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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053
An anonymous reader writes "Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, here is a look at what Microsoft has in store for it's future operating system. 'Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.'"
Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.
You don't think Microsoft can figure out 10 more things to implement in the next 2 years to consume any ram they happen to free up through optimization?
GPL Deconstructed
So the big news is, an alpha version of an operating system from an OS family known to eat lots of memory, actually eats lots of memory?
Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.
No actually, they have the all important Brushed... I mean Slate look in place, so thats development pretty much wrapped up on this version.
Jonathanjk.com
Am I the only person who thinks improvements should come in the simplification of code rather than adding new features? I would much rather have another version of Windows 2000 that runs more efficiently than whatever may come from Longhorn. It's beginning to sound less like an application launching layer and more like a 3-ring circus stuffed into a shoebox.
microsoft works with computer vendors to make it that the new opperating system requires a new computer to be compatible with it. Revitalizes companies like Dell, HP, etc. Everyone walks away richer (well except all of us who will have to throw away our current computers).
Dang, i remember the days when 8 megs of ram was a lot, and 80 meg hard drive would never get filled.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Of course it's a resource hog, they probably have every debugging feature turned on in it. Is there a point to "reviewing" this build?
not caring about proper memory management and usage leads to lazy programming. it's wasteful. why not spend the extra time to have a smoother running program that requires less of a footprint? any improvement you make now will help you in the long run, especially if you're always adding things to older code. start with a polished base and more often than not you'll end up with a polished product. this whole "memory is cheap, who cares" thing reminds me too much of how wasteful people are in general..
"why build 1 when i can build 2 for twice the cost?"
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ME: Not Funny.
Hey, if you're extremely worried about the RAM resources, are too cheap to shell out that extra $40 for 256 MB of memory, or expect to run the whole thing on TI-83 calculator, then maybe next Windows is not for you.
There are plenty of otherwise perfectly good PIII machines out there with 1+ GHz CPUs that are limited to 1/2 GB of RAM. Adding another 256MB DIMM may not be an option.
I think this is backwards. If windows needs 480MB of ram, then consumer machines will have 768 or 1024.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Its a product that won't hit the shelves for 2 years. It was compiled in debug mode - of course its going to be a resource hog.
Don't you love the fact that MSFT always builds an OS for nonexistant hardware? MSFT relies on the hardware manufacturers to put out faster, more capable hardware to support their shotty implementations; it's a crackers heaven.
This is how it works:
1: MSFT Releases new OS
2: MSFT stops supporting old OS
3: End user forced to upgrade
4: PROFIT $$$
but it doesn't stop there.
Since the OS is implemented badly to begin with, you can expect there will be plenty of things to exploit, to gain control over the end-user's machine. With the above cycle in mind, it's more than obvious that MSFT is blindly supplying crackers with faster, more powerful machines that they can use in their network of zombies.
I hear that they plan on shipping a virus scanner with future versions of windows...I sure hope they update virus definitions much faster than they currently patch their security holes.
and 483 MB? That's rediculous. I'm running slackware with everything I need to rule the world, and it uses less than 200MB.
Memory isn't really an issue for me, as I have an ample amount, but my point is this: Microsoft should more concentrate on fixing their current implementation issues. They need to make their OS's usable (and fast) on widely available hardware. They need to do a lot of work with their memory mangement. I shouldn't have to reboot my computer twice a week, or even twice a month. MSFT should not require users to use the latest technology either, because generally it's prohibitively expensive, and always implemented poorly.
Until MSFT fixes the above issues, I think I'll stick to OSS.
Is MS in bed with hardware manufacturers?
MS is in bed with almost everyone, in the sense that almost everybody is taking it up the tailpipe from Bill & Friends. And many don't seem to mind.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It's great to see betas leaked. While we in the free software world of course shouldn't just follow in Microsofts path, we should keep a close eye on them. Hopefully, by the time Longhorn is released we will have most if not all improvements implemented. In this release, I don't see much to copy. Actually, it was more of Microsoft playing catch-up with free software (Firefox).
Of course the UI has changed a bit, but other than new colours there didn't seem to be much enhancements. I guess I'll go back to study the screen shots more carefully. I'd better hurry before the rest of you make Flexbeta grind to a halt completely--it's already slow!
In the past few years they were shipping Windows XP.
Before that they were shipping windows 98 with 128 Megs of Ram.
Before that they were shipping Windows 95 with 64 Megs of Ram.
Before that was Windows 3.1 with 16 megs of Ram.
Then there was dos with 640k of ram. Because that is all you needed.
so right now without any optimization 483 megs are needed for the OS this probably includes a lot of debugging stuff and some features that will be removed in the final version. So after all that is done it will probably be about 256megs of Ram. Just to get it to run and 512 for it run ok and 1 gig for the optimum performance. You should not fear this just accept it. When people buy windows they rairly buy it at compusa, but with a new computer. That way the cost of the OS and the extra memory is absorbed in the cost of the computer.
But I bet Microsoft is getting one step further in giving us what they promised us in Windows 95.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When my sister went to college (she's a sophomore now) , she bought the several-thousand dollar IBM Thinkpad offered and supported by the school. It was a well-outfitted machine (Office, NAV, Pentium 3 Mobile, CD-RW drive, Windows XP Professional, etc.) and a whopping *128*MB of RAM. I would have expected that much from a cheapo $1000 laptop, but not the school-sponsered computer.
When she ran Windows XP, Internet Explorer, Mulberry (mail), Photoshop, Word, and several other programs at the same time, needless to say, it was slower then molasses.
I guess that if nothing else, this will get computer manufacturers to offer more RAM in their computers when they find 128MB, or even 256MB, won't cut it anymore.
I'm typing this from a 400Mhz PII with 128 megs of ram. Linux 2.4, Xfce4, gaim, Epiphany and assorted daemons currently have my memory monitor at around 50 megs. I know this is a debug build and that the final optimized release could use as little as half as much memory, but I can't for the life of me imagine what functionality could possibly justify using even that much. I'm about to build a new pc that will have at least 1gb of ram in it, but I want that space to be used for applications, not some retarded dog that should have died with MS BOB.
Did you invent those numbers? 3.1 ran nicely with 4 MB. 95 was good with 16 MB. 98 was good with 32. XP is tolerable with 128.
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Yeah, I guess you folks have never worked with a debug version of Windows before, or a debug version of anything I guess. Even on Linux you can easily get 4x or more the executable size compiling for debug.
The average household must not have any games. Sure, some people may be happy playing the same games 7 years later (off the top of my head estimate at how old a P200 would be), but not your average gamer. Sure, your average household may not be your average gamer. However, many home pc sales are fueled by games. For example, take a (mother|father|pair of parents) who works very hard trying to give their children a better life than they had. This is part of the American dream, no? Due to working long hours, this perental mass feels guilty over not spending as much time with their children as they want to. However, computer games make this child act happy. The parent can rationalize spending to much time away from the house, as it allows them to buy computer hardware/games, which make them happy. (Ok maybe this includes console gaming as well, but that appears to be getting closer and closer to desktop hardware). Anyway, the point is, that new games, a HUGE market, create a need in a household for new hardware.
Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself.
OS X will use as much RAM as it can - it caches apps and data you use a lot to cut down on time accessing the disk. I have a gig in my machine and OS X is using 892.8 megs, with 12 days of uptime and ten apps currently running. However, I bet that bits of apps I don't have launched right now, like Photoshop and Preview and Acquisition, are cached, because I tend to launch them a lot.
I'm not saying that modern OSes don't use a lot of RAM, cause they do. But the fact that the OS is using almost a gig of RAM on my machine is not a sign of inefficiency.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
When people buy windows they rairly buy it at compusa, but with a new computer. That way the cost of the OS and the extra memory is absorbed in the cost of the computer.
Tell that to large corporations who will have to upgrade everything.
First of all, I am sure it was compiled in degug mode - resource hog.
Secondly, whenever ID Software claims:
-"Our next game, DoomQuad, will require that you travel forward in time and get yourself a system powerful enough to run it. Unless, naturally, you are content at playing the game at -2 FPS".
Now M$ has a product that requires you to have a somewhat beefy system and everyone starts bitching.
Why am I not surprised? This is slashdot after all.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Meanwhile over in Windows Land, Joe sixpack can't even load the program because he has about 10% resources free because there are 30 items running in his tray...hmmm how did I get three copies of WeathreBug running? Not to mention spyware and mailware running in the background.
Yup, with the right hardware, and keeping Joes Sixpack off the internet and your windows box will run well. I just fear for the day when all the spyware gets ported to Linux and I have to clean that crap up for folks......
vi +
Is that meant to spoof the old "more Windows viruses because it's more popular" myth?
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one are they more likely to spend time writing and testing properly: the one that will be used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be used on 5% of desktops? Even the large companies that can write decent drivers often write their Linux drivers in a rush, usually after some big customer asks for it and they're facing the loss of a big sale.
Of course, one could argue that a company that doesn't have the resources to make a decent driver won't even bother with the Linux market. But such no-name companies mostly just use common chipsets anyway, most of which have good drivers.
Sources working at the Redmond campus say that it is common knowledge on campus that Longhorn will not ship until mid 2007
Wow... Windows XP was released in 2001, so that will end up being a 6-7 year interval between OS releases. I'm not sure what that will mean, but that's a really long interval between OS releases.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
hmm no, i've run linux/freebsd 5.1/winn98/xp on the same pc and linux/freebsd were much much more reliable. they were the same if not easier to install. linux/freebsd were actually easier to install becuase they had drivers for my sb live.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Because *nix supports more platforms than OS X does. :P
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
He said it right before Al Gore invented the internet.
I really don't know if there is anyway to contain a widespread, untrue meme. The facts don't seem to matter if a fiction is repeated often enough and loud enough.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I use Windows for work and games and Linux for home and am a web developer by trade. I've been using these boxes for well over 20 years now
And how long have you been using your time machine?
Uh, that's one of those questions you don't want to think about too much. My head is already locking up.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I've seen XP blue screen, and I've also seen it restart for what seemed to be no reason.
It turned out it was caused by a bad third party video codec.
A VIDEO CODEC. A piece of non-system software that turns one stream of bits into another stream of bits somehow has the ability to totally lock up and reboot the operating system.
2k and XP may be stable by themselves, but stability in the face of poorly written code should also be a consideration.
I recently visted Ford's design lab. They were working on the 2007 Mustang. Those guys didn't even have the engine designed! I mean what the hell? The car can't even drive for god sakes!
I know it's a joke, but. . .
Even an idiot like me can set up a webserver/fileserver with MacOS. You've got to give Apple ease of use points for that.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
1. You are correct about the disk performance. Laptop hard drives are ridiculously slow when compared to desktop versions. I am also using a very recent VAIO. My desktop has a 1.8 GHz P4, and the VAIO has a 2.0 GHz P4. At purely computational tasks, the VAIO is slightly faster, as you would expect. But the desktop can do a clean build of the project I'm working on more than twice as fast as the VAIO.
2. With XP, 512 MB is enough memory for most daily work, unless you are running memory-hog programs. However, I happen to know that Photoshop is a major memory hog. All of the others you listed can be, depending on how they are set up and used. Memory hogs are less of a problem on a desktop where there is a snappy hard drive available: when the disk cache is reduced to allow for more programs, you don't feel it much (you've still got the 8MB cache built into the drive, and cache misses are filled more quickly), and when you start using the swapfile, again the disk is faster and has built-in cache. But on a laptop, once you cross the line and you start feeling the memory pressure, you start hurting really fast.
3. I've never noticed XP itself to significantly slow down with increased uptime. I do a lot of programming at work (translated: I stress my work machine a lot, running buggy programs and killing a lot of processes), and sometimes I'll go for a month or so without needing to reboot (and the reboot is usually due to driver reconfiguration, hardware installation, etc., not unresponsiveness). My VAIO also goes a long time between reboots (lots of suspend-resume cycles, but few reboots). However, some programs tend to gradually accumulate resources until they reach a critical mass and drag the computer down. MS Messenger and MS Outlook are the ones that I tend to notice. Logging out and then logging back in usually makes everything all better.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Users don't need more then 640k of mem
"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free."
Computers are deterministic; everything they do has a cause.
Computers are detrministic; Windows is NOT. My experience on win2k and XP echoes a lot of others here: some days I breeze through with no problems; the very next, doing exactly the same tasks, it is reboot hell!
Any system that is complex enough looks chaotic. The fact that things may be deterministic underneath it all is absolutely no consolation when you are working on deadline.
I've noticed the tendency here to blame memory errors a lot for underlying ills in Windows. It is tough to prove (in spite of memory diagnostics - most of the ones I've seen are pretty poor) and seems to have become the catch-all for Windows instability. This in spite of the fact that I have seen the very same hardware moved to Linux and the problems just go away (disclaimer: server situations, I have NOT seen the same thing with a desktop; with the apps we use, a Linux desktop just isn't practical - yet!).
As a final argument against all win2k/XP problems being hardware or driver related: I also use win2k/XP every day. The number of minor, annoying bugs that I see in the UI of Windows every day is apalling. I'm not even gonna try to list them because it would triple the size of this post. If you use Windows every day then you know what I am talking about. Now, if they can't get the simpler things in the UI right, what makes you think they've been so perfect in the underlying OS?
Windows QA has gone up a notch or two in the last few years BUT they are not at the point where I would use the OS in a mission critical application yet!
Now, by the time Longhorn rolls out in 2007 or so, it's likely that 2 GB of RAM, if not 4, will be standard on most new systems.
I would hope so, but the fact that I still see systems sold with 128MB (with shared video no less), makes me doubt that 2-4GB of RAM will be 'standard' on the average mom-and-pop machine in 2007.
A one time penalty would be checking bounds at compile time, or actually writing it correctly the first time. Neither ".Net" nor Java are "one time penalties".
The future of small custom programs is runtime. For apps that require realtime characteristics (like games, media players, device drivers, operating systems) the overhead of a runtime language like
Runtime languages will take over for small custom apps because they allow the development to proceed more rapidly, but for everything else there's no replacement for languages that interface directly with the machine.
Yes. You can turn it off, customize it, etc. Unless you never touch it again after the first boot, but that's your choice. Did you base your entire sermon below on this screenshot of software that's 3 years away from being released?
KDE now has all sorts of integration, and gnome is heading the same way.
Like... cut 'n paste?
I do not have a single complaint or problem with linux except for less than perfect hardware support, which requires you to pay a little extra for better quality hardware.
You know, the other day I set up RH 9 on a new box with an Abit mobo. I had to compile the fucking ALSA driver in order to get sound. Would that count as a complaint? Not that I complain, mind you. Unless you compare that to, say, Windows.
In linux, I can do graphics, video animation, I can program, I can use the wonderful openoffice, I can record sound and edit sound in highest quality (with some commercial programs), and these are the very reasons why Crysler, Disney, IBM and other leading companies use linux. Not to mention the reliability, control, and power both as a server and a desktop machine.
OK now, "the wonderful open office"?? Lesse - on my laptop (again with RH9) it takes about 15 seconds to load Writer. This is a machine where MS Word takes about 1/2 second to load (and yes, I disable the MSO cache). And everything else... well, I can do all that, too. I mean, did they port Photoshop or Quark to Linux yet? Guess not. Depends what it is you want to do.
I for one am now getting an OQO
Give me a break that's been vapourware for what now, 4 years? Hell, even PalmOS is better on devices. Why do you people want to run Linux in everything that has a power plug?
I do not see longhorn ever rising personally and microsoft knows it and tries postpone the release as long as it can, as it will be seen as an instant failure. So instead, microsoft invests in companies like sco to try to slow down linux.
Looks like you've got it all figured out. That proves that ESR's FUD is working, I guess.
And I for one plan to use 1ghz PCs for a long time to come, I just do not see a reason to update as each new versions of KDE and the linux kernel focus on making it run better on both older and newer hardware, and with every release, I enjoy using linux on my 400mhz laptop more and more.
That's nice. So what you're saying is that KDE 3.x runs just fine on your 400MHz laptop with all the eye candy turned on, right? Because it's KDE, so it must be magically faster than Windows? I run Windows 2000 on 450MHz machines just fine, and I'm not upgrading until I upgrade the boxes. Microsoft has EOL'ed W2K but will still continue to provide fixes for it so I'm jiggy. If I had made an investment on RH desktops on the other hand I'd be screwed!
And as someone in one of the comments said, while you spend time rewriting a program to be cleaner, someone will come up with a better, more full featured product, and that someone is linux
Yeah. You know, OO.org is better than Microsoft Office... 97. Really now, have you ever used commercial software? Or is this your first foray into "free" computing?
Can someone please tell me how there is a potential advantage to use windows?
Nope, not to you at least. You just spent half an hour typing up the worst piece of fanboi drivel I've read here in a while so don't sweat it. Nobody wants you to switch to Windows or OS X or anything else. Stick to what you know.
because I am completely lost how such a pointless, expensive, slow, unstandarized, closed standard product can be even discussed seriously as an alternative to linux.
I think the
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
By looking at the screenshots, I can say that the Longhorn GUI sucks. First of all, the sidebar is useless and takes too much screen space. Secondly, they have flatten the GUI too much, and suddently the user can't tell a label from a menu item. In previous versions of the GUI, the 3d elements made clear which parts of the window are editable and which aren't. Without 3d, it is much more difficult to quickly judge the borders of each area.
The only good thing about Longhorn is WinFS. Something that the Linux community should embrace. I have said it previously, and I will say it again, that we need to manage information, not binary data. The operating system must be aware of the types of data stored on the disk. It is a task not to be left on the application layer.