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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"
"The official Microsoft Longhorn Developers website went live."
Must not be running Longhorn.
I've already upgraded my Debian box to Longhorn using a simple apt-get dist upgrade command. I don't know why Microsoft has secrecy warnings all over the place...you should be able to get it from any Debian mirror. Has anyone else upgraded their Debian install this way? I can't seem to find GNOME any more.
The fix was simple. They simply swapped:
$error.backcolour=#0000ff;
for
$error.backcolour=#000000;
Now, no Blue screen of death!
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
I realize the product isn't finished... and won't be for a long while (hint to /. editors)... but check out this comedy from the developer site.
It's a so-called 'guided tour of Longhorn', which consists of no actual imagery, but rather a gigantic step-list of things for you to click on in your Longhorn alpha, to make you go 'ooooh'.
Just brutal. I mean, if its really a 'bet-the-company' strategy, you'd think they'd splash out just a little cash for a Flash or non-ass-looking PPT prez... or even screenshots.... something other than this. Just looks really amateur.
Um... which of these options do you prefer:
1. Microsoft makes fake demos of things that don't exist yet.
2. Microsoft has the guts not to show what they don't have.
This is a developer site, not a marketing splash. Developers want information, not pretty presentions.
The fact that they are willing to give out information on a product which is years from being finished shows both courage and strategic integrity, if you ask me.
.: Max Romantschuk
But 3 years to polish off what is now in beta?
Who does MS think they are...Debian?!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Over on C|Net, there's an article about Longhorn. Bill Gates has called this their biggest effort since Win95. Now if we assume that he's telling the truth (hey, why not?), it brings up some interesting parallels.
Windows95 originally was just going to be Windows 4.0--an updated version of Win3.1 Turning it into more than a GUI for DOS, adding multitasking, recreating the GUI, and so forth, was a HUGE undertaking which lead to endless delays. (Win4.0 was supposed to be out in '93; Win95 barely made it into it's named year.) But what threat caused the massive effort? OS/2. OS/2 2.1, the PPC chip, and the Pentium FP math bug got MS good and scared, and they came up with a (relative) miracle.
Now they're saying that they're putting that effort in again. What, pray tell, is the threat to MS this time, hmmmm?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It seems the signal to noise ratio of this discussion is terrible. People are bashing the site like there's no tomorrow, without taking into account what it's for.
This is a developer resource. Take this UI guide on the Sidebar. Excellent writing, and finally something which approaches what has made Apple keep the UI edge for all these years.
If an article was posted about the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines I suspect the crowd would be singing to quite a different tune.
Where is even the slightest bit of objectivity these days?
.: Max Romantschuk
You know, that's exactly how I feel.
I still run 2k on my home system (mostly out of lazyness really, theres nothing windows-specific that I really rely on, save a couple games on occasion). I still run 2k on all the workstations at work (except mine, which is RH). My PDC is NT4 on a 500mhz box, as it has been for 3 years, and once I get time it will become Samba3 (it also runs Apache and BIND).
I do have a 2k server, which is running our accounting system (unfortunately, the low-cost (under $1k) linux-based stuff didn't meet our needs, linux mid-market ($5-20k) doesn't exist, and the rest is $90k+). We ended up going with a mid-market windows-only solution, but that system is ready to be a terminal server.
I have all the pieces in place, and my ultimate plan here is to switch all our desktops over, once I find something that isn't going to reduce the 'feature set' of our desktops. An upgrade isn't really viable if I have to tell everyone "oh sorry, you can't select printing options when you print anymore, they can only be set in the driver options - which you can't access".
I'm just totally giving up on windows. It's just not worth the hassle anymore. I can't do any sort of automatic app installation, which is one of the things that bothers me a lot. Our office is small - 8 workstations - but it's big enough that it takes a lot of time to go around doing windowsupdate, installing version x.y+1 of whatever, etc. I never found a nice solution that didn't cost a lot of money. (And yes, I know 2k can do it. I've used it at another company, and we had to turn it off because it made things more difficult). This is the sort of thing that I can use rsync and a couple shell scripts for, and have a working solution in half an hour. Flexibility is key: My job is not to be a sysadmin (we're not even a computer-related business), so the less time I spend sysadmin-ing, the better.
Anyway, that kind of turned into a rant, and i'm not looking to fight with any of you MSCE's that are going to try and counter everything I've just said - I've heard it a million times. I'm just trying to point out that if you're going to wait, wait for something worth waiting for. I personally don't see longhorn adding anything that justifies the expense.
Speak before you think
Microsoft knows that the delay to 2006 is unfavorable for them. First its a problem for all of the companies that bought into the subscription licensing, who are now seeing their money wasted essentially, paying MS for nothing for three more years. Second, it gives their competition nearly three years to advance before MS has an answer to any of it. Mac OS and to a lesser extent the Linux desktop will be quite different in 2006.
Knowing that, Microsoft is deliberately drumming up the hype now with an outrageously early beta, leaked screenshots, and surreptitious press releases and leaks about their upcoming features. Why? To get the current installed base excited about the next release, and to quiet any concerns they have that might make them switch in the interim. If they saw no compelling reason to stick around until 2006 they may migrate to other platforms. The leaks and beta try to give them that reason.
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)
Well when you rewrite your entire suite of apps & the shell in managed code, write a completely new window manager that uses the DirectX pipeline as its compositing engine, uses vector graphics to scale to various resolutions and DPI, and so on it can take some time.
There is other new tech going in as well.
This really is a big step, and Microsoft is making it public right now so developers can get on board early in the game and make suggestions or comments on it. Microsoft wants to make developers happy, so they are showing them the way windows development will work in the future to see how the developers react - what parts they like and don't like. It also means we won't have to wait a year after launch for Longhorn apps to appear.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
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.