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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.'"
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?
Chances are the alpha is built in debug mode. Those seem to be rather bulkier, both on disk and in memory.
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
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
Why is this flamebait?
Why is it obvious that an OS in two years won't consume 400mb of ram?
What will the base system Microsoft target contain, in terms of memory?
Right now 512mb of ram is $100.
In a year then it might be $50 or $60. Or it might mean a base system will contain 1gb of ram, and everyone will have 64bit CPUs capable of addressing 16gb, or 32gb of ram. We already have desktops today that can address 8gb, and we're only waiting on ram sticks to increase in density.
GPL Deconstructed
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?
People get a grip... Microsofts customer is *NOT* you and me. It is Dell, Gateway, HP and the like.
They goal is help their customers sell more product. That means give to their customer's customers pretty bright beads and *CAN NOT* work on existing (well slowly at least). This leads to the people buying BIG compters from MS Customers allowing for MS to sell the product twice!!
Can you say "More profit!"
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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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.
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.
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
Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources
What is the point of showing these numbers then?
In other news:
Apple is working on a ultra-mini iPod. The pre-beta-alpha version we got our hands on weighted 20 pounds and was bigger than my G5. Of course, the final version will be smaller and lighter. One could still wonder where Apple is heading at with such a bulky product.
Foreword: If you have nothing relevant to say, don't say anything!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
If you look at past versions of windows, 500MB for Longhorn isn't really that crazy either. From experience, I'd say you needed about 32MB to be comfortable in Win98, 64MB in WinME, 96-128MB in Win2k, and 192MB in WinXP. 500MB in 2006 just seems like a natural progression. (And by comfortable, I mean being able to run the OS and other things to make it usable like a browser, e-mail app, and whatever else is needed. In reality, much less is needed to get the OS to actually run, it will just run like ass.)
Of course, after having to manage several GNOME/Mozilla users on a VNC server at work (university departments are poor), I've gotten into the habit of making sure there is at least 256MB per user to prevent running out of swap and taking the machine down completely. So Linux isn't really doing that well in terms of memory usage either.
Memory usage in current environments is all pretty insane to me anyways though. A harddrive is literally a million times slower than ram for latency. You'd figure operating system and desktop development people would want to use as little swapping as possible as doing so would dramatically improve the responsiveness of the system and, consequentially, the user experience.
I think I'll just stick with fluxbox.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.