Slashdot Mirror
Longhorn Developers @ MSDN
ePIsOdEOnline writes "The official Microsoft Longhorn Developers website went live. Content is filled with information fresh from the PDC, and the host of secrecy swarming Microsoft and its next generation Operating System,
Longhorn"
That's a nice source of information there. I was especially interested in their description of WinFS.
Everything that is stored in the WinFS store is an item and each item has metadata properties that are described by a schema. Items that follow the schema are stored in the WinFS store as serialized
No way.
Look, man, you need to know that the video modes used to display blue screens of deaths don't support the use of 16 million pretty pretty colors, or even 256. Nope, those modes use a grand total of any of sixteen colors.
Figured I'd point that out.
That tells us very little, since "native" performance can vary by 10X or more depending on how it's written. An implementation in C++ that uses lots of automatic object construction and destruction with generic containers and algorithms can be rather slow, maybe even slower than a good Java implementation. An implementation in C that makes extensive use of high-level libraries like glib/gobject/etc. can also be a little sluggish.
However, most OSes aren't written like that; they're written using carefully tuned hand crafted data structures and algorithms. These tend to avoid doing any redundant allocating, copying, initializing, etc. This is one reason that it can take hundreds of developers decade or more to produce only about 1 megabyte of kernel image.
I really have to doubt that an OS written completely in a VM is going to get anywhere near 95% of the performance of one of the popular conventional OSes. I also doubt that it's even possible to write a certain portion of the OS code in a VM since an OS often has to muck with page tables and goof around with obscure CPU control bits. During these times, the general-purpose memory management routines of a VM could often be unusable.
Active MSDN Operating Systems, Professional, Enterprise, and Universal subscribers may request a set of software distributed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2003 (PDC), including the preview versions of the "Longhorn" operating system and SDK, and Visual Studio "Whidbey".
I just called MSDN customer service and ordered my set. It was really easy, and it will take 7-10 days for the discs to arrive. Note that it's DVD-ROM format only.
Hope that helps.
Its not the Kernel that is being rewritten in Managed code, thats still plain old NT, albeit version 6. Its the crashprone stuff like explorer.exe and iexplore.exe thats being rewritten. A sizeable chunk of Windows nontheless. .Net version can use remoting calls across appdomains so that plugins cannot effect the core shell.
I expect a lot of the problems with explorer came from all the inprocess com objects and third party shell extensions. The
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
1. WinFS was always running on top of NTFS. It will change things, because the new storage API in Longhorn makes WinFS a first-class entity and the preferred method of working with the filesystem.
2. Nearly all the bits, like Explorer, applets, property pages, etc are being rewritten to run on the CLR. This also means Microsoft has greatly expanded the capabilities of the class library, but much of the windows-specific functionality looks like it will go under the Microsoft.* namespace, making it easy to keep cross-platform if you wish.
3. Aero is the new window manager, which does away with 2D/3D for an integrated, vector graphics & 3D, all-new windowing system. The new Aero classes do not wrap Win32. It talks directly to the window manager. How many of the other classes no longer talk to Win32 and do their work directly remains to be seen.
4. The Longhorn kernel will be the base of the next version of Windows Server, including the focus on managed code as being THE new API. This is a huge shift - Microsoft is basically telling everyone "get ready to move away from Win32/Win64 - it is in legacy mode now."
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I can't tell what the OS is, but sniffing the http response header (after sending a request for http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn) produced the following server info:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:23:43 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI'
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 24182
btw, if anyone's interested, http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn does a silent redirect to http://207.46.196.115/longhorn, so that's the server info you need to check against, not msdn.microsoft.com.
The codename Longhorn has nothing to do with Texas. Win2k3 was codenamed Whistler, the next release was supposed to be Blackcomb, these are two mountains in Canada. An intermediate release was decided upon and this was called Longhorn. Longhorn is a bar that sits between Whistler and Blackcomb.
For all you trolls bitching pointlessly about the sidebar (which is optional anyway), this is from the UI guidelines page. which nicely describes what the sidebar is for:
"The sidebar will be most useful to users with large monitors who will have the space available to keep the sidebar open all the time. Users with small monitors will usually keep the sidebar minimized. When the sidebar is minimized, all sidebar tiles will have an icon in the taskbar; clicking an icon lets the user access the related tile."
In other words, it's not a big deal, and it won't take up your space. I think it's silly to react this way about an optional sidebar, when probably at least 80% of you run gkrellm and whatever other sidebar apps exist for the Linux desktop environment. This is just Microsoft's XML-based version of that concept (now comes the "they're stealing ideas again" replies).
Kind of reminds me of when Red Hat dared change their desktop theme, and all the knee-jerk Slashdotters flamed them to hell for absolutely no reason. Then it turned out not to be a big deal after all.
Considering that Microsoft has stated publicly (and personally from the Ballmer and Gates) that Linux and free-software and communist in nature, anti-american, unstable, and should not be used in any way by government or business, I think it's reasonable that supporters of open source are a bit anti-Microsoft.
In a technical sense, Linus is exactly right. Microsoft is technically uninteresting and Linus wouldn't get anywhere (that he wanted to be) by copying them, nor I would guess, anywhere financially either (MS does dominate markets well). The only reason to consider MS, except as a security hole for servers and yet another unstable desktop OS, is that MS seems hell-bent on destroying our right to use free software (and establish open standards, so that software will always be free in a useful way).
Also, Microsoft has on numerous (and documented) occasions, lied, stolen, perjured, faked evidence, conspired illegally to destroy a competitor, slandered and libelled, and threatened unjust lawsuits to silence critics. But other than that, they're fine neighbors...
Why shouldn't we wish for the collapse of MS, it's them or us, by their choice.