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Microsoft Clips Longhorn
Gr8Apes writes "Microsoft is clipping Longhorn to get the already-delayed follow-up to Windows XP out the door by 2006. MS has decided to remove some of the most ambitious features. Blackcomb is the version to follow Longhorn, and is expected at the end of the decade. The full new file system feature has been moved to Blackcomb. Other notable parts of the story, in MS's efforts to get its DRM into play, a new version, Windows XP Premium will start shipping with new PCs, which will include a new version of the infamous Windows Media Player. This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'."
Actually, they take the names from ski areas in British Columbia. I think Longhorn is a bar on Whistler mountain.
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This is not Interesting. This is a troll but I'll bite.
No platform, especially one deployed at such great lengths, will be 100% secure... There are just too many things that could possibly cause problems.
Would it be economically viable for MS to develop this? I doubt it.
Why not just make all versions of Windows "Secure" then?
1. Does Windows XP currently allow every application full write access to the Registry, or at least access to registry components for other applications?
2. If so, does this strike anyone else as a really bad idea from the view of modularity, scalability, and security?
2. Will Longhorn keep the Windows Registry?
I think it's less "out-flank Apple" and more "out and out copy Apple". But by the time we start seeing the Microsoft Music Store, OS X 10.4 will probably be shipping, and we should also see higher clocked G5's, and maybe even G5's in the iMac line. There are some very compelling reasons to consider switching, not least of which is that when you use a Mac, you get to enjoy Microsoft's upcoming "innovations" months before Microsoft's customers do.
Yeah, I know, it's blatant Apple partisanship, but who really wants to be stuck waiting until 2006 for Longhorn to catch up to Panther, when it's likely that Apple will have released Tiger, plus Lion, Ocelot, and Tabbycat by the time the damn thing actually ships?
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Have the previous cases not established precedent that pre-installing non-essential features into the operating system constitutes anti-competitive behavior?
Rather than putting our hope in the courts, I think it's best if everybody contributes as much as possible to the development of desktop linux. We have a two-year window. If linux can achieve mainstream acceptance by the time this goes gold, then we'll be able to avoid widespread adoption of Longhorn, Blackcomb, and everything after.
so anybody got a good project that needs testers? Or documentation-authors?
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
This seems like a not so sneaky move by Microsoft to shut out interoperability between linux and windows platforms. I am VERY glad therefore, that this is still 5 years off at the earliest.
Maybe we can start calling Blackcomb the Death Star.
OK I'm being a little extreme here, but if my company upgrades to Windows Blackcomb and I can't interoperate over a PPTP connection, I'll have to dump linux for my work... Which would really suck, now that I've got everything working so I CAN use linux for my job.
I really want to see where this is going. I don't know anything about the WinFS network formats, and if they will include the ability of backwards compatibility with other OS types on the network.
I'm wondering how many execs are actually paying attention to the fact that these plans are essentially useless. I have spoken with at least a dozen, who blindly renewed their contracts without ever checking to see if there was a return on their investment. Funny (not in a ha-ha way) how as an IT Manager, one gets the 3rd degree when asking for the funds to upgrade a data backup system because the CTO fails to see the business case, yet they blow their budgets on "software assurance" programs that provide no value whatsoever.
Why didn't I become a plumber?
if Win98 is already considered obsolete, and win ME will be gone in another year at best. Meaning that "all" MS oses is really only Win2K & XP right now!
This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'.
This is seriously screwed up. If this isn't a blatant anti-trust violation, I don't know what is. Didn't the EU just assess a 1/2 billion dollar fine over this very behavior?
I can't understand how this doesn't enrage anyone who believes in capitalism. What's to stop Microsoft from integrating an Amazon.com, paypal and Ebay feature into their software and MSN stuff as well? How many markets will they be able to dominate through their desktop OS monopoly?
Can any investor look at the tech world and invest in something that isn't in danger of being killed off by a Microsoft action? It seems that entering into any online service or consumer software is a matter of picking up dimes before steamrollers.
Without proper anti-trust enforcement, innovation and investment opportunities will dwindle. Maybe some of our politicians should get their heads out of the sand. The market doesn't solve all problems, that's why we have anti-trust laws in place.
Seriously though, isn't anyone else just amazed by Microsoft's gall?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
It's hardly a troll.
Windows' security is the number one issue facing the company, and this is by their own declaration.
More functionality makes more complexity, which creates more security vulnerabilities.
Microsoft's users are currently seriously exposed to trojans, worms, and viruses. The advice of "protect your systems" is useless, even malicious, when 95% of PC users are technically naive, and when this is the very reason that Windows has spread to every corner of the PC market.
Microsoft's core market consists of people who cannot install patches, who don't know the different between spams and real emails, and who have a finite capacity for being hit by malware before they will abandon the Internet or find alternative platforms.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Just throw OpenBSD onto a box, with all incoming ports (even ssh) firewalled off, and just a web browser and email client, maybe IM as well. Make it so that those apps are the only ones that may be run by the user, don't give him a home directory, don't give him any drives except a read-only flash device, close off all outgoing ports except those needed for web and email, close off all UDP, don't allow user programs (not even Java applets), don't allow for reception of attachements beyond textual ones, weld the box shut.
While it's technically possible to break the box open and mess with it, it should be immune to viruses and trojans. Spam is another matter of course, but disallowing the posting of an email address on a form might help.
If you still want to buy it, I can get you some.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
So...no grandiose new filesystem, no newer purty interface...
other than incremental improvements to their media player software, what's improved about this new OS?
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I for one welcome the news that WinFS will be more than two years away. In the meantime, Linux/*BSD/etc. will have a chance to better refine those NTFS drivers, which combined with such long delays and feature-cuts in Longhorn, may be at least one nail in MS domination's coffin.
Or here's to hoping.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
I tried to get a startup off the ground last year, and failed partly because our product had features that were going to be in Longhornn. "Longhorn will be out in 2005, how will you compete"? Sigh...
I attempted to get a group of admins to use them to make two bickering departments happy about file locations and they basically laughed at me (^)...using shortcuts instead as "good enough".
This, btw, did not settle the arguments since neither liked shortcuts and still "couldn't find anything".
(^. I would feel insulted or take them seriously, though the same admins thought it was OK to use the default database admin account name and the default -- *blank* -- password on the primary image database server. It only processed 50,000 checks up to and beyond $100,000 USD, so maybe they were right to not bother with a password -- such trivial amounts after all. :-/ )
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Oh, I see, that's a 3rd party tool, and the FS only supports symlinks for dirs (and it most probably does not go through SMB) :)
Well, there's room for improvement
Real life is overrated.
MS destroy companies by getting everybody to play in their backyard and then changing the rules. Other companies help by moving their preimer software to MS (sometimes even only supporting MS). Real is a good example of this. They made available their jukebox only on MS. Likewise, they then made their free download to difficult to find. Corel did that, as has AOL.
To stop that, Apple and others need to expand who they support, not limit it. A good example is that Apple currently limits download to Apple and Windows. Yet, they have been cracked so you can unencrypted. Others simply go to MS only.
When MSN starts the downloads as part of its' service and only connected to XP II, they will make it hard for others to exists.
If apple and other download companies were smart, they would make sure that they offered download to Linux (and possibly other Unixes) as well. In doing so, They make themselves invaluble to some percentage, possibly even forcing MSs plans to change.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously. Back in the days of NT 3, they were talking about the searchable database/filesystem as planned for "Cairo". Cairo eventually became NT 4, which certainly didn't add anything as spiffy as a database-filesystem.
Since then, they've talked about this feature for every single release of the NT family.
It's a mirage, receding into the distance faster than you approach it.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
OK, to be more precise, there is no front from Apple. They've had little things that were going to break big for every year for at least the past 6 or 7. Every year, there's OOOOOH XSERVE and OOOOOOOOH ACG and developer support! It's as predictable as "Linux is going to take over this year, really, this is the year, every prediction for the past 7 or 8 turned out wrong but THIS year is really it!"
G5 sales are still disappointing, and look to be so again this quarter. You tried to avoid the main point of any threat specifically from Apple, other than the empty promise that these things that aren't selling, have been out in the market place for a while now, are suddenly going to turn around and start selling like hotcakes.
Apple is going nowhere. They have a few more "gee whiz" products that everyone will stare at through the window and ooh and aaaah and then walk off without a purchase.
Where are the tons of orders for XServes?
Where is any evidence that their sliding sales and tiny market share is going anywhere but down? How are they compensating for the disappointing G5 sales?
Funny, but as I recall the main information on the business systems was data, not music and videos.
I think that really depends on what business you are in.
I'll launch Windows Media Player 5-10 times a day for work.
I might launch Excel, or even the calculator, once every 6 months or so.
Some people work in industries where music and videos ARE the business, and they ARE the data. And those businesses need DRM in order to make their business viable in the digital age.
Now if people actually paid for what they use, it would be a different story. But some people are under the impression that since they borrowed a CD from a friend, and copied that CD to their computer, it is now THEIR data. Without any regard to the effort and talent that went into creating the music. So the choice is- make it harder for these people to copy the data, or hope that they have a change of heart, and start to pay up.
I don't see a long line of people waiting to pay up...
No reason to lie.
Very off topic, but yes, product activation is required to install XP and can get screwed up by changing your hardware. The only reason I ended up on it at work is we have a corporate license that removes all activation-nonsense. If you have that option available, then I recommend XP Pro - it's fast, the anti-aliasing is nice, and built-in WiFi and FireWire support. If you have to deal with activation, then I'd stick to Win2K Pro.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
What does it take to get software written?
Software engineers.
What does it take to get software engineers?
Cash money.
What does Microsoft have more of in its bank account than any other company on Earth?
Cash money.
What does America have millions of now that India has learned to code?
Unemployed software engineers.
What did Microsoft get when Bush became President?
A big "job-creation" tax cut.
What are Microsoft not doing even though they have a desperate need and a mandate from the nation?
Creating jobs.
Is anyone else wondering just what that tax cut was really for? Is anyone else wondering just what Microsoft is really for? Is anyone ever going to vote for these guys or give Microsoft any monopolistic slack again?
"Microsoft is STILL! trying to push users off Windows 95, 98, and NT"
This is a really good point for those worried about compatibility. As far as I understand it, Longhorn(or whatever the real name will be) will require higher hardware specs than Win 9.x or even XP. A lot of people will keep upgrading their hardware like normal, but I think there are a bunch of useful machines out there that won't get tossed out. I'm not sure a 3D interface and a new file system will compel most businesses to invest in all new hardware. There are many people who just need basic word processing and email for work. I think WinXP and the 9.x's will be around for quite a bit. Longhorn probably won't be the "killer app" that gets people to upgrade like Windows 95 was.
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If they're not going to be releasing the next version of Windows until 2006 they're giving Linux a VERY BIG chance of overtaking them on the desktop. Just look how far Linux has come on in the last couple of years especially in respect to the desktop GUI and GUI configuration tools. I think MS has driven a very big nail into their coffin by giving Linux another two years to play catchup.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
> Now if people actually paid for what they use, it would be a different story
Yeah, its a shame that last year was such a banner year for the music industry. CDs sell plenty. I have difficulty seeing how the industry is being hurt when they're making more money than ever. If there was actually a drop in sales in the last few years that didn't correlate exactly with the general economic downturn there might be something to those lies.
The problem is that while trying to eliminate a "piracy" problem that doesn't really exist ("Yarrrrr!"), they're making it more difficult to legally use the music one purchases.
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The difference is that MS is a monopoly and has been convicted of being a monopoly in the couts system. But the bigger difference is that ms sell an OS and Office suite. Apple sells an entire package. It's not Illegal for GM to make you buy a GM engine with your GM car. It would be, however, if we bought cars in pieces to assemble, there was only one engine company, and they made you but their body even theough there are other body companies.
Yeah, because it's totally obvious that somebody should be paid over and over and over for something that they only did the work to create once. People should be paid for providing goods or services, not because they think they "deserve it".
Personally, WinFS scares the crap out of me. It looks far to complicated than it needs to be for casual users. The schema itself looks like a nightmare. Having the ability to transport properties from documents into the fs is cool, but most people don't use them now. Maybe once the tool sets are defined I'll feel better about it.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
There are plenty of new features in SP2. I guess when Microsoft adds features to say Wireless networking, they are not new "because they should have been there before". It's a very nice interface. As is the IE pop-up blocker. As are the new handwriting recognizers for Tablet PC based systems. As is the new in-place TIP. Read all about it http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dntablet/html/hwrecog.asp?_r=1. Disclaimer: I work for the Tablet group.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Thanks for the kind words.
Yes, MS is aware that the actions of 3rd party apps reflect upon them. The Designed for Windows XP logo is the carrot/stick that they use to get developers to stick to these (and other) standards.
Although I haven't read these docs in a while, I don't see Microsoft changing the Registry scheme. It has proven to be a pretty robust methodology provided it is used intelligently by the applications that leverage it.
The requirements you describe are met by providing applications their own registry space under the HKLM\Software\companyname> namespace. All other areas are generally used by the OS and more-or-less off-limits (depending on the application's need to query or modify OS functionality). If an application had data that didn't really belong in the registry (user-associated file data, for example) it should probably go into the user's profile under "C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\companyname>\Program" directory. If you run Windows you almost certainly already have some of these already.
This security stuff is still just Marketing and PR speak. It's simply a way to try to force the masses to shell out lots of cash to buy their latest bloatware, and to make suits feel like Microsoft is working to improve security.
They wanted the next version of Office to only work on Longhorn. Hmm, that sounds like just one more tactic to force people to shell out cash to buy their latest OS. They've kept incompatibility as a club for their sales staff to beat users with, and have now added security hype as another big stick.
OS X - 1 trojan every 3 years is a track record I can live with.
> Longhorn probably won't be the "killer app" that gets people to upgrade
> like Windows 95 was.
Windows 95 wasn't either. Most folks didn't get it until they bought a
computer that came with it. A lot of people were still using Windows 3.1
(yes, really) as late as 1998 or 1999. (Admittedly, Windows 95 wasn't
readily available until early 1996, so that's only 2-3 years. Still, Win3.1
really sucked, and almost nobody cared.) DOS continued to be used even
*longer*, because of legacy DOS-based apps that wouldn't run properly in
Windows. These have been *very gradually* dying off, and at this point
*most* of them are dead, but DR-DOS is still selling a few copies, though
admittedly most of those copies might be running on VMWare or VirtualPC.
But as late as 1998, DOS was still almost as widespread as MacOS. Win95
was at that level in 2002 or so, and Windows 98 still will be in 2005.
If Longhorn comes out in January 2006 (which seems early to me), WinXP
will still be common as late as 2010 or 2011.
This sort of thing is not unique to Microsoft. I administer four Linux
systems (two at home, two at work); one of them is still running a 2.2
series kernel (hey, it works). At work, we have five Macs. One of them
is 8.1, two are 9.0, one is 9.1, and the newest one is 10.1.5 I think.
(We don't _just_ have Macs; it's a heterogenous network; we even have
one VMS system. We've not upgraded the VMS system since we bought it in
Fall of 2000, but I think 7.2 is still the current version.)
Heck, there are (a few) people out there still using Perl version 4.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
My error, I typed too fast - what I have is Longhorn milestone 6 build 4053, so it's technically an Alpha release, not a beta. (Incidentally, 4053 is the build from the original NT code tree, not from the start of Longhorn development.)
The reason I have it is - as someone else rightly pointed out - because I have an MSDN subscription (I have had for C~5 years now). I signed up a while back to do pre-release testing of various MS stuff: Everett, XP SP2, Whidbey, Yukon (MS SQL 2005) and Longhorn. I must admit it's kind of a buzz to try out stuff before it's available and I'm lucky enough to have the hardware and the impetus (I freelance and advise clients of upcoming software/hardware trends) to actually do it. As far as I know, it's not publicly available for download.
Just for the record, what I've seen so far has impressed me a great deal. There are some very neat things in there - probably too much to mention here, but you can check it out at Paul Thurrott's Site if you're interested.
Oh, it gets better.
First, a folder and a junction pointing to it are *indistinguishable*. Looking in explorer, you can't tell which is the original folder and which is the junction.
Second, it's possible to create a junction pointing to a parent folder - thus creating an infinite-depth tree. (This is why you can't hard link directories in *nix!)
Third, if you delete a junction, you also delete all of the contents of the folder the junction pointed to. The original folder remains, but it is left empty.
All these considered, I really wonder what the hell MS was thinking.