linux indeed has many advantages over Windows, but it is not superior in every way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1) Managed directX has, at worst, a 10% performance penalty against the exact same C++ code. People are always complaining about how we have an excess of performance in todays' CPUs. This seems like a good use of it to me, thanks to #2:
2) Managed code does not have buffer overflows. How many bugs in Windows and Linux, especially rootable bugs, are a result of a buffer overflow? 50%? 75% 90%? I don't know, but it is a lot. Dotnet code has zero buffer overflows.
3) Managed code avoids DLL hell: the GAC and side-by-side execution ensure that programs will continue to run on versions of libraries that they are designed to support, since minor/major version upgraded files will not be fed to these applications (although revisions still can for bug fixing reasons.) Neither the user nor developer need to even THINK about these issues - the runtime simply takes care of them.
4) Managed code upgrades to 64-bit in a neutral and architecture-independent way. Apps that are "bit neutral" will run on a 32-bit system JIT'd for 32-bit mode, and those same EXACT EXE files will run in 64-bit mode on a 64-bit system, including making use of new registers and other such things. No recompiles - the JIT takes care of it. This also means that much of the code Microsoft writes - mountains of it - to handle all kinds of things from Office to [insert favorite feature here] can be transported across 32/64 bits and architectures. No more Mac version of Office if they want - Abstract any platform-specific calls into one or two classes and have everything else be managed bit-neutral code. Notice that no one is being silly enough to suggest write-once-run-anywhere for useful apps; that is and always was a pipe dream.
I would not doubt that the dotnet runtime on Longhorn is not going to call the Win32 API much; They might just be doing it internally and only using the Executive (NT/2K/XP's kernel native API) when necessary. That would explain part of the time length. Not only do you have to upgrade your existing code to C#/VB.NET/Managed C++/whatever other dotnet language, but you need to rewrite the new runtime to completely rid it of any dependance on the Win32 API. In this way, you also make the runtime a little bit more platform neutral, vs having to convert it from Win32 to Win64 for other platforms. But this is just a guess.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Are you talking about that developer beta release for a product not due out for another two years? It sure would be silly if you were making judgements on it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
> Bill Gates just made the Adam Osborne mistake. He
> announced "WinFX", whatever that is, as the improvement
> to
> WinFX, and Microsoft will lose the profits it would have
> had from those who wait.
But unlike Osbourne MS has LOTs and LOTs of cash and
other sources of income.
What longhorn is right now is Freezeware. They are
going to keep hyping it for the next two years. The goal
is to keep people who are on the fence about switching
from doing so. "Look!" (they'll say), "Linux doesn't
have any of these nifty features that are going to
make you so much more productive! (Please ignore the
Mac just to your right, thak you)."
IBM used to do it. MS learned the lesson. Remember the
build up to win 95? NT4? 2000? etc... the hype started
years before anything was released. IIRC win2k was supposed
to have the db based filsystem too. But at some point in 99
they just dropped that feature from the list.
Sorry. I was writing my Slashdot comment while I was supposed to be working, and I was a little too abbreviated.
At one time, Novell had 85% of the networking market. Now the company is still profitable, but much, much smaller. Part of the reason for the shrinkage was due to Novell's terrible abusiveness toward the consultants that supported its software. (In my opinion, it was terrible, that is. I still feel bad about the way I was treated.)
Actually, I have been hearing that Novell users are quite happy with its products at present.
If I remember correctly, Novell bought Word Perfect Corporation for $1,150,000,000 (yes, that's more than a billion dollars) and sold it 9 months later to Corel for $850,000,000 less. That is the most expensive single business decision I can remember.