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Projected 'Average' Longhorn System Is A Whopper
greg_barton writes "At first I thought this was a joke, but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it: 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
640K was enough for anyone. Reckon not....
We got to the moon on less computing power than a Commodore 64 and Longhorn needs 2 Gigs o RAM. Amazing.
When longhorn comes out in 2008.
The first full-fledged beta isn't due out until sometime in 2005
I don't see anything wrong with these specs. Next year well be in the 4 GHz range and my system today has 2 @ $150 gig memory which isn't a bunch either, Gigabit Ethernet is on ~2/3ds of the mommaboards today, Moore's law will take care of tripling the video processor over the next few years, AMD is kicking butt with their 64 bit chip so Intel will get it's 64bit ready for the masses, if you're not running 802.11g then great you can upgrade to wireless SuperG @108Mbps. When long horn comes out in ~2006 than I imagine this will be the average system. MS is making quite good estimates on the intended consumer. But then you read that a dual processor machine is on the horizon makes me wonder if LongHorn isn't targeted for desktops.
By the time Longhorn comes out I would imagine that it is a pretty normal requirment. 2 years from now is a long time in the PC world. Keep in mind that the average home users is close to (if not above) 3.0 HT procs today....
It takes a lot of resouces to keep people shackled.
that the average Longhorn user just kill themself right now.
..that'd better be one hell of a game of Solitaire.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
computers in the future will be better than the ones we have now.
on a side note, i can't wait to get one of those.
zing
When you're a subscriber, you get the story early, and you also get the line:
Well, Duh!
Let's see now: 1TB of storage is the thing that stands out. I've been running a dual CPU machine with 4GB of RAM for a while now, but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?
I've just commissioned a dual opteron 248 (2.2 GHz) , 8 GB of RAM, 1TB of disk with a 3ware 9500 raid controller (I'll post benchmarks soon if anyone's interested - I can't find any on the net but it promises 400MB/sec sequential raid-5 reads. We'll see...) This is far and away the most powerful machine I've ever ordered, and it doesn't meet the Longhorn 'average'... Something smells...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
What could possibly require that kind of hardware for an 'average' desktop user? Is it the new filesystem? Do you need 3d glasses?
-- RLJ
Bloatware... C'mon with embedded systems doing more and more with less and less. Johnathan Livingston Seagull...
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
And mozilla needs 4 gigs and a hyperthreading P4 to start in under 4 seconds.
Longhorn isn't supposed to debut until 2006, by which time those specs probably will represent a mid range machine. Just because they are not available yet (processor) doesn't mean that they can't desing with more resources in mind.
That said, it looks like my PIII-800 that struggles with XP will not have a hope of dealing with Longhorn. So much for backward compatibility. *sigh*
They will send me one of those machines if I offer to test Longhorn for them? - Please... I promise to keep Longhorn on the machine for at least a week.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Now IE will run as fast as its linux-based counterparts!
*ducks*
Its works on even todays legacy hardware!
Quack, quack.
but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it
According to the article it's not a confirmation at all. Microsoft has released no official statments about hardware requirements, these values are just estimates from developers, who may or may not have a clue.
Of course if it is accurate, then wow.
With french fries and a large coke please!
Montreal - Best city to live in!
Microsoft will not survive if it keeps making larger and larger demands of the hardware market. People, Businesses, Universities, and others will not be able to afford to upgrade their systems to use Longhorn. Not to mention they will lose their largest market, PC manufactures who make up the majority of their business.
A: Install Longhorn
What the heck do think this is, FC.com?
"Yes, we're not releasing Longhorn until 2006, but development is not behind schedule! We can't release it because the hardware industry is behind schedule inventing hardware to run it!"
Wow, with that kind of processing power you can play a heck of a lot of games of Global Thermonuclear War!
~~Guildencrantz
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
up to a terabyte of storage
:P
I wouldn't worry about THAT, you'll probably need about 100TB more HD space for games and pr0n
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But I doubt they mean the average with all the upgrading machines too. It seems more like they mean the average computer SHIPPING with Longhorn. Which by then I don't see as being unreasonable at all.
...or he'll be spinning in his grave.
...that will come free with my $699 purchase of longhorn right?
That's why the smarter people use Firefox.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
those specs are not surprising. If you look at today's "Average" PC and factor in 6 years of technological progress that seems to be what most people will think of as upper middle range in 2010.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Uhhh... So?
Did they also mention the motherboard chipset cryptographic engince, the always-on internet connection for "authentication" or even what kind of sound cards these new systems will have? Or are they still going to offer "analog holes" on top of all that (ahem) "security?"
(J)anus and Lower Horn will be very close together. I will continue to reap the bounty of cheap discarded and powerful hardware for my linux installs.
C|N>K
Wow. Seems like a tough system to test and debug at present. I suppose they do a lot of unit testing and wait for the hardware to catch up before systems integration.
Microsoft is leaving MacDonald's users out in the cold by only supporting Burger King's architecture.
I'd like to see Longhorn on Big Mac as well as Whopper.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
maybe when longhorn is released, microsoft will release a computer with astounding hardware and loads of DRM to run it then everyone will need to buy it to use longhorn mIRC did something similar in idea a few releases back mIRC 6.11 was the first version to require a serial code to run after 30 days not alot of people updated to it, then not long after the release an exploit was discovered mIRC 6.12 was released to fix the hole in all versions prior to it, and people were forced to upgrade to be secure
"...and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
Usually, Macs are touted as the premier computer to use for graphics processing, so of course it would be in Microsoft's best interests to try and change that perception.
To be honest, I really don't care, as a future graphic designer/3d animator, I'll use whatever gives me the shortest render times, since I don't have a network to help out.
I'd best put the purchase order on my boss's desk now. Perhaps it will shock him into getting that 80Gb hard drive and 512Mb of RAM we've been needing for the past year...
Oh hang on. He wants me to break it down for him - whats the projected software and license cost?
As was mentioned by someone else, the quote you are referring to is total BS. Find someone who cites it to him and see if they give a when and where. And while you're wasting time doing that, check this out: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00. html
The thing that was omitted from the article was that Bill Gates was quoted "All we'll ever need is 640GB of RAM"
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Don't you remember the days when microsoft was hyping the first version of windows, but they never actually produced the first real implementation until after apple has release their version of the GUI OS.
I think this is what microsoft is doing. Promising the world, without an actual line of code, then producing it years later after someone else has already made the product.
This really can't be a serious article.
Why would any machine need (require) both wired and wireless networking interfaces? Why not shoot for broad-multiband, as well?
Today, one of my co-workers rolled out a 1TB RAID-5 that's going to hold the entire output of a worldwide food company's 30-person packaging design department, which deals with monstrous graphic files.
And you're telling me that that's what's recommended for the computer used by a single Longhorn user?
Did Bill Gates Really Say That?
Someone just did this joke a couple of articles ago. False memes that never die just make people look ignorant.
Anyway, at the current level (I'm talking 1.5GHz to 2.5GHz Intel processors or perf-equivalent AMDs), performance is not an issue anymore for most home & office uses (with the exception of some highend games and realtime mpeg4 video encoding).
At least the chipmakers are happy with M$. As the software gets slower and slower, you need better procs to compensate.
The Raven
That being said, I don't really see why the system needs so much in the way of specs. If this is supposed to come out in 2 years, there's going to have to be HUGE leaps in technology and huge drops in price for this to be anywhere near affordable for the average consumer.
Some people whined when Apple did away with the then-standard floppy disk drive. Occasionally companies need to push forward (even if it is in x years time!).
And this is the suggested system that would have the OS running at its best.
Maybe they just want to give hardware companies something to aim for, and hardware resellers something to look forward to as masses of users upgrade their computers.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I thought my p4 3.2/2 GB RAM/400 GB was ridiculous.
Hey, wait... I hope I'm joking.
If these specs are correct, Microsoft is making a major tactical mistake. The computer market is driven by early adopters, but the bread-and-butter is still in the business market. The average business still has P3s running around, or even older. Even with the average upgrade cycle, but 2006 what's cutting edge now will be the average. Even with Moore's law Longhorn will require far more resources than the average business machine.
If Microsoft ships with those specs as a baseline, 2/3rds of their business customers will say now. If Microsoft demands they switch or lose support, they'll end up switching to Linux (which by then will have made significant inroads as a business desktop OS).
I can't imagine this story being true. As much as I dislike Microsoft, they're not that foolish to release an OS that most businesses can't afford to buy. Even XP can run (albeit slowly) on a two or three year old machine. If Longhorn can't run on today's machines it needs to be streamlined until it does.
The requirements always sound ridiculous when they announce them. By the time the O/S is available, it's usually just about affordable for desk-top, and possibly making an announcement now has an effect of pushing the price of hardware down, as manufacturers know how much people are prepared to pay for hardware.
:)
The price in $ for a nice fast PC has fallen quite slowly, but you definitely get more for your money now....
I like running desk-top linux on hardware that never needs to use it's swap file
RG
Just join a church of your choosing, serve a 2-4 year misssion for said church, come back and a computer with those specs will be very buyable.
like one poster mentioned, what will longhorn be intended for? not the average terminal user. i cant even begin to imagine what could possibly take that much resources to do! databases? no. video rendering? maybe. real time monitoring (drm, etc) YES!
I do not forsee myself needing the kind of system that these recommended specs infer. Just give me an os that doesn't heat up my processor!
_Pogo - since i've lost my password and my old email acct went *POOF*
~Keith Akins needs bonked on the head for never replying to emails!!!
Can someone please tell my what exactly I am going to be doing in 2-3 years that I am not doing now, which will require that I have a terabyte of storage (although I would'nt say no to it today, I don't need it)? I have to wonder what 'new and improved' things will be running in Longhorn that require all of these resources, and exactly how all of these things using resources is going to 'improve security' of MS products?
Developing Retail Point-of-Sale Software
Is it just me or might this be (at least in part) a colossal bribe to hardware manufacturers to get them to buy into MS's lock-in strategy?
[Adjusts tinfoil hat]
With that kind of hardware it had better at least make toast too... In terms of 'average' hardware requirements I think that we're stretching it as it is even for XP's requirements. Just another case of bloatware keeping the Wintel monopoly going I guess. More eyecandy and everything in a different place but not necessarily any more functionality. Whatever happened to high performance software that pushed the limits of what was possible? I'm thinking BeOS here. It ran crazy-fast even on ancient hardware! Fortunately Linux is good but not quite that fast yet (on the desktop in comparison to BeOS).
In short: Which joker made this up?
Hate me!
I have always preferred Windows as my OS. Linux just sorta sucks in my opinion, from what I've seen of it at least. But by the time this thing rolls out, between the high system requirements and the DRM, and the countless other annoyances it has, I think that is going to be a good time for me to switch over. I'm sure Linux could be in a much better state by that time, at the rate its I'm proving. Maybe a 4ghz machine will be standard computing power by the time longhorn comes out... but I sure as hell don't want my operating system sucking down my system down, i want my PROGRAMS to use the power of that system.
Imagine what? I'd imagine with Longhorn installed on those, it would about the equivalent of 2 486's running windows 95 :P
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You know, there's a lot of MS bashing on here, but this is a bit over the top.... Anyone should realize that this is a debug release with debug symbols included and probably needs twice the horsepower to get reasonable performance. I wouldn't think the release version would need quite these specs... Besides, if Longhorn requires all this, just think of how cheap lower spec hardware for all you linux heads will be....
If the current state of Windows security is anything to go by, and if Joe Average has an 802.11g card in his machine in the future, we'll all have free internet via our neighbours poorly secured wireless link. Go Microsoft! :)
All this hardware will be free!
BTW, KDE gets leaner by the day.
who the hell is going to need a terrabyte of storage two years from now? It used to be pretty easy for joe shmoe to tap out his HD with avi's and mp3's...
but nowadays even large media files dont fill up hardcore downloaders drives so quickly... your average 250gb drive will take joe shmoe a year or more of serious file swapping to come even CLOSE to filling, much less the fact that most people stop file jacking when the get over 10 to 20 gigs worth of stuff.
While the rest of the specs seem reasonably on point... a terrabyte is WAY over the top... i mean average systems today ship with 40 - 80 gb on them... i doubt two years will cause the average to jump twelve fold. ... more like 250 to 500 gb.
unless there is a SERIOUSLY HUGE revolution of people recording (home movies) their day to day lives to HD (read apple), there just isnt a need.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Slashdot is no better than Simone:
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A Dragon Lives in my Garage
want to rent a botnet of them?
"Did Bill Gates Really Say That?"
Yes he did.
"False memes that never die just make people look ignorant."
Quoting Wired is the sign of ignorance.
I think it's indicative of Microsoft's own expectation of Longhorn's release date. Much better than estimates put out by the PR department or MS fanboys.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
You're wrong on both counts. Application startup depends most on hard drive speed and certainly has nothing to do with the amount of ram you have unless you don't have enough and you have to swap to virtual memory. Last time I checked even Mozilla didn't take up more than 35mb of ram and the most I've seen it go up to with multiple tabs on my machine is about 70mb.
The 3ghz cpu makes some difference, but it's mostly hard drive speed. And it's certianly not ram. 256 is enough if you're just running a modern OS and Mozilla.
It's looking rather dubious that the GHz number will fit with Mores law, though I expect preformance to go up still, 4GHz parts are pushing the heat levels, and the smaller fabrication techniques are increasing signal to noise ratios in chips, there's only so far you can go with a transistor...
Processes will still shrink, but probably slower and for the other benifits of reduced physical size and heat dissapation. IBM's Power5 seems to be pushing onwards to the multy-core idea, and if it all fails there's plenty of other technologies waiting in the wings.
These specs are not fast enough to run Doom3, Half Life 2 or Far Cry at the necessary 2560X2048 running 860fps.
It may sound steep (and I don't exactly believe the article) but in a few years these specs will be for a sub $999 E-Machines
http://www.kubuntu.org/
But I'm laughing my ass off just the same. Did I get FP? No and yes. Of course I posted my own first post. But did I get FP? No fucking way. Oh well, I'm no troll anyway. And I'm sure I'll gain that karma back in time just the same. The white hat way. Naked Rayburn
I dont believe the original poster attributed the quote to Bill Gates, so you can hardly shoot him down on that point.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
This is probably about right: just remember that even though Longhorn may arrive in 2005/2006, it is likely to have an expected product lifetime of (say) 5-10 years (think Windows NT/2000/XP). This means that the average is planted somewhere midway into the envelope, say 2-3 years. I'm guessing that by 2008, these technology characteristics are properly not too far off base.
I'm sure someone could sit down and do the numbers for us by extrapolating on CPU and hard drive rates and moore's law as it has occurred over the past couple of years.
I mean, design is all about tradeoffs: we don't design in assembler any more because the playing field has moved on. We don't design UI's from scratch, we use UI 'builders'. In the same manner, we don't design for todays technology when we expect our design to work with tomorrows.
If Linux didn't design for MP and scalability now, then it would be hosed by the time MP became "default" for the desktop (well, in fact, with HT, it already is!). Yet, designing for MP now causes some performance and related loss even though the technology is not here.
Who am I trying to lecture Engineering and Economics 101 to the
At least you don't require a keyboard and mouse any more though. Leave that to the Linux hackers eh?
Omnis amans amens
especially when most win32 programs are compiled for a 386.
i just installed xp on my parents machine, a amd k6-2/500 with 256 megs of ram...works just fine. what are you running?
All that power is so that Word will crash in the very beginning of your document, before you have really accomplished anything. If it crashes when theres nothing to loose, M$ figures people will stop bitchin'.
It's not inconcevable that this will be the standard system by then.
It's big and clunky,
Requires a lot of resources to stay alive
It's slow
and all it's able to do is turn green things (eg money) into big heaps of shit.
Way to go Microsoft!!
I have a 15K SCSI-Ultra160 drive here and Mozilla is still ass slow to start. Its the bloatastic design, not your harddrive.
Yes he did.
Okay. Then cite it.
Quoting Wired is the sign of ignorance.
Wired quoted an interview in the Boston Herald. Next!
Why not? There's nothing wrong with these projections. When I was at Intel, a group (headed by Mike Hawash, by the way) was planning on a console system to be put out by Intel in the next 2 years (this was back in 97, 98?). We were struggling to price the system at under $250 with a Pentium II 233, DVD drive, sound card, hard drive, etc. Of course, at that time, it was sacrilegious to even suggest that to the management (that's like saying put in a P4 Xeon 4.0GHz with 200GB hard drive in for under $250) Needless to say, the project was scrapped. (I remember Hawash suggesting to our group - "How about the name...Intel-tainment Center." We all groaned loudly.)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I believe the parent's 4 gigs was referring to the CPU speed-- 4 gigahertz.
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
Perhaps he can afford that equipment (perhaps he [Bill] already has it?) but our strugling Australian University is not going to consider it (Even in 10 years!). It will make a lot of redundant equipment available for Linus use though...
Honestly.. I've got a couple servers running the VIA Epia boards in order to cut back on electricity requirements, and they seem to be doing just fine. My biggest desktop system is only a 2GHz system with 512M of RAM.
As was mentioned by someone else, the quote you are referring to is total BS. Find someone who cites it to him and see if they give a when and a where.
Read Ray Kurzweils Age of Spiritual Machines. He gives a when and a where. And the quote actually says 640,000 bytes not 640K (I know a semantic difference)
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if MS makes every effort to put that hardware somehow to use.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
What the artcile didn't say was that this computing power was needed primarily for a new feature of Longhorn - the Microsoft Streaming Patch System or MSPS.
If one graphs Microsoft's patch releases over time, it is clear that the time between patches approaches zero. No one likes to patch a aysstem, just to see the next day a new patch or twelve have been released over night!
So the MSPS will stream patches to all servers in a continuous feed. Of course, to install these patches takes bandwidth (1 GB Either), to download, both CPU power (dual 4GHz) and ram (2 GB) to install and a lot of room (1 TB to be exact) to store them all.
+1 Sarcastic
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Bend
Oover
Here
It
Comes
Aagain.
The big question? Where will that longhorn go? In the posterior or in your wallet?
I don't think there's anything wrong with these specs for a computer almost four years in the future. What does bother me is that manufacturers will continue to push the envelope while still ignoring some basic problems with the PC form: the noise, size, and heat.
Things will get faster, no doubt about that, but will they get smaller and quieter?
Now electricity prices are going up and demand is close to capacity. If everybody has to buy a big damn electricity hog of a computer just to run an operating system, we're going to trip more circuit breakers. The air conditioning systems are going to have to work harder too!!
Microsoft still hasn't learned to write better designed and more efficient code. Which is why Linux will win out because it can run on all those older computers with ease. In a slow economy, who's going to spend the buckaroos on an expensive computer to use office and internet applications.
There must be people who are, today, trying to run the pre-alpha Longhorn for testing etc. Not only are they doing it on sub-standard hardware (by Longhorn standards), but much of the code will not yet have been optimised*, and would run unacceptably slowly even on that dual 5GHz/2Gb machine.
I'm glad I don't have that job.
* No, I don't have inside information, just experience at the software development cycle. For anything this complicated, the early development versions run too slowly.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Well, I am not surprised about the boost/upgrade recommendations for Longhorn. Considering Avalon and WinFS look pretty complicated, and rather abstract, I'm not surprised you need all that horse power just to get the sucker to boot up. Don't forget, WinFS is supposedly being built on top of a rebuilt version of SQLServer. And Avalon is supposed to be a GUI made up a bunch of XML files. Crazy? Probablly.
On the other hand, I'd be perfectly happy to have the cast-off of some upgrader for this system.
-- Mein Systemadminstrator hat einen großen schwarzen Moustache.
maybe we know it's BS but still find it funny?
guess what, you know that Monty Python sketch with the dead parrot? IT WAS COMPLETELY FICTICIOUS!!!!
What, we don't need an active Internet2 connection for Longhorn too?
Anything in parenthesis may (not) be ignored.
Why is it everytime Apple releases an OS update, it makes even older (mac) machines work FASTER, while everytime Microsoft releases an OS update, it makes even newer machines work slower??
In a response to Microsofts recommendations, Windows users today recommended that "For that hardware, Longhorn better have an average uptime of 200 years, a no-virus lifetime guarantee and a paper clip with a 180 IQ AI system that can actually tell that you really want to write a letter by reading your mind and can write your 50 page report for you."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If Microsoft really thinks that this will be an average system in two years then I doubt we will ever actually see Longhorn. Microsoft will be finished by then.
The vast majority of people today are more than happy with their computer systems as they are, and a significant number of people have too much machine for what they're doing. For many years into the future you will be seeing people with P3 and P4 machines still doing then what they do now.
There's a reason why processor sales are slipping for Intel, and it has little to do with AMD: no one's upgrading because the last upgrade they did made no real improvement. How much faster can you get a program to start? How much faster can you do what you already do (excluding those who are in scientific or graphics fields).
Hardware speed and power has accelerated so quickly up until now because software development could keep up with it. Now that proprietary software has stagnated (the last two software packages released by Microsoft, Corel, Macromedia and Adobe are exactly the same with one or two completely useless features thrown in and a new splash screen and icons) there is no reason to increase the capabilities of the hardware. Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers. Same with web browsers and email clients. Even games -- game development has slowed to a crawl because it takes so long to make them now. Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic (and really, they don't need to be -- the Doom 3 demo already makes my stomach turn).
The described system will not be anywhere near "average" for the "average" computer user in two years. Bookmark this post and flame me in 2006 if I'm wrong.
-JemJim Allchin showed Longhorn playing six high-resolution videos at the same time, while playing Quake III in the background.
XP on equivalent hardware barely sputtered out four of the videos. Longhorn is definitely a media OS.
I'm looking forward to this new 3D infrastructure display technology.
...Longhorn won't be out until 2006, wait, 2007, wait, 2008. In any event, every computer will have all those bells and whistles by then. So it's not some incredible breakthrough on Microsofts part. Old news.
Absolutely ridiculous. Minimum 2GB RAM? 1000GB of disk space? Just for an operating system? The disks alone would run $1200.
Nobody is going to spend $4000 on a new machine just for an OS upgrade, no matter how 64-bit the desktop icons are.
And here everyone still thinks Apple isn't brilliant. They've got the coolest operating system on the market running on single-processor G4s.
lol
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I worked at Microsoft on all kinds of projects from Win95 Osr2 to WinXP and then Longhorn.
Longhorn is going to be BIG, Gaudy (ugly) and have far too much in the way of trimmings...
Believe it, you will have to have a HUGE video card just to keep up with all the "pulsing and fading" crap...
I do not doubt any of what is reported. It will be able to be "turned off" kind of like WinXP can be "reverted" back to Windows Classic...but what a PITA...
And why exactly would I need a 1GB Ethernet port? Maybe to connnect my existing 2.4ghz Athlon to, which according to Microsoft, by that time would be relegated to Firewall status?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I can just imagine it, installing linux/*bsd, etc on the old 3Ghz machine to bring some new life into it . . .
How can you imply that Mozilla is bloated.
It doesn't even have a built in operating system.
The figures come from the guys at the WinHEC that took place. They were demonstrating builds of Longhorn there. This thing definitely isn't vaporware.
the Beowulf of those (just imagine it ...)
Microsoft without doubt holds the crown of over-bloated, third rate, unintuitive (in more than one way) software design.
If this is true (you can be sure there are both truisms and some misleading hype in there) then they deserve all they get.
Dude! You really need to get a sense of humor. I think most people here already know the quote is "total BS" already.
Lighten up a bit.
Does it run Linux?
Please, please don't recommend SuperG. It clogs the already crowded 2.4GHz band... as has been noted on /. before.
Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, then you pretty much have that band to yourself. But for the same reason people don't play loud music, eventually using this much of the unlicensed spectrum will be taboo... at least, I hope so.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Can you imagine an average user needing a Terabite of storage for all _legally_ purchased material they are downloading? These specs sound like Microsoft is assuming the average user wants to store Ted Turner's complete film library.
Who is John Cabal?
Slashdot and Fark "trading" articles is getting more and more noticeable. Maybe some sort of joint non-duplication accord is in order.
My history of PC clone purchases (I tend to buy a near top of the line machine every 2 years):
1995: 133 Mhz
1998: 400 Mhz (300% faster)
2000: 1500 Mhz (333% faster)
2002: 2800 Mhz (90% faster)
2004: 3400 Mhz (20% faster)
If the present trend that I've observed continues, however, we won't see 6Ghz in 2006.
However, CPU clock speed is only one factor as far as system performance goes, hence Intel's recent announcment about moving away from marketing Pentiums based on clock speed. So maybe we'll see a P5 "7500+" rated CPU...
Remind me not to upgrade to Office Longhorn, it would slow my computer to a crawl...
This is probably a good thing though, because it's a good opportunity for Linux, et al., to appeal to users who have inadequate machines when Longhorn is released (and that will be almost everyone, if this holds true). All we really need is something really cool at that time. Of course, this is a bunch of speculation and idealizations, but the opportunity is real and we should at least try to seize it.
I am feeling fat and sassy
Win 3.1 Windows folder approx 40MB
Win95 approx 100MB - 150MB (4x increase)
Win 98 approx 450MB (4x increase)
Win XP approx 2.5GB (5x increase)
Longhorn? Around 12GB???
Well, seems to be the trend.
This sig has been deprecated.
It is well to keep in mind that past performance on machines with Microsoft's minimum requirements for the given OS has been crappy. You have always needed to step it up a couple of notches for things to be zippy. Just what I need, a 4 Ghz slug.
I think I better detour 'cross here and head on over to Big Leg Emma's house now.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
First, I'm going to take this "scoop" with a grain of salt. It's being brought to us by the same biased nerds who continually try to slam Longhorn with as much unsubstantiated FUD as they possibly can. My favorite involves the Longhorn release date. All over Slashdot all I see are cries of "2008" for the release. I seem to remeber it being 2006 for a release, 2007 at latest. My memory might be slighly fuzzy in that regard, but if someone can provide me with a definitive link stating "Longhorn no earlier than 2008", I'll be happy. Otherwise, I'm convinced that in 2005 Slashdot geeks will be yelling "no Longhorn until 2009", etc. At any rate, I'm not buying these specs. They are quite ridiculous, and it seems unlikely that the Longhorn developers could be getting any work accomplished with modern-era PCs if Longhorn is expected to be such a hog.
Now the second point: does anyone remember all the big flap over the story that Windows 98 was going to require (gasp) 200MB of hard drive space? Who could forget... "200MB for an OS! That's ridiculous", etc. Of course, everyone forgets that at around the same time, Linux had similar HD requirements. And when XP was set to be released, bitching and moaning about the expected 1GB install (or thereabouts), when modern Linux distros installed to roughly the same size. Time marches on, and OS requirements will climb because modern OS's will be expected to do more and more hardware-taxing things. The minimum recommended specs for a modern version of Redhat would look downright bloated to just about any computer user of 3 or 4 years ago, so keep that in mind. Windows will require beefier hardware, and so will Linux. This sort of behavior is not limited strictly to Windows.
Nothing to see here, just more geek hypocrisy...
Yet another braindead contentless discussion on slashdot!
Rumors have it that this Windows version will be so massive that Microsoft plans to abandon CDs in favor of read-only 120gig hard drives.
Much of the space will be used by the conveniently pre-installed pop-ups, worms, viruses, and spyware (in other words, it will come with RealPlayer).
Whatever floats your boat.... just making sure people don't treat it like fact. People know that Monty Python isn't true... they don't know a quote that is passed around as legit isn't.
We'll need powerful computers to
work with Palladium...
Um.. It launches in 2 seconds on my 1.25 GHz Powerbook with 1 gig of ram, so I think that is a bit much.
That pretty much what my dad said about the 30MB hard drive we got with our 286 computer in 1991. He wanted a 20MB hard drive because he couldn't imagine filling up 30MB. It eventually was filled up, all right!
By 2010 or so I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to fill up a 1TB hard drive, some of which haven't even been conceived of yet. I certainly never would have thought 6 years ago that I could fill up a 40GB hard drive. Storing large collections of movies, music, and images, and bloated Microsoft programs simply wasn't done that long ago. Well, we complained about Microsoft programs and OS's being bloated back then too, but few imagined they would get much, much bigger.
Peripheral Interchange Program; or better put, lets smash that Printer / Fax Machine!!!
Naked Rayburn
Sending all your porn and torrents to China. What the fuck did you think it was doing? It will sense your presense and cut the ports when you touch your mouse. It will sense the declining heat on your Aeron when you go away, and resume sending all your good shit to the far east.
Anything questionable with go directly to John Ashcroft.
How will this run on a laptop?
perhaps they are integrating clippy into the entire OS, but beefing him up and replacing him with that nvidia fairy girl...
:-)
i imagine a lot of you slashdotters would buy longhorn then
my dual proc G5 makes the spec.... oh wait
These are the requirements only if you've got Clippy enabled.
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
on our desk top again?
They have got to be fucking kidding (pardon my french). What on earth can they load into Windows that will make it that demanding ? Office + Web browser + movie maker + musik player & encoder + solitaire + xbox simulator all loaded into memory and running in the background per default ?
or else they're just anticipating the usual code bloat... =)
Anyway. I just gave my trusty Mac a pat. 4-6 Ghz just to run it.... Linux will sure seem like a useful alternative to many when Longhorn strikes... if all of you readers will do your to make sure people "out there" KNOWS THE ALTERNATRIVE TO WINDOWS!
Get to it, folks.
My "fastest" system here is 900MHZ AMD and runner-up is a 2x300MHZ UltraSPARC. They are my *servers*, my clients are like 500MHZ or less. All my computers, Mac/x86/Sun, all run a flavor of Unix.
My point is, my computers are doing evrything *I* want them to do, and more. Uptime and stability are great. Will they beat those "been up for 10 years" VMS uptime records? Probably not, but whose keeping track? =)
If this is the path Microsoft wants to take with reference-hardware, which clearly is not the case according to that MS-SpokesHole, I'd think that this would be another great selling/advocacy point for OSS and just nix in general.
iGZo
They say 2006, Longhorn probably won't be out until 2007. By then who knows what the average PC will be like.
So?
... and then remove... a hard drive for backups.)
I only have to start it once a week.
(I shut the computer down on the weekend to slide in
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
As long as I can tweak it so the "upgraded" interface looks as much like a bare bones Win95 system as possible, and I can turn off all the "friendly" background tasks to make it actually responsive, I'm happy. I like my processor working on my tasks, not needless graphical widgets, thanks.
Visit the
Uh huh, I can realistically see a 1TB hard disk drive in a laptop in 2 to 3 years. I mean if that's average, laptops won't be running this thing. It's pretty much impossible HD space-wise & graphics wise. So are laptops stuck with XP forever or something? :)
Moores law has been predictable for a few decades. If anything it is showing signs of slowing down. The Prescott is slower than the Northwood. The speed improvements are just not happening that fast. This dual processor 4 GHz 2 Gbyte machine will be bloody expensive even in 2006.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
So maybe someone can explain something to me... If Microsoft is willing to suggest that Longhorn will need such advanced equipment, exactly what do Microsoft developers currently have that allow to them to even test their own product? Does this mean that Longhorn development is guaranteed not to be finished until the developers at least get fast enough hardware to support what they think the average user will have (4-6GHz,1TB,etc)? Otherwise how do companies typically determine what hardware to "recommend" for their "future" products?
...which still run fine (for cli junkise) on a P90 with 16 meg of RAM.
That's odd... the WOPR has been around since the 80's. While it was certainly impressive in the day, I'm sure today's computers can surpass it.
It's nice to see Microsoft supporting old hardware. One question --- does this mean they'll finally include tic-tac-toe with the OS?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Or at least since HP and Microsoft demonstrated Athens, their concept PC.
Indeed, this article misses out the most interesting specification mentioned back then - that widescreen monitors will be the standard
Who's gonna recycle all that toxic scrap? Sure we could donate it all to charities, but what about the stuff left over from them as they upgrade?
Starts in about (wall clock) one second on my machine.
Version 1.5 on Debian.
I have SATA drives... if it matters.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
seriously
only way to afford Longhorn is to buy a system with it bundled on it. Which MS gets a cut of the profits from anyway. Either way MS wins.
Then once your office buys new machines with Longhorn on them, and cannot reformat and use Windows because new machines only have Longhorn drivers, they will be forced to upgrade all the machines to run Longhorn. Since Longhorn does not run Legacy Windows or DOS code, your office will also have to buy all new software from Microsoft, etc.
So either Boycott Longhorn and continue using Windows on old machines, or switch to Linux or some other alternative. Or drink the MS-Kool-Aide and switch everyone to Longhorn.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
On the other hand, by the time longhorn comes around...
Mac OS will still be more technically advanced than Longhorn.
The new apple PCs will only run at 3ghz or so, but will continue to completely school anything from Intel/Microsoft.
The OS will still comfortably run on an 800mhz G4
Steve jobs will manage to create a pointing device with no buttons at all. Mac users will claim this to be a revolutionary feature.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I think they are going to have a special watered down version called Longhaul. It will only require a 500gig drive and 3 gigs of ram.
Bah. And I suppose next youre going to tell me that Kevin Mitnick never hacked into a computer by whisling hayes modem codes into a prison telephone.
"640k ought to be enough for anyone" -- Bill Gates
There, feel better now?
oh wait I guess that wouldn't work... dang.
Now, I'm thinking fundamentals here, but an operating system's main purpose is to let you access your hardware, run applications, and manage data. Now, I can see these specs being accurate for the games and multimedia applications of the future, but an average of 4-6Ghz CPUs and a terabyte of HD space just to use the operating system efficiently?! Give me a break. I'd rather Microsoft outsource their development to Russia, where they know how to make use of every bit of the 286's they're still using.
The windows are ANIMATED. Its the future! Many of you may not have the vision to imagine a world where windows are animated and icons move. Look at your desktop now, and imagine your windows being animated. Do you really think that could happen on your pathetic "modern" computer?
I've been a programmer for several years now, and I applaud Microsoft for fearlessly driving this technology forward.
We can no longer claim Microsoft doesn't innovate... they're clearly years ahead of their time.
God Bless.
This is the natural progression of the MS strategy since they decided to lock XP Media Center edition into specific hardware configurations. Their stated reason for not allowing their XP customers to upgrade to Media Center was the "special hardware" configuration ect. Do you call a TV card and DVD RW drive "special"??????
The media center functions don't even need to be bundled with the XP Distro (or even the OS for that matter) much less locked into hardware offered by MS "partners".
This whole thing smells like PR BS. What they want us to believe is that they are working on something so advanced and extrodinary (read NOT Linux or Mac) that it NEEDS that kind of configuration to operate. Maybe all the resources will be needed to render their 3D desktop and shimmering ICONS or MS smilley faces.
So what is it??? Any ideas?
The only thing resonsable I can think of is a "meta os" that will eoncompass any operating system running concurrently with any other or others. Longhorn would be more of an OS container than another distribution of Windows.
I still believe those figures must be a joke but I seriously wonder how slow that thing would crawl on a regular PC. Well, if there will be still people running that crap they must be some pretty slow idiots themselves...
I know we can expect hardware performance to improve substantially in the next three years, but COME ON! what are they trying to achieve here? What problems do I have with my computer that this solution is going to fix?
Ten years ago (pre-win95), if you asked me what my 5 major computing problems were, I'd have said:
1. Memory management - need a flat model with real 32 bit support
2. Standardized driver and hardware support, especially for printers.
3. Long File Names.
4. Standardized install/uninstall support.
5. Performance - hardware needs to be faster.
Well, a year or two years later, we've got all of them.
So, what are my top five today?
1. Spam
2. Viruses and Spyware
3. Every software vendor on the planet wants me to send them money every year even though I'm happy with what I've got. (See: license keys and forced registration/activiation.)
4. Tech IP (Patents).
5. Vendor lock-in.
ONE... **ONE** of those (#2) is a problem software can fix. and FOUR of them are *CAUSED* *INTENTIONALLY* by Microsoft and companies just like them.
I am not the only one who's soured on MS just because I'm tired of putting up with the crap. The corp world is moving, too.
I also think MS is in more trouble than they let on. They feel their grip on the monopoly rope slipping and rather than letting go and trusting that they can compete in an open world, they are forcing themselves to be the only player in a smaller and smaller box.
BTW, Knoppix 3.5(?) came out today. It now supports my NForce2 audio and net card correctly in the default configuration, and it makes NO demands of me beyond making me look at pictures of penguins.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
but it is a public secret that such a system should also have:
;)
- a USB microwave installed
- a deflector shield
- 2 plasma coils
- a fusion reactor a power supply
- seatbelts
- BIO-DRM-authentication
and so on
Privacy is terrorism.
And 1 GB Video Card memory... (drops down dead)
I'm sure this is an OS, Post Longhorn specs. A Playstation 3 and Longhorn system sounds nice though...
The article only specifies the specs for the Longhorn client machines.
Makes me wonder about the specs for the Longhorn servers.....
Why 1 terabyte of hard drive space?
Then I remembered that the dafault is for the OS to handle the pagefile size.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
The Boston Herald is a News Corporation rag. They're about as likely to double-check Gates' claim that he never said is as Jon Katz is. Wait a minute ...
Where are your powers of deduction? It's a common enough meme, it's posted under a story about Microsoft... Should we just assume that you lack the mental fortitude to figure this one out, or that you really enjoy ignoring the obvious if things aren't specifically spelled out for you? I bet you like correcting speeling errrors too, huh?
Okay, I know I'm way off topic but I read the article in that link and I'd really like to know what the following at the bottom of the article was all about:
Other favorite feedback from this column: A woman (a Wal-Mart shopper, no doubt) emailed in outrage that I had used the word "blow job" in a public forum. "You are disgusting," she messaged. "How dare you use a word like 'blow-job' in your column, you fucking moron?"
Wow. I mean.. just... Wow.
I'm a 2000 man.
WTF does a server need a graphics processor for? Given it's Windows and absolutely must have its GUI running (for some strange performance draining reason), wouldn't it spend most of it's time waiting for a local login? Would the login screen now consist of some kind of super-intense 3-d login mechanism or some kind of VR maze/puzzle to login now?
Linux has creeping featurism/bloat too.
I, and many others, remember the 0.99 and 1.0 kernels - they were much smaller than a 2.6 compile.
An' you didn't need any of those fancy schmancy newfangled pen-tee-ums to run it. 16 megabytes? You don't know you're born! ^_^
It isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Some of those features make life easier, etc.
--
I don't mean Microsoft, I mean the functionality that we do with our computers. Gamers will have gaming machines, internet surfers and e-mailers will have machines for that a-la Imac-type machines, and then there will be entertainment-center type machines, and so on. There isn't really much of a point of having one machine do it all, unless, of course, you configure it as a server, and then hang terminals here and there around your house; perhaps one in the kitchen for recipes, one next to the TV to look up things that come up while you are watching TV, perhaps some kind of DRM-enabled storage device with brains plugged into your TV/entertainment center, things like that. The Linux-type OS's would probably be much better at enabling this kind of thing, although with work, and maybe some reboots every now and then, Longhorn-type OS's could do it too.
The whole concept of one computer doing everything is fine, but in that case it's going to have to function as a server, with perhaps smaller devices booting off of it throughout the house. Families have more than one person in them, and if we are really going to have stuff this powerful, eventually it's just going to split up into seperate devices, each with a specialized task. There is not really any reason to have everyone purchase a computer that does everything when they don't need that. If you aren't a gamer, you don't need a gaming machine. If you are fine with DVDs and CDs, you don't need mp3s. Things like that. But it sure does sound like one awesome gaming machine, this thing they are describing. No doubt about that. It's just that not everyone needs this kind of power, certainly not to read the web and post comments on Slashdot.
Yes he did.
He did, he did, he did.
My reality and I say he did, so he did.
If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.
Problem is it's not his responsibility to deny he said it; it's your (or whoever's accusing him's) responsibility to prove he did. Anybody can just accuse anybody else of saying anything; doesn't mean they did. Show me the proof. And the fact that a bunch of Slashdotters think he said it is not proof, so don't pass it off as such.
Nobody has ever come up with an original cite for this alleged quote, in all the times it's gone around the net. See here for Gates' own response, including his own call for a citation that he knows doesn't exist (and if it did, he'd finally be able to disprove this silly quote once and for all by digging up the original article cited and showing the world that the quote is not in it).
As Gates himself admits, he's said plenty of real stupid and dumb things, so I don't see why he'd choose to deny this particular quote and none of the others if he's lying about it.
Glad you hear your machine is alredy up to specs for Longhorn.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
According to Gates's Law,
"The speed of software halves every 18 months."
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
It doesn't even have a built in operating system. Or a lisp interperter, or a text editor!! Its a terrible emacs clone!
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Why you do you need that much power just to run an operating system? Will people be able to print faster in Word? Perhaps the cards will bounce around the screen REALLY fast when you finish Solitaire? What can Longhorn or XP do for me that 2000 can't? Give me more pretty colors on my screen and a teeth-grinding, bang-my-head-on-the-keyboard, handholding, the-user-is-an-idiot default UI from hell?
Microsoft has brought us into the culture of bloatware acceptance. The belief seems to be that code doesn't need to be optimized because the brute force of today's processors make up for any clunkiness, and any extra processor cycles left over after that can be used up by making the UI pretty and shiny with lots of special effects and talking paperclips while you move windows around the screen. But then if this wasn't so why would anyone upgrade their computers?
Seem to me that Intel makes the processors and Microsoft sells them. I guess they don't call it "Wintel" for nothing.
-R
And microsofts never had a memory leak. I've had mspaint leak memory and take up as much cpu as it could atleast twice now, might still have the screenshot.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Bollocks. I'm lookinmg at my mem usage for firefox just now; got 14 tabs open, it's been up for 4 days, shit loas of exttensions installed, and it's using around 60MB, and it took less than a second to load up, on a dual P3 600
I boot up IE, it friggin crashes whewn it sees it has to load a webpage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He did. Paul Allan admitted it
http://saveie6.com/
The amount of ram and storage space is probably correct. My biggest question is about the "dual pentium" part. The only dual pentiums I've known have had short painful lives. It seems to me that, when you have an application requiring multiple processors, you should jump from 1 to 4.
If Longhorn ran on current "mainstream" PCs, Microsoft would be in trouble. Assuming that current PCs cost $600, in a couple of years, this will drop to $250. This would make Longhorn >50% of the price of the PC. The only way to keep the OS price hidden is to push the total hardware price up. Otherwise, people will realize that the Microsoft tax actually exists.
That is why you run MYIE2 (www.myie2.com). It is a shell for IE that has tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and a popup blocker. I have around 40 pages open on my crappy work computer (800 mhz, 512 mb ram) and it has no problems.
Of course, my Slackware system runs like the wind on a 600Mhz P-II with 128MB of Ram and a 12GB hard disk. Funny, ain't it?
;)
I bet it's more secure, too.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
You expect /.ers to be accurate and honest while bashing Windows/MS/Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer?
I'd say, "you must be new," but your UID is too low.
I'm not certain why people are complaining. Everyone's always talking about how important ease of use is. Well this is how you get ease of use. When Linux get's ease of use, it will have similiar requirements.
I call bullshit or troll. First of all, 50 open tabs for days is so unbelievably illogical that I can't even begin to imagine what you're doing. I can't exactly say I'm going to hold it against the Firefox developers that their browser becomes a memory hog when people are using it waaayyyyy beyond its intent. If that's something you legitimately need, offer a patch or use a tool that's actually meant to do that. Otherwise, don't complain that it's not doing things it's not supposed to.
Second, the trite old "it loads slower than IE" is so incredibly irritating that I have to bite my tongue to prevent a slew of obscenities. Boo hoo. So, you have to wait an extra 2 seconds for it to load up because the WEB BROWSER isn't tied to the KERNEL. After all, what sort of moronic dipshits would make a web browser an integral part of a system kernel anyway?
Finally, I call bullshit on the "slow loads". If you've got benchmarks, show 'em. Otherwise, my anectdotal evidence says your anecdotal evidence is full of crap because the only lag I see on my 1.5/Cable connection is from the servers on the other end of the pipe.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Some Linux fanatics might fear the release of Longhorn from all the supposed improvements... but now I think this is a joke. (no offense to anyone who defends Windows, I'm not trying to start a flame war) But why would you want to build a PC that powerful just to run an OS that sucks up 80% of the resources? That would be like grabbing a refurbished computer now with 800mhz and 128mb of ram and running XP. You could run Linux though (probably BSD too, never tried it long enough) with pretty good usability, applications that on average do as good as their proprietary counterparts, better security (again, not trying to start a flame war here), and uses a relatively tiny amount of the computer's power.. so that you can focus the CPU and RAM on where ever you really want it (games, massive databases, major multitasking, deticated server, mission critical tasks, etc)
...Just my 2 cents I guess, for what it's worth.
Correction, NORAD computer :)
You should drive a Jaguar XK16, grow your own spare body parts in a bathtub cloning lab, eat only VitaProtein tabs, and have a pair of 1.8-ton antigravity boots.
You will have the option to have your blood siphoned over the Vascularnet by Citibank Direct Withdrawal once per month to pay off your New Software Loan.
people 100 years from now will recycle them?
By the way, Im not saying building a computer, a car, or a pencil doesn't create waste, but most of those statistics bandied about the ammount of waste involved creating a computer are misleading to flat out false. Most of the weight involved is water, and using 1 gallon of water does not mean there is one less gallon of water in the world. The water gets re-introduced back into the very system from whence it came.
Human beings are not the only creatures on this planet, and we all need water. My god, how do we still have any left?
And in a futile attempt to stay on topic, act locally. Don't upgrade to longhorn. I don't intend to, particularly if these specs are accurate.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Remember when OS/2 Warp 4.0 came out? It had fewer requirements than the 3.0 version! Without sacrificing any features or performance!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
A dual-core 4-6GHz CPU and 2G of RAM just for a freakin' OS?!
Oh wait. We're talking about M$ bloatware... nevermind.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
" And mozilla needs 4 gigs and a hyperthreading P4 to start in under 4 seconds."
Must be the windows version underlying Mozilla.
It works fine on a 4 year old gateway pII-600 laptop maxed out at 288MB. As I surf Slashdot, I am taking a break while doing compiling a report in SunOffice7, pulling from Excell and Word files on one virtual desktop. Two separate instances of Mozilla with a total of 10 tabs are open on another to confirm data. Evolution and a tabbed terminal session running ssh and wget take up another Virtual desktop, and I leave one open for KPatience. Gkrellm is showing 129 processes and 90% idle cpu. Memory is sitting at 60%.
This is normal use with Mepis, your milage may vary.
is "retailers". It is NOT "retailer's".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
There is another interpretation of why Longhorn might be so large, which is this: keeping as much functionality as possible under the hood means that the "single" operating system can be seen as efficient as possible, and will have as few rivals as possible.
This is similar to the case of when Internet Explorer became an integral part of the operating system. Now we all know that a browser is fundamentally a separate piece of the pie, but by including the functionality of IE, MS manages to exclude as much competition as possible.
I imagine that a lot of the operating system will be functions that sweeten the GUI performance.
If the legal cases over software provision are to have any effect, they really need to lay down the separation of the development of software into distinct modules in the case where there is clear monopoly abuse.
For example, it would be possible to instruct MS to supply Longhorn with a minimal GUI (and no IE) with a published GUI API/Protocol so that other developers could easily compete with the provision of GUI related software.
You may also note, after you have wiped the foam from your mouth, that despite this I still use FF, because I find IE too annoying to use, but I can't remember it having that sort of problem when I was still using it.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
You mean "Intel will get its 64-bit [CPU] ready for the masses".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
If I install a linux distro, it might take up 1.5 gigs, but it will include thousands of useful programs. XP takes up 2 gigs and gives me Solitaire. Moreover, with Linux I have the choice of as little as I want.
Crappy computer? With an 800Mhz processor and 512MB i don't see why it should be challenged by Mozilla with 50 tabs, 800MHz is plenty fast enough for me, and 512MB of RAM is ample, though i supose it is crippled by the OS,
;)
This longhorn PC prediction sounds more like a Micro$oft wish list to me
As for MyIE2, i don't mean to flame, but i can't understand why you'd want to add all those features to a browser and not replace it's braindead HTML renderer.
Software Freedom Day!.
Longhorn will be your media server (replacing the cable box, VCR, Tivo, and DVD player), play games via your television (replacing game consoles), interface with any networkable appliance in your home (refrigerator, heating and cooling system, alarm system) and provide a centralized control panel...
That high-end PC will sit in a closet and be accessed via 5.8ghz wi-fi through a set-top box attached to your HD capable TV, thin client portables, and touch screens on your "Longhorn Enabled" appliances.
Your Longhorn PC will be on the net and everything connected to it will be accessible (i.e. check your refrigerator inventory via a personalized web-based panel so you can prep a grocery list to pick up on the way home). Eventually, you'll walk into your house on a 48 degree (farenheit) winter day, and your home will be a sweltering 95 degrees (farenheit) inside, courtesy of the W64.HVACdemon virus, written by some pointy-headed 15 year old in Holland.
That's Bill's ultimate goal: to squeeze Microsoft "technology" into every nook and cranny of your life until everything you do has some Microsoft code enabling it or making it inaccessible unless you pay Bill. And that's why such huge specs are needed.
-- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I guess Microsoft decided to finally write their entire OS in visual basic (.NET?). Good job!
4-6 GHz is ridiculus. It's obvious they are not designing the OS to scale with a wide range of processor speeds, either that or they won't be releasing it till sometime in 2012.
The question is, what are all those CPU cycles going to be doing?
When you think about it, longhorn will take AT LEAST a few more years before a near "complete" version will be released for testers and/or testers.
For the video card part, it's somewhat plausible considering new video cards come out every half a year to a year and prices of precedent generation cards go down pretty fast.
As for storage, that's pure bullshit... I stil know people who have a hard time filling up their 20GB (without pr0n). the AVERAGE user won't know what to do with that space (unless he's told to download like a freak)
2 cpu's? Right so I'm gonna use a windows operating system for a multi-cpu system when linux handles smp way beter AFAIK. People won't get a multicpu system to use word/excel and use email.
2GB of ram? and my friend's name is richard simmons. Are they saying that based on their current longhorn versions running in DEBUG-MODE? 2GB could be a mainstream for gamers or developpers but I doubt it will be for the average joe.
1gbit ethernet. oh isn't that nice. Microsoft are predicting the evolution of home networks with the transition from 100->1000. Unless it's a house with crazy exchange of pr0n, then I don't see the use of 1gbit lan (/. talked about transition to gigabit lan I think). Even if there's no home network established, is this a hint given to us that says "our future residential service offered by isp's will offer blazing speed?"
wireless? Can't say much for this one really. Have friends who need wireless, some who totally don't care. Can't really say if later, wireless would be introduced in products other than laptops and pocket pc's
Basically, what I think on this article? nice way to tell pc vendors "sell monster pc's for the people who would want to play 3d minesweeper with AA/AF)
giddy up!
Thanks for the link. I never bothered to look it up because I always hoped it would be fixed in the next revision. This also confirms my perception that 0.7 was particularly bad; 0.8 was a big improvement in this regard.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Dude, of course the OP was exaggerating, but time to start up (and response time) doesn't have much to do with what the program does while idle.
For reference, on my system (900MHz Athlon, 256MB RAM, Linux) mozilla takes seven seconds to start up. I would be rather surprised if it wasn't slower to start on your laptop. In comparison, Opera starts in about three and a half seconds.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Yes, of course, so that the viruses can run faster, corrupt a greater amount of data and spread more efficiently.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Video editing.
Trust me, you can never -- never -- have enough RAM, disk, or CPU when doing this. And people need to do this; home movies/videos are painfully boring unless chopped down to the interesting bits.
(I just dread the period we'll inevitably go through with video editing analogous to the DTP (remember DTP?) "use all the fonts!" era. It'll be the same thing, only 100 times as annoying.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Aren't those the same specs recommended so XP will run smoothly?
Props to GNAA!
Well, I am one of the product tester and the last kit they sent me recommended a 1.5 ghz Proc 512megs of RAM and an 8 gig drive. they only send it out on DVD too....
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
Who's said that the average home user is on a 500 celeron? Pulling these figures out of thin air?
4 years back, upgrading to 600-700 Celeron was average. 3 years back 900-1 Ghz Athlon systems were average. And this wasn't even in the us.
Even average home users on second hand laptops are probably on 600-1.2 P III's.
Processor speed for intel/amd home desktops now is around 2.6-2.8 Ghz. Average age of a home desktop is 2.5-3 years before it is upgraded/new one is bought.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
But somehow the system wont run much faster than one of today's midrange dells...
I, for one, welcome our new terahertz overlords.
Damn, another ruined attempt at a slashjoke. There goes my karma.
I wish I could moderate you as a "+1 Jealous" ;)
the guys at NetBSD have decided that Longhorn will not be the only OS to run on a Whopper and have ported NetBSd to run on various burgers including the Whopper, Big Mac, and all of Wendy's architectures.
Three letters: DRM. ;)
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
IBM went the other way with OS2 (1994?). I seem to remember salesmen trying to persuade people to buy OS2 machines with 16Mb. OS2 needed 32Mb to run properly.
Everyone just ended up complaining about the OS2 performance which was a shame, since it had a multiprocessing angle which Windows didn't have at the time.
So maybe we should applaud the efforts of developers to be realistic.
U160 doesn't mean anything with only one drive. There is no way that one drive can saturate 160MB/sec of bandwdith... why even use a U160 drive unless you want to look cool or got it for free...
Hey, I have 25 open tabs right now. Why is that insane? Granted, Mozilla can't take it, so I use Galeon, which dones't go unstable for a good long while.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No, those specs are fine. Microsoft is about to announce that Longhorn will debut in 2007
... Change alot very soon. Speed of Light anyone?
This'll change everything with computers.
I work under NDA with MS, and while my credibility is lacking as an AC, I can tell you that the true current requirements in MS' "Book of Longhorn" are much less than these bogus stats. A top of the line system sold today easily meets the requirements. Of course, things could change over time...
... unless they're asking Apple to replay the C:\NGRTLNS.W95 ad campaign over again. I'm typing from an 'old' PB@867 and I can't see what Longhorn is supposed to do better than Panther ;-) I'm afraid that 10.6 on IBM equipped PBs will demonstrate that by that time MS dominance can only survive by market stranglehold.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
[Longhorn will require] a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
:)
Now, if that's just the OS... well, let's take the minimum requirements for XP.
* 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
* 64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features
* 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space
* Super VGA (800 × 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
Now compare that with the requirements for a modern game... I'll use Unreal Tournament 2004 as an example:
PIII 1000
128MB RAM
3.5GB HD
64MB Video Card
Alright... Comparing XP and UT we get:
233:1000 processor speed... (~1:4)
64mb:128mb memory (Which is stretching it, you tried playing UT2004 on 128mb RAM? Slow as hell here.)... (1:2)
1.5gb:3.5gb hard drive space... (~1:2)
SVGA:64mb vid card... Tricky. Let's say (1:5)
After looking at longhorn's reqs, we are left with the conclusion that games of longhorn's time will require...
(4-6ghz*4)16-24ghz... yeah, sure, that'll happen if 4 years...
(2gb*2)4gb ram... that's MODERATLY reasonable, at least in comparison to the processor speed...
(1tb*2)2 terabytes of storage... right.
(3x*5)And a video card roughly 15 times what we have now. Not a chance in hell.
So... who's up for some pong?
You know you're a nerd when you can mathematically prove that you have no life.
Can't someone show me where I can get hardware like this for free? Or does Longhorn cost $5000 and come bundled with a bonus computer.
Bill Gates has 40 billion $, and you live in your parents' basement.
I don't really believe these specifications 100%, but don't you think stuff like this might encourage companies to make better, cheaper hardware more quickly? It could help stimulate the industry.
blog & fiction: jd87
That might provide just enough juice to power one of these new systems. Or maybe not.
By the time longhorn releases that kind of a computer will be the kind of outdated pos that you use as a router because you're too lazy to throw it out. So it isn't really a problem that longhorn will require this when (read: if) it comes out.
-Tim Louden
-k
[1] Hank the Hallucination
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
Also, it loads slower than IE
IE loads faster because it loads up most of it's components during Windows bootup. Which is one of the reasons Windows boots so slow. Mozilla doesn't have that luxury.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Not to burst your bubble, but the article was written by JonKatz.
Since when has that man ever been bringer of exacting knowledge?
from Microsoft Watch confirms it:
But WHO WOULD BUY A WRISTWATCH FROM MICROSOFT, for Mingus' sake?
Your reply smacks of desperation.
Sad to see a Microserf stoop so low so quickly.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
AMD has a MUCH more scalable arch than Intel. (AMD licenced alpha for athlons (32-bit) (dedicated northbridge connection per processor) and copied them for the Opteron (on-chip memory controller, and very fast chip interconnects)) Intel by contrast has a shared memory bandwidth for all it's chips (assume that both Opteron and Itanium have the same base memory bandwidth, for a single chip call it 6.4GB/sec, Assuming it's in the Opteron's own memory (each can have it's own memory) on a dual processor board, each Opteron would have 6.4GB/sec to it's memory, and slighly slower access to the other processor's. Itanium on the other hand shares it's memory bandwidth so each processor has 3.2GB/sec. Scale this up to 4 processors and each Opteron has 6.4GB/sec bandwidth while the Itaniums have 1.6GB/sec bandwidth.
Now we see why Intel chips never appear on servers with lots of CPUs - CLUSTERS DON'T COUNT!!!!
Clusters only work for work that can be completely partitioned.
Now, even if we ignore the face that Longhorn is years away, and hardware is constantly rising in performance, and dropping in cost. The simple fact is that this is the RECOMMENDED system. This is not the REQUIRED system. The required system is that of a decent system today. That means anyone who gets a machine in the last year (or more), will still be able to run the OS just fine.
I've see the current system requirements, and I've seen the current Longhorn run on them just fine. The recommended system is for people who want to utilize all of the graphical features, etc.
Sorry, I just hate reading a million posts on people who overreact, some of whom don't realize exactly what we're talking about.
What you're saying is that the average computer owned by the average person is going to have those stats in 2 years.
/.'er here, we're talking about everyday non-tech-obsessed people.
You are out of your mind.
I don't dispute that those stats will exist, but I strongly dispute the assertion that the average person will feel the need to have a computer with them. We're not talking the average
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think Longhorn will be the death of Microsoft. For the first time Microsoft will release an OS that will leave the majority of computer users unable to upgrade. Sure, it'll come with all new systems, but people are replacing their systems a lot less often nowadays.
And let's factor in the inevitable delays with Longhorn too. That'll give Linux an opportunity to catch up on the desktop. Four years from now may not seem like a lot of time, but in the world of computers, it's a lifetime.
So let's summarize, Longhorn will be utterly bloated and all new hardware will be required to run it. It will be late. And Linux will have sufficiently caught up on the desktop by the time it's released. Given the choice between Longhorn and Linux, what would you chose?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Considering Longhorn is probably about 2 years off, the typical mid-range PC will probably be running around those specs anyway. You figure my 1GB 2.6GHZ system is moderate to high-end now, in two years it'll be barely enough. Remember when everyone thought a 486 was hot shit?
So, you have to wait an extra 2 seconds for it to load up because the WEB BROWSER isn't tied to the KERNEL. After all, what sort of moronic dipshits would make a web browser an integral part of a system kernel anyway?
Good question. Microsoft didn't tie IE to their kernel. They tied it to the Windows shell.
I love the progression of memes around here. IE startes out integrated into the shell, and over time becomes integrated into the actual Windows kernel itself! Cute.
Meanwhile, KDE does the same damn thing.
Thus killing one possible aspect of a "Look how many businesses aren't uprading to Longhorn" story line in the press.
Why don't you just restart your browser each day? And there can be no good reason to keep 40 tabs open. Face it, it not the browser, its you.
As an MSDN subscriber, I've had access to a build for a few months now, and I have to say that I was less then impressed. I will confirm the fact that Longhorn is VERY slow, and in need of a speed boost.
I've run it on two different P4 3.0ghz machines, one with 512meg, and the other with 1gig of RAM. The results where not acceptable. I became frustrated by the lack of response fairly quickly. There are also a set of new UI elements that can not be disabled that take up the top 100pixels or so, of every window, no matter your resolution. Dropping to 640x480 and 800x600 proved my fear, there is just not enough remaining screen real estate to be useful.
If Microsoft does not make major changes before release, this product will just be another Windows ME. The only people using it got it for free on their PCs.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
We're overlooking that Microsoft has always targeted the average PC. But methinks that Microsoft is selling more OSes on new machines than upgrades.
So perhaps the strategy is to give us "tomorrow's OS on tomorrow's hardware" and really take advantage of it?
... to run all of their DRM software.
And then they armed me with moderator points and the world mourned.
what about mobile computing? I think that the OS will be highly scalable, particularly because they are not willing to give up the growing (whats the percentage now?) laptop market, nor all of the lower end compuers.
-ashot
And don't forget the daily blowjob! From someone sexy.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
do you really beleive it will ONLY need those spec.
He said cite it -- not recite it.
Read the parent -- he never attributed that statement to Bill Gates. You just assumed and flamed him :)
that's the beauty of linux. I can run the LATEST software on my celeron 433 pc with 256mb of ram, 6 gb harddrive, no problems. Longhorn will be the death of microsoft, as more companies will switch to Linux rather than upgrading thousands of PC's.
It's All Politics
it sounds like what the tech evangelist from microsoft spewed at my school so probably it is
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Frankly I find this part to be the most unusual. Some of the others are coming around a bit (as another poster mentioned many recent motherboards have gigabit ethernet built in), but why on Earth does the system use both wired and wireless networking? Especially considering that the specs state 802.11g when a more recent wireless technology could very well show up by then. It also tends to be a bit short-sighted as the massive installed base of 802.11b these days really doesn't seem to give people much incentive to change. Perhaps I'm totally wrong, but I was under the impression that most hotspots are using 802.11b which won't drive consumers out to buy new wireless cards especially since I doubt most are even using the full bandwidth of those.
I can see some benefits to having both wired and wireless in one system, but to expect that to be standard is a bit crazy.
I'm reminded of the famous quote:
"Windows and the Mac OS have advocates. Linux has apologists."
That's because you ran it before during your current boot and a large amount of the application was stored in free RAM for the next launch. OS X does that.
Because none of these resources were confirmed by anything. They were projected guesses by the guys who wrote it.
:P
But, hey, nothing beats a good chance to assume rumors are fact in order to bash "M$" some more, right? Meanwhile, let's take 9 seconds to load OpenOffice...
They need all that storage and horsepower to power the DRM crypto that will keep you from running "unapproved" OS's on the next-gen hardware.
Microsoft's utterances have an effect similar to Greenspan's mumblings and Buffet's flatus.
Which is a shame; will the market ever mature to the point where actual product, not hints and wishful thinking, matter?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Hi. When someone asks why Mozilla loads slower than IE, and you respond by raging impotently at Microsoft, that's when you cross the line from "helpful" to "apologizing for Linux's mediocrity." HTH.
I see you have removed eggs, milk, and butter. Do you want to bake a cake?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Because you never do any serious research on the web, nobody else needs to?
/. discussion without some incoherent ramblings thrown in.
No one needs that many tabs open - the function is better served with bookmarks. In fact, you can even bookmark sets of tabs (tab 1-n) as one bookmark!
So bugs are OK, as long as they only affect other people in their productivity?
It's not a bug. Just like it's not a bug that I can't use my $500 computer to host multiple terabytes of RAID drives. If it were as overpowered as you seem to think it should be, it might be more crash prone, and it would certainly be more bloated.
Actually, Firefox is designed to browse the web. That's why it's called a web browser. The memory leaks and the crashing are not intentional. This is called a bug. [...] So Firefox isn't supposed to be a web browser? Better go and tell the developers then.
And it does browse, quite well. But rational use is necessary. Is it rational to complain that OpenOffice runs slowly when I have 50+ documents open? No. Just as your complaint is not rational.
Not that it would bother you, obviously. [...] I guess it wouldn't really be a
Ad hominem meter is now pinned.
I don't know what to say about this, really. Do you suffer from narcolepsy?
Ad hominem, AND insulting to those folks who actually do have narcolepsy or similar conditions - I don't have it myself, but I know it sucks big time. Not a laughing matter.
Yeah, I know. IHBT. IHL. HAND.
If I go nuts and decide to open every program on my machine, or listen to my whole mp3 collection at the same time, while lens flaring every photo I've ever taken, I don't want to wait. Ever.
I may be using extreme examples, but the OS should be instant. I'm still amazed at what BeOS can do on 233 pentium. Why can't today's Windows do that? Why won't tomorrow's? Why does it take 20 minutes to copy a 14 meg file on my OS X machine.
Instant. Now. I want it now, and I want it yesterday. Specs be dammed.
FireFox takes just as long to load as Mozilla on my computer. Mozilla has gotten much faster lately. It opens in under 4 seconds on my Athlon XP 1800+
MS probably has an agreement with the big hardware vendors. You install our DRM crap and we'll make it mandatory for everyone to get a new computer.
With the typical microsoft release delays I'll probably have a system like that running on my watch by the time windows 20XD6 (codename longhorn) is released.
ôó
I can install Windows 98 in under 200MB. WinXP takes up about 1.5GB (also according to MS' system requirements, so I don't know where you get 2.5GB from). My Windows Server 2003 Standard install takes up 1.5GB and so does Windows 2000 Professional with all the latest patches applied. A clean install of 2K is much less than that.
If a user installs every imaginable option then yes it may take that much. But I highly doubt it.
1 Terrabyte of storage isn't that rediculous. With all things digital from music to video to games, 1TB of storage will probably be pretty common. I have around a 500GB of storage available on various harddrives.
It fills up quickly with all my photos being archived in high quality and VHS tapes being digitized.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
What matters is that he and his companies designed software that way. Whether he actually uttered those exact works or not makes little difference.
What this is really about is the question of whether the man and the company reached their current position through technical competence or through business acumen and luck. I think it's pretty clear that it's the latter.
I'm using an AMD 2600+, 512m ram, 40g HD. Out of every person I know (familly, friends, work) I have the most powerful PC. Yet they all have PCs. They have P3s, P2s, Pentiums, and so on. Simple fact of life is that if you step out of the "tech" crowd just by 1 foot you see that people upgrade their system less than their cars. People still buy used 486s. They get pissed off when a program doesn't work on their 3 years old almost-new PC. So it will be many, many years until the "average" PC is like that, unless by average you mean average for a tech or CS college student.
Being the Porn Baron I am, I could use a terabyte of storage.
Please flee in terror in an orderly manner.
She canna' take it captain! We doon't have the power!
fucking microserf
I've got a starting set of 9 tabs and as i read through articles and posts i'll open referenced pages in new tabs. I'll then go through the tabs later and read the referenced material. Some of those tabs i'll close when i'm done reading, others i'll keep open so i can show them to my girlfriend later in the day.
When i'm researching something i'll often keep several windows open on the subject at once. I currently have seven tabs open on pages about Venus and the effects of a planet's tilt on seasons/climate as reference to an idea for a science fiction novel someone is working on.
Got another three or four tabs open to statistics and a message board for an online game i play. I usually check in on it ever three or four hours, so i tend to just leave them open.
Once you start to multitask it all really adds up quick.
As for opening time, after first rebooting my computer Netscape usually takes between 10 and 30 seconds to open, depending on how grumpy my laptop is feeling. Of course part of that is because i told it not to pre-load its components. IE opens in about five seconds. Once i've used them both the both re-load in a second or two. Or are you talking about the individual loading of pages? The only serious problem i've noticed is that sometimes i need to load a page twice because the first time it will time out, but on the second attempt it loads right away. I have no idea if that's a problem with Netscape or a problem with my ISP however.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
An OS manufacturer suggesting such a hard drive storage requirement would suggest in turn that not only the OS is going to grow significantly, but also all the other applications that MS want you to isntall are also going to grow significantly. Presumably the terabyte storage is so that they can still say "our stuff is only using 1% of your diskspace". But anyway. People keep going on about the OS requirements as if it is such a terrible thing that the OS would need so much hardware engine to make it go. My question is "Why not?". I have my PC here and the only thing that even begins to drive it is the latest 3D shooter. I am going to have all that power sitting there for that reason, so why shouldn't the OS utilise it? I for one am sick of these 2D windows with slow redraw times. This is my working environment. I want it to look good. I want it to give at least as good a visual impression as a game. Now I don't mean that I want to run down a corridor to find my finance spreadsheet, but some flexibility in the front end would be such a boon. Whatever the validity of that mostly suspect spec - it is just a prediction at best - I would like to see a breed of OSs that allow you to commit the resources you have available to you toward the process of getting stuff done, rather than have them sitting idle waiting for the next time you pull up Doom III. koan
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I have little consideration for these kinds of arguments, mainly because they're unduly paranoid, but also because they don't take into account the reality of the market.
The fact is, replacing every router on the Internet would be a gargantuan task. Furthermore, $BIGCORP doesn't want mandatory Longhorn adoption - they'd have to pay to update their own systems. Upgrading a 100 seat network is a pain... 5000 seats is damn near impossible without a lot of money, time, and headaches.
Imagine replacing every sysem on the Internet and rebuilding all that infrastructure - we're talking about tens of billions of dollars and millions upon millions of man-hours of labor.
In other words, it's not going to happen, except in the minds of the paranoid.
There's an early scene where the crew is coming out of hibernation and a computer screen is slowly scrolling text. One of the partygores said, "One hundred years from now and they still haven't done anything about how slow Windows boots up?"
Someone piped up, "Of course they've done something - they're shipping a hibernation unit with each copy!"
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
1 Terabyte disk space seems a little rediculous
My media server has >1TB of disk space. I call it "comfy".
Da Blog
Correct, The other one, which I was refering to and missed being canceled when the UltraSPARC V was code named "Gemini" which was to US 2 cores on a die as a low end part. Register article about Gemini and the Mass core kill off
I use Slackware, build my own kernels and use Enlightenment as my WM. You could say Im a 'hard core' linux user. Yet firefox does leak. Its much better than IE for sure but don't blind yourself into thinking that its perfect. I hope that by 1.0 it will be 99% perfect however!
Learn lisp today!
I'm using firefox on a toshiba libretto...233MHz pentium with 64MB of ram. Runs fine. Of course, the little guy is running linux (Mandrake 9.1, windowmaker).
Of course we need 2 gigs of RAM! How else could we run the new and improved animated Paperclip?
every customer I have will ask the following question.. "So, with this leenux thing, we can just re-use some of these old boxes and get great performance and stuff? At least for a few years right? And you say we only need to really just buy one copy of it to fund the folks who put it out.. so $50-$100 and we're set right?"
To which I will say "um, yeah.. I wouldn't bother with the Longhorn crap until you absolutely have to, and by then some linux coder will have built most of the compatibility you are looking for"...
Alternately, they'll say "What kind of linux box can we run if we skip buying Longhorn.."
meh
If you will note, the story gives the source of the minimum specs as:
"developer sources close to the company"
So if the author article defines "developer" and "close" as loosely as she did "source", this little tidbit of minimum specification could could have come from pretty much anywhere.
It's worthless anti-MS FUD like this, backed up by absolutely no journalistic integrity that tarnishes the image of slashdot.
To blog is sublime
"No air cooling system in the world can handle that sort of heat density."
Rubbish. To keep a processor at a reasonable working temperature (lets say 45 degrees Centigrade), assuming an ambient temperature of 25 degrees C, you would need a heatsink rated better than 0.2 degrees/Watt (without fan cooling). Such heatsinks are common, are used in audio amplifiers and large linear power supplies, and can be bought for less than $25 from good electronic stores.
That's not to say that a heatsink that size isn't a problem for a neat tower case, but dissipating that kind of heat is not unheard of, and certainly not impossible. However, without improvements in the chip technologies the days of processors being a seperate module to the mainboard may be numbered.
Do you suffer from narcolepsy?
No, but I got crabs in my goatee from your dad's hairy ass.... oh wait, sorry... I thought you just wanted to try and see who could be the better troll.
Anyway, ignoring the fact that you wrapped up with "I'm not smart enough to counter with anything intelligent, so I'll just sling a random, dull insult".... Honestly, if you're going to throw insults, make them interesting so someone at least gets a chuckle.
Now then, we've established that fact, let's get down to the responses you made that either put words in my mouth or responded to things I didn't say.... I..... wait.. that's your whole post.
I'm not going to bother responding with intelligent counters because this post by magefile already does that, and I don't feel a need to duplicate the work. The only thing I'll add is that while it might well be a bug, if it only occurs when you abuse the tool well beyond reasonable limits, it should be prioritized appropriately. I, of course, am assuming that this is either already a known bug, or you've submitted it as a new one... right? Mods, please mod up the linked post.
All that said, I find your lack of intelligent banter to be something of a disappointing testimony on the average quality of today's universities and private colleges (unless, of course, you're just below average) if you're the caliber of student that makes it far enough to write this deeply involved of a thesis.
Go ahead, troll. Beat that.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Imagine UT2004 on that system!
--pete
What, you mean this?
Bigger plan is to invalidate all existing applications when you upgrade, and require 100% new hardware, to get hardware-level MS-DRM on every machine.
Sure you don't *have* to upgrade, but when you cant read ANY documents from ANYONE else due to lack of 'trusted pathways' you will be isolated, and loose customers... And of course, if you need new windows based software, it wont run on any versions of windows we have currently.
Once business rolls over on new versions, its just a matter of time before home users will, by default. And of course any new purchases will have longhorn, since you wont even be able to install a 'retro' version on the newer hardware and expect it to boot ( or be legal ) due to the DRM/Trusted limitations at the bios level....
And of course we have the 'network security' issues too, now that the governments have declared that the internet is 'essential'. So expect some mandates from congress in the next year or so... Especially with all these worms wreaking havoc.
I have a feeling the 'battle' for open computing may be about over, and looks like we may loose...
Who 20 years ago would have dreamed we would be at this point? My how things have changed..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So much for your SlashFUD.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Just when DV, has been busy graduating to HDTV and about when SHDTV is getting started, rendering megamachines shall be hitting the road.
Imagine the juice such machines will have.
One box renderfarms.
First thing - they 'leak' some astronomical base hardware requirement.
Then, when they get close to release they publish something more optimistic.
Finally, they claim that the product launch is a success because the hardware requirements are not as steep as peoples expectations (which they set artifically high in the first place).
It's just marketing - get over it.
You're thinking too small. If it did have 180 IQ: It'd learn to STFU. And with 4-6 GHz chips ... it'd do so in record time.
Or, heck, maybe it can get wine working in Linux for me.
To run that, I'll have to sell half of my house! :)
Anyone willing to buy my mom? Cooks like heaven, it's a litte annoying sometimes, and comes with a doggie called Zelda (not sold separatelly)
:: Andrea
Anime Wallpapers
Sounds like a dodgy source to me. Unless the source was actually hinting at how long it's really going to take for Longhorn to be released....
C-x C-s C-x k
640k is still plenty enough for Longhorn. 640k x 10^4 that is.
Only a developer can take advantage of all this stupid XML driven GUI development, WinFS, Indigo and .NET all rolled into one. I think this is going to be a huge mistake for Microsoft, because people have gotten to the point where they are sick and tired of paying 450-1000.00 for an ugly box when their old system is just fine for what they do.
One of the major reasons we are moving towards a transition to linux from windows is:
a) XP is expensive, even by volume licensing an organization with 1000+ machines is a costly thing to licence
b) Most of our machines won't run XP. They won't run win2k very well
c) Upgrading/replacing all our machines to run a new OS is more expensive than the OS. Moreover, with the MS track record, by the time it was done there would be a new OS.
Cue in Longhorn, I think this will be even moreso. It's not just the cost of the OS businesses can't afford, it's the hardware required to run the damn thing... not to mention the dependability/security issues. If not for our linux servers offering protection from the outside world, we'd be sasser'ed nicely too if we ran a lot of winXP machines.
Longhorn still sounds to me like Cairo - the "next generation, object oriented file system-based OS" promised in '94. Give it a 15 year development cycle (2009) and Moore's law makes this not implausable. All that OO thinking must take a lot of cpu cycles.
You can by 1 terabyte of IDE 7200 RPM disk for $800 now (Maxtor - WD is $200 more for the tb) at CompUSA.
I just wonder if they expect you to RAID it so it doesn't have to be backed up?
Well, the icon's nice, anyway.
C-x C-s C-x k
"Hey, I have 25 open tabs right now. Why is that insane? Granted, Mozilla can't take it,"
Huh? OK, I'll bite. I up the ante, posting this with 30 tabs open in Mozilla Firefox, with no problems whatsoever.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
*spelling
*errors
The Longhorn DRM / security security system places unusual demands on the hardware. The DRM / security system uses dynamic encryption / decryption of every file. It also needs to generate new keys constantly for all files
Oddly enough, a single error in the file description of any file can cause encryption / decryption failure as well as loss of all security keys. This problem would extend to file backups. Items producing this error include user set flags in commonly downloaded file types.
Note well that the proposed hardware system requirement is for middle range users. The Longhorn / proposed hardware system may be no faster than current middle range XP / hardware combinations.
You must be running a PIII. PII only goes up to 450 MHz. http://developer.intel.com/design/PentiumII/prodbr ef/
Unless of course you overclocked a 450MHz PII to 600 MHz by using some sort of refrigeration and water cooling that is...this IS slashdot, so I wouldn't put it past you...I was never able to get mine much above 500MHz without spontaneous reboots...PIIs don't scale well.
But yeah, my old PIII 800 with 512MB ram running debian (woody) runs mozilla quite nicely. Some people are just beyond help.
I mean really, it's a freakin web browser. If you can't even setup a relatively modern system such that a web browser runs smoothly, you shouldn't be visiting this site. You should just go home, take your computer(s), put them back in the boxes and take them back to the store to return them. And when the guys at the returns department asks whats wrong with them, just tell them that you're too stupid to own a computer.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
I am posting with Safari which has about five windows open, each with about 20 tabs.
.. err ... better than yours)
Beat that!
(My browser is bigger
- - - - - - -
Orppf urp mf y.ppcxn. yflcbi otcnnov C am yflcbi yr n.apb Ekrpatv (Dvorak -> Qwerty)
I tried starting three web browsers on this machine (MacOS X 10.3, 256MB RAM, 933 MHz G4 iBook). Just for laughs.
Internet Explorer 5.2 -- 5 seconds
Firefox 0.8 -- 6 seconds
Safari 1.2.1 -- 11 seconds
What does this tell me? More or less nothing, because, in the first place, I only start a browser once a day, if that. In the second, Firefox has bugs and IE just doesn't do tabs. So, frankly, load time isn't important.
And while I was at it, I made them all display a series of miscelaneous sites. Safari shaves seconds off the time the other two take. So I guess load time REALLY DOESN'T MATTER.
Everything I've heard on this is that he did actually say it but it was taken out of context. Apparently, if you were in the conversation it made perfect sense. Something like 640 k ought to ben enough for this thing we are working on or it is enough for what you are showing me right now. That sorta thing...
I think when someone told them to
'Write the Phattest Code, man...'
they misunderstood...
Um - I'll take the hardware, now can I get some Linux to go with that?
I'd rather not bog down the whole system trying to LOAD the
'Mother of all OSes'...
Basically, they're saying that no current consumer PC will be able to run Longhorn. Given recent trends, it's not unreasonable to expect that most/all consumer hardware will ship with embedded DRM capabilities. Is this not exactly what MS wants?
Who doesn't like free music?
Moore's law predicts approx. double every 18 months, nowadays we are looking at avg 2~4GHz CPUs, so by 2007, it should be avg. 8~16GHz.
800GB harddisks shall have the price of today's 200GB.
But then, what is that pair of 16GHz CPUs doing during that whole 1 minute boot? Trying to detect non-existance plug and play hardware? Scanning and analysing your harddisk for traces of evidents of using privated MS software/childpron/linux distros? Uploading your My Documents folder to the MS CRM server for analysis for better-customer-support? Waiting to get authorization-to-use(tm) from the forever-under-DDOS Microsoft server?
Years ago, I am pretty sure I had a handful of AVI files of Bill Gates... from him saying "Cool!" to the infamous 640K quote and one of him saying that OS/2 is the operating system for the 1990s.
One of these days, I will have to dig through my old sub-100MB hard drives and see if I can recover any interesting stuff.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
;P
Longhorn upgrades will mean when I dumpster dive for my next work station I can do much,much better than a Pent 166MMX.
Must remember to thank Bill for XP release and all my free linux boxes.
Great tools do only ONE thing, but do that ONE thing very, very well.
You call that making perfect sense? Was it even english?
Ok, but to this I say - "Apple Mac".
Seriously, if there was ever a strong argument for buying today's PowerMac system, it's got to be for video editing.
The G5 systems support up to 8GB of RAM, and it's not at all uncommon to find people configuring them with at least 2GB - 4GB right now. (Because quite frankly, it's not really that costly to do so using 512MB PC3200 DIMMs. They have 8 slots on their board.)
I've done video editing from a DV camcorder on my Pentium 4, and believe me, I get *much* more accomplished without crashes and hassles using Final Cut Express or even iMovie with some 3rd. party plug-ins. Don't forget, Steve Jobs owns Pixar, along with being Apple's C.E.O. That means he's VERY attuned to the needs of movie producers and editors. His systems practically revolve around it. So I'm only concerned with what Apple does, when it comes to a need for more CPU, RAM or disk space + video editing, and I suspect I'm in the majority in that particular niche of the market.
In 2006, chances are I will still be using a Pentium II @ 350 mhz, running FreeBSD.
Why don't you just restart your browser each day? And there can be no good reason to keep 40 tabs open. Face it, it not the browser, its you.
Because most of us dont want to settle to restarting an App every day or reformating every month. We don't want cheap windows workarounds, we want software that works.
Its 2004 now, so very difficult to buy any less than U160. I was only trying to indicate that I not using some 5 year old drive.
The question needs to be asked as to whether or not these specifications are simply the expectation that Microsoft has for PCs at the time of Longhorn's release or actual recommended specifications for the OS required to make it run decently. If the first is true, they're just being optomistic and this is all FUD. It is possible that the average PC at the time of release will have all of the things listed, so maybe the comment was a sort of "think how great Longhorn systems will be" instead of a "don't try it with anything less." Additionally, these specs could be ideas on the way computers will be used with this OS. This does not mean that the OS itself will require such hardware, but in order to take full advantage of some of the features it offers (PVR, etc.), the average user will want this type of setup. I didn't see this point made very clearly anywhere else, but I think it is important so we don't misinterpret a harmless statement of optomism as one of hardware-munching madness.
Well, I'm sure I've got out of bed and posted this thought way to late for any good responses... however...
It would be interesting to look at global market boom-bust cycles and use these to evaluate when MS is going to release longhorn and its' next armarda of operating systems for maximum profitability. I believe we are starting to move into the next stockmarket boom period, here in Australia anyway. The rest of the western world can't be all that far away from us. As the equity markets boom and money flows into them, productivity needs to increase and ms-windows is an excellent short cut to helping increase productivity, forget linux for the moment, linux is a longterm investment. Windows-longhorn and its decendents will create more profit in a boyant marketplace. 2008 might be a good time to start pushing/selling longhorn when the equity market starts to get ahead... similar things happened with NT4 release dates IIRC and if my theory is tracking along sane lines...
Any thoughts? or did I really sleep in and miss the boat...
Does it go on forever?
My favorite HTML rendering feature of IE is when you set a DIV 100% width and it goes to about 90%.
I also really enjoy how you have to use a DirectX filter plugin in order to render PNGs with transparency.
Well, I thought the article was spreading nothing but a rumor about the specs for Longhorn, and insulting the intelligence of the reader. I would understand if the source was a linux freak, but I don't think "a source close to Microsoft" would say something that seems such an exaggeration.
Errm.. if a WinXP box has the default settings for 'System Restore', then all of the changes made to the hard drive (ever) are probably being stored as part of the drive contents (hidden away, sort-of) and the space that uses defaults to a percentage of the drive space. If somebody does something that uses intermediate files that stick around past the periodic mirroring of disk changes to that 'restore' space, such as a browser cache, then yes, a basic system can be using that much disk. And it won't show on a simple "dir /s c:\" (but it will show up as space used on the disk properties).
If the hard drive is 80Gb - common - then I'd expect to see that sort of usage after a few months of use.
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
I have a brand new athlon64 with 512 megs of ram and SATA RAID1 10k drives,
So far Netscape/Mozilla loads in 2 seconds. The problem is not the software, its the hardware. RAID should be the standard setup, and it should be raid 0+1
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
quoting the Boston Herald can also be taken as a sign of ignorance, its really more of a tabloid than a paper...
Kinds of makes me miss the old 16k TRS80-Model I. The old word processor and printer worked ok. No fancy graphics, etc, but this is real progress.....
those configuration requirements sound like my current system.
fucking linidiot.
My Athlon64 512 megs of ram with 10kRPM SATA RAID drives, takes 2 seconds to start.
People just need to buy better harddrive setups. All software will load instantly if you have RAID, good CPU and decent amount of ram. Not to mention you can install applications instantly. It's the hardware which controls the speed of the software. Instead of worrying about the speed it runs on the slowest computer they should just make us upgrade.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
...is a thing of the past,
There was an unknown error in the submission.
That wasn't whistling, it was his cell-mate helping him squeal like a piggy.
of course, all this is necessary for running outlook express, right?
That's to make sure that no one installs bootleg copies of Longhorn on legacy equipment is to make sure that legacy equipment can't run it. You can't (easily) buy a PC without it.
This is a boring sig
What do you mean Monty Python isn't real? Come on! Next you would try to make us believe Life Of Brian wasn't biblic.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Bill Gates never said that. Urban legend.
Which means it should be on the shelves by December 2009
loyalty above all, save honor
Yeah, but does it run linux?
Thank you, I'll be here all night
Having read TFA, it seems Microsoft is also using "Lonestar" for their tablet edition of XP, which adds on top of the already Western-sounding "Longhorn".
Then a bunch of other codenames are listed, seeming to be a mishmash of various other cultural/mythical references, for example "Avalon", "Janus", "Athens" and "Cobra".
To me this sounds remarkably like Tarantino's Kill Bill vol2 which was a somewhat epilleptic combination of many elements, with an underlying western theme. All of these other codenames mentioned will be based on the underlying "Longhorn" Western themed Kernel.
We may hope for it, but I doubt if we'll get to see anyone kill Bill.
I would be seriously interested in hearing what other people would use a 64-bit 6GHz processor with a terabyte harddisk and gigabyte of RAM for?
I could see having the drive size for storage of 10000 CDs or a few hundred of your favorite movies. I asked the same question about five years ago about a 10 Gig hard disk and the most common reply was to store all your music recordings on your PC. That's what I'm doing now.
I would like to see high quality language translation cheaply available. Language translation seems to have five levels. Level one is a word by word dictionary look-up. Level two is phrase translation inside sentences. Level three would translate whole sentences and compare them to other sentences in the paragraph. Level four would catch most idioms and ensure that the paragraphs made sense in the destination language and level five would be equalivent to a modern professional translation.
This is just my WAG on the subject. But it seems that the web translators like SysTranCom and Babelfish are working on level two. I wonder if a 6 GigHz CPU and 1 GigRAM box would be able to do OCR on Arabic and also translate to English. I would think that Arabic to be the hardest language to do Optical Char Recognition on because the syntatic elements are linked together.
I wonder if 6 GigCPU with 1GigRAM would be able to do speech-to-text better than today's Dragon Systems and IBM. A $50 hand held box that does level four translation from speech in one language to synthetic speech in a second language would be a great goal to hope for. But I don't think these devices will be around for another 15 years, at least at $50 US.
Another wish-for would be audio remixing of commercial music. Hate that stupid guitar solo or dumb background vocal? Then just phase-lock onto it and remove it.
How about a comment compilier? Toss the source and do linguistic analysis on the code's comments. Then have the comment compilier create the source according to what the designer wants.
If it's not right, then do another interation until it gets closer. C language is so primitive: it's a legacy from the days when RAM was tiny little metal beads woven into a grid that doubled as a spaghetti strainer and CPUs acted as room heaters.
What are your thoughts? What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
Let me guess....
Ultra Porn
and Games
Using the word "meme" makes you look like you got kicked out of k5 or dailykos.
this one,
this one,
this one,
this one,
this one,
as well as this one
already do that, and I don't feel a need to duplicate the work. BTW, these are non-troll posts, as opposed to the one you linked to. Oh yeah, this, this and this are the relevant Bugzilla entries. Of course all these people are abusing the poor browser, right?
All that said, I find it quite odd that you wouldn't use the tab feature extensively, considering this post of yours (the avatar suits you). But maybe you just play Everquest all the time.
OTOH, I had a look at your site, and all you have there is some IE specific JavaScript stuff, and you also mention that you use IE as your browser ... strange, huh?
Thanks for sparing me the slew of obscenities, BTW. Oops, no you didn't ... too bad. Well, maybe you can say some nice things about my mother in your reply?
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Should have pre-viewed! It is a Gateway Solo Pro 9300 PIII- 600. Darn thing runs hot enough without thinking of overclocking, if even possible on a functional laptop.
Mepis is based on Debian sarge, and with reiserfs and partitioning, disk access is fast enough that loading Mozilla is not an issue.
Ahhh, but they are still working on it! Soon it will surpass emacs altogether, check out Bugzilla Bug 122411.
4 11
/. referrers are blocked.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122
Copy'n'paste because
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
You might have a point if Windows XP did boot slow but it boots a hell of a lot faster than any of the Linux distributions out of the box, and if you spend time disabling stuff you don't need (as you would with those same Linux distributions) it's still way faster.
You're one of those people that last used Windows when it was called 98...
I do a lot of repair work for everyday users. While they currently *sell* 3+ Ghz computers on average, that doesn't mean that is the average computer *in use*. People are simply not upgrading unless they have to. The 'average' computer I work on is about a 500mhz Celeron.
You see, people who aren't slashdot reading techies only upgrade their computers when their is a tangible benefit. I.e. they need to upgrade to use their new digital camera, or upgrade so they can get a new cd burner. There really are a scant few people out there who bought a computer at best buy and now feel they need an upgrade.
Interestingly, this is not true of cell phones. I know of 3 people who cannot explain to me why they replaced their cell phone with a newer $150+ model. I'm not talking picture phones, I'm talking these people were attracted to basically the pretty pictures on the color phone.
Just odd.
-- I have fans? Wow.
The one of him saying "Cool" is a little 160x160 or so RLE-encoded AVI that was part of the Microsoft Multimedia Pack for Win3.11... came with my old Packard Bell.
And why the hell do I still remember that.....
to "Longshot", given requirements like those :-)
(Moore's law not withstanding)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
IE defaults its cache to a certain percent of the entire hard disk. On a modern 80 gig disk, the cache alone would be 8gb after a few months on a default install. Programs exist (PurgeIE) to get rid of "stray" cache files that IE loses track of (but could still get you indicted).
Have you ever gone around in the cache? The same page saved in twenty different folders. Individual text files for *each* cookie. Whoever designed this program is absolutely batshit insane.
10. The recycle truck has already taken away your old p.c.
9. You're thankful for getting that Bush tax cut.
8. Bill Gates has never steered you wrong before.
7. A general willingness to bend over.
6. You will dance but wont, because people stare.
5. The liquid nitrogen for the cooling system has arrived.
4. You won't even ask for a reach around.
3. No back bone
2. Fat wallet
1. No Brain
Now, my Celeron 1.2 on the other hand...
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
It seems wasteful to require all that RAM just to get screen animation effects - but the same was thought about color displays at one time.
Would the WWW have caught on so quickly, if we hadn't had color graphics? Without color graphics, would PC games have ever really taken off? Sometimes you have to throw resources at a problem in order to break through to the next level.
If I were to guess, I'd say that the MS back-buffer/front buffer scheme might enable a useful VR work environment, and for home entertainment it may mean PCs have the resources to handle VR glasses and head and body tracking.
Still, I would have thought Microsoft might want to support 8bit application window buffers - most of the time that's all a spreadsheet or word processor needs, and the application could switch to a full color window if a photo was pasted in.
That'd let office systems be a bit cheaper or use larger virtual windows. Doing a table-lookup during the blend from app frame buffer to screen wouldn't be a huge deal, so they wouldn't sacrifice any Windowing functionality.
Of course, they'd have to have graphics code for 8 bit as well as 32bit windows - but code bloat has hardly stopped them before.
As far as I'm concerned, XML is great for non-wire processes. things you read once at start up and be done with it is great. I wouldn't want to use XML as any sort of protocol to access files, databases or network IO if I can avoid it. Unless all systems come with a dedicated XML accelerator, then it's fine. Maybe MS should buy up one of the XML accelerator companies out there and make it requirement for WinHEC.
Jeese, if it weren't for the mention of MS and LongHorn, I would've sworn that the system requirements described were those required to comfortably run IBM's Eclipse Software Development tool.
Isnt this the same Babble you nix folks and Novell lovers shouted about regarding Windows NT versus Mmmm...well the command line and things like Novell 3.1.
Perhaps your attitudes toward progression is why windows is moving swiftly into the Enterprise and beyond.
I mean its been 20 years and you folks still froth over the same old lame crutch complaints. You have to give MS credit, they dont stand still and stay stagnant.
Where the fuck did you retards get the word "requirements" from? It's not mentioned in the article at all. If anything the blurb was just some guy making a comment as to what the PC world may look like in the 3 years it takes to bring the product to market. It's not Bill Gates claiming that minimum resources that the OS will require in order to operate. Get over yourselves you fucking zealots.
ive been sucessfully running the Longhorn alpha/beta/whatever for a few months on 1.2ghz athlon with 1.5gb ram and a geforce 2 mx400... i think its just what microsoft would LIKE for you to be running... longhorn actually has a smaller footprint once you tweak the services/etc than XP does on the same machine...
And then there was E
Elementary, Mozilla ain't cheating.
IE has most of its DLLs loaded with the OS. And when you install MS Office, it does the same thing. So many other companies follow this terrible example, and this is how you end up needing 2GB in the first place.
Mozilla is kind, and does not pre-load itself. Give em a break if it appears to take a little while longer to start.
For the record, I have no idea what Opera is doing.
Yeah, just like khttp. next
Gates never said that.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
you people are so blinded by your hatred of microsoft that it clouds your common sense. i am completely serious when i way this inability to look at issues like this objectively will stunt your careers. these are not going to be system requirements. why the hell would a wireless connection by an OS requirement? or Gigabit as a requirement? nonsense. rather, microsoft if planning on releasing the next release of the worlds most popular consumer OS in about 2 years. figure a good 5 years shelf life. MS has to gamble on their interpretation on trends of how people use their PCs, trends in hardware availability, other industry changes, etc. i can honestly see the average system having these kinds of specs in a few years, and i can see people using them. i'm also certain that the OS requirements will be much less, although the memory requirements will be shocking. if you honestly think microsoft is going to require a TB of disk and the latest and greatest graphics card for business users, you need to get a clue.
Does the Linux kernel having a built in web server count for anything?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
with all the viruses, worms and spyware/adware spreading around these days, ppl. need such computing power to play solitaire with no lag O_o.
Won't somebody please think of the Karma!
Wait 'til you have kids. Then you'll be right into the home video and video editing.
Why do these computer specs remind me of the way the US auto industry was in the mid 1970's, when right after the country had just gotten thru an "energy crisis", yet cars like the 1976 Ford Thunderbird still weighed in at about 5000 lbs and came with the most sluggish, inefficient low compression, gas-guzzling 460 cubic inch bigblock V-8's/
The only thing I'll add is that while it might well be a bug, if it only occurs when you abuse the tool well beyond reasonable limits, it should be prioritized appropriately.
Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to deterministic state machines like computers. If a program has a memory leak, it's still there when someone's running one pooty little tab.
He actually sold a system that had a 640k memory limit. That's worth a million words.
Last anyone has heard of him, he's writing articles about lap dogs targeted at overweight Southern women in their 50's. He's found that to be a much easier demographic to impress than 12 year old HaX0r wannabees.
Remember Junis and his Commodore 64 in Afghanistan? After we called shenanigans on his tall tale, he decided to find an easier way to make a living.
Don't mod me down, this is a semi-true story. It has only been embellished a little bit.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
Find someone who cites it to him and see if they give a when and where.
The sources I've seen usually say PC world, 1981. That should be easy enough to verify.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's obvious that no-one here has seen Star Trek!
On that sort of hardware, even Mac OS X 10.0 would seem peppy.
Not to sound all knowledgeable or anything, but I'm soon to purchase a USB enclosure for drives so that I won't have to shut down to do that.
Slashdoters inability to read. Even in the description of the article it says that this is what Microsoft projects a common computer will be about the time Longhorn is released. These are NOT system requirements of Longhorn.
A common new computer when XP came out was about a 1.4GHz If I recall correctly, but the system requirements are 400MHz...
Just some food for thought.
1) Windows 2003 as a "router box"? What are you protecting? A honeypot? (Does a day go by without word of yet another windows virus/worm/problem? I thought the statistics folks were quoting somewhere around 20-30 NEW bugs/viruses/worms per DAY. Most not being widespread, of course.)
2) I HAVE installed Linux on a 25 Mhz 486 with 16 Megs of RAM. It's no big deal. Installation was absolutely trivial!(*) Recognized all my network cards and other hardware right out of the box. Pretty much a plain-jane default install. Had all my compiler tools. Network mounted drives. Awk. Perl. Tcsh. Ssh. Even ran Apache.
(*) Well, there was one little problem: The motherboard wouldn't recognize my CDROM drive. But once I told BIOS it didn't have a CDROM drive, it would boot. And Linux, being Linux, would automatically ignore the BIOS settings, find the CDROM, and use it just fine.
3) $300 for a new system? Try $158.98 a box. Or $248 for a faster system with harddrive & CD-ROM.
Don't forget to add another $200 for Windows XP Pro.
Those "typo" patches that you dismiss so casually are precisely the advantage of open source.4)
The ability to view the actual source code, to change it however you feel like to suit your current needs, is invaluable for developers. It allows you to understand precisely what is going on all the way down to the iron.
Frequently, this "many eyes" approach to understanding the system results in improvements, both large and small. Inefficiencies are corrected. Bugs are fixed, rather than worked around. Changes are submitted back up. Rarely, projects are forked.
It's a very Darwinian environment. All that matters are your results. You can work on any aspect your little heart desires. From architecture to device drivers. You just have to produce quality work.
You mention thousands of developers on Windows. I'm just curious: How many people do you think it takes to write a line of code? Or to create an architecture? 'Cause, you know, my computer only has one keyboard... (Though emacs can display the same buffer in multiple windows on different machines... But we're talking windows here, not UNIX.)
5) Longhorn, 2008: Microsoft claimed a lot of features for Longhorn. Last I heard, they had gone the Dilbert route, and shifted those features to the "Future Development" column. Thereby moving up the date.
On the other hand, having witnessed Microsoft's amazing abilities to stick to a time-table with win95a, win95b, win95c, win98, win98se, winME, winNT, win2000, winXP, etc...
Yah. 2008. Maybe.
And don't forget to add another year or two on, to let them get the kinks out... Somewhere around Longhorn-Service-Pack-TWO it ought to become usable.
It was only put there in the 2.4 kernel to boost static page speed rates, and was really meant as a demonstration.
khttpd was removed in the 2.5 kernel.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yeah, that will go down, right next to Billy G's "all anyone ever needs is 640K" quote.
You must not be doing real computing, like the rest of us.
1) Faster computers
2) ?
3) Profit!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It doesn't "appear" to take longer to start; it really does take longer. Loading stuff while the computer would just be idle (in other words, 99% of the time for a typical desktop computer) isn't cheating, it's simply good sense.
Anyway, as I said, I'm not using Winders, and I'm not using any of the preload tricks. The seven and three-and-a-half numbers are the real startup times.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Considering I just went to xp this month, I kindof doubt I'll be running longhorn as my primary os before my computer is actually running those specs. Ok, so I've actually tried running it in virtualpc but performance wasn't so hot. If I had only known I needed to give it 4 GHz and a gig of ram!
This is an anti-piracy measure by Microsoft. Since everyone will be downloading the OS a week before it's officially released anyway, they figured they'd get some dough out of your bank account by forcing you to upgrade your hardware. Think of your next computer as a cash dongle.
No comments about the rest, but I frequently use up to 50 tabs in Konqueror. It's great to follow many links for later perusal, such as off the slashdot homepage.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Oh yeah? Well I distinctly recall you admitting that you were a giant asshole.
Bill is just attempting to insure his shares of Intel go up since there is no real need for this type of power on a desktop.
How else are you going to insure everyone (anyone) will buy this type of powerpc in the corporate world.
Unless Ultimate 4 or Half Life 5 or something else made of fairy dust hits the gamer market, few will buy this type of system except for bragging rights.
Yes
It had fewer requirements than the 3.0 version!
No, it didn't. 4.0 required a 486, 3.0 a 386sx. 4.0 may well have run on a 386 as well (although I suspect, like NT4, it had 486-specific instructions), but it certainly didn't have lesser stated requirements than 3.0. And 4.0 certainly wouldn't have been faster than 3.0 at the bottom end of the hardware scale, because it used a lot more RAM. It might have performed better than 3,0 on higher end hardware, however.
You may be thinking of OS/2 2.0 vs 3.0, which would have had similar (if not identical) base requirements. OS/2 2.0 was a dog (2.1 was *much* faster), however, so 3.0 running as well on the same hardware would not be surprising.
What the hell machines are they testing alpha builds of Longhorn on anyway? Are they installing it on a cluster and considering that "tomorrow's platform"? No Beowulf jokes... the 640 thing is enough "classic" Slashdot already.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Everybody has 3 or 4 machines already and a game box. We simply don't need a 6 ghz processor. We certainly don't need another bloated M$ product to surf the web. We (I believe) will soundly reject this upcoming drm and new word/excel format. This cycle needs to stop, and will.
These companies make this stuff because that's what they do. The ultimate proof will be when the consumers actually buy this stuff or not. There have been many "great ideas" that the unwashed masses have already rejected. Anybody remember "PUSH"?
Microsoft also backtracked this year on their intention to end support for win98. Guess they checked and found that 28% of the web was still using win98... probably with no intention to upgrade. Our dollars will decide where the computer industry goes. There is no new Internet to drive sales so I can't really see it getting stronger. BTW, here in Canada, an AMD 2400+ with most goodies is about $475 American.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Just for kicks I decided to launch Opera 7.23 and open 107 browser tabs on a wimpy 500mhz 256MB machine. Now I have no idea what the memory footprint would be to leave this like this overnight (probably very ugly). But I am surprised that it hasn't crashed yet. Using a little over 111MB of memory for Opera alone.
Perhaps if you routinely operate with 107 browser tabs open you might find Opera more to your liking.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I don't who the dipshit moron is who modded you troll..
Bug Number 131456 = Memory use does not go down after closing tabs
However, it is hardly "full of memory leaks". And I'd strongly disagree with "is generally slower during usage". It is certainly slower starting up slightly, due to IE being intergrated into windows, I find it to be quicker in many ways.
how do you get the titlebar/menu fonts to be small. gaim and all my other gtk2 apps have samme fonts and have their themes change when i run /usr/local/src/gtk-theme-switch-2.0.0rc2/switch2.
For some reason firefox and thunderbird always have big fonts. If I could change that then I'd switch
if
Make sure you've quit out of emacs before you run your sims. We discovered we were leaving it up during simulations of device dets, and it was wrecking havoc with the gnuplot splots.
Try that, and good luck.
A scientist,
LANL
I expected much better from the audience here. It seems so far that almost every +4 or +5 comment at this moment is blaming MS and arguing that nobody needs that kinds of performance for a desktop PC, so would MS please stop selling bloated OSes. Shit, and I thought slashdotters were NOT a bunch of mindless drones.
I am personally quite anti-MS, but in this I am 100% on their side. First, the humankind does benefit enormously from faster processors and if you are forced to buy a new Intel or AMD every 4 or 5 years, so be it. Second, there is a huge potential for further software (OS in particular) development and if MS is going to catch up, so much the better. We need dynamically indexed database filesystem that keep every version of your work. We need your computer to keep track of everything you see, say, hear, write or do (for you). We need better voice synthesis, voice recognition and image recognition. We need at least some rudimentary AI in everyday applications. We need hi-definition video and surround music on desktop. We need dynamic real-time evolving networks, uniting smart devices to better serve you. We need home automation, media centres and robotic control centres. There is plenty of stuff to do and the iron MS is aiming for is only adequate for the tasks. Third, hard disks still tend to be filled up and CPU still have something to do (even though most of the time they are relatively idle, we still need better peak performance). I've got 480Gb of disk space for a desktop PC and it gets used up pretty quickly. And I don't even have a fast Net connection (256K only). And I can't really delete anything. Fourth, your individual upgrade history doesn't mean shit. Fifth, games ARE important. With average American 40+ y.o. woman playing 6 hours of online games, you can't get some sort of idea of how computer games are important to our society today. The fact that you run Linux doesn't mean everyone else should suddenly stop playing games. And games will use any power you can give them, even though at the moment ATi and nVidia just made a huge leap in productivity and appear to oversaturate existing games with raw power. Sixth, don't you ever thing that MS is stupid. Yes, Bill himself is no genius and they ignored Internet and Linux for too long, but they are still the number one software company in the world. Trust them at least a little bit, won't you?
I fully expect to meat the HDD space requirement as soon as I can fit that into a standard computer and CPU and RAM when I do my next major upgrade (2006?). As for graphics processing power, my card (Radeon 9600 Pro) is already 3-4 times slower than the recently released monsters and in 2-3 years I will definitely upgrade to X800 or probably something better.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
He might have said it or not. We couldn't possibly know.
However, what we know for sure is that the operating system created under his command was designed with that premise in mind.
Which is worst?
I don't remember the exact number but it was over 90% of computers are business....that was like the 90s. But I bet its still over 75%.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No offense, but you have no place running Longhorn. Why not stick with Win95 if you are so in love with it?
~ Maintainer of the Skajake Projects
"Clippy" and "Trusted Computing" just don't sound like they should go together in the same sentence.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I, for one, welcome our new new 3D infrastructure display technology overlords.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I'm just stunned that Fark got this story up before Slashdot did.
It's weird because Slashdot usually gets stories like this up before ANYONE.
Plus, the Fark admins are distracted by the Boobies links so much that they USUALLY get their stories, on average, 12 hours AFTER EVERYONE ELSE.
Maybe someone who works at Slashdot also works at Fark? -cue 007 theme song-
what I do believe is that the authot said that the average longhorn system will be run on a whopper. Somehow I don't see how a hamburger can run longhorn, unless you managed to stick a nano-itx board in there.
I've seen your sig a few times, and I keep wondering...what exactly do you think P2Pstudio.net implies? What kind of studio?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
"This system recommendation is brought to you by Intel"
Dude, something's wrong with your setup. I've got Mozilla loading -OVER NFS- in under 1 second. I can load it locally on an old 40GB IDE drive 'fresh' (not cached, right out of booting) in three seconds while compiling two things in the background.
This is on a 1.4GHz Athlon with PC2100 RAM and a 40GB 'junker' hard drive.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Well...the company I work for sells computational chemistry software. It simulates how molecules react in any designed environment. The larger the molecule...the longer the calculation. Some researchers are running calculations on proteins that last weeks...or longer.
http://www.hyper.com
Strictly speaking they aren't -- they're Herald Corp. However, Pat Purcell, the publisher, is a good buddy of Rupert Murdoch, so it's not that far off.
Are we subscribing to the 640k should be enough philosophy now? I thought we were making fun of that, or will it be like that later? Can I get a schedule on these paradigm shifts?
thanks.
Isnt it pretty amusing that open source and ABM often get faster and faster while Microsoft tends to make things slower? BeOS could do pretty much anything longhorn will do if you remove the middleware and ran circles around anything. There has to be a connection between intel and MS cause MS cant stink that bad can they?
HTTP/1.1 400
I hate to nit pick but... um... ya
Remember, if you buy one now, it might even arrive in time for Longhorn to get its first Service Pack. Look here for all the details you need on Michaels Computers, the fastest computers nobody's ever seen: http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20040317/
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
At Windows XP installation, when you are prompted to type the PC name and description, Windows shows "kitchen's computer" as example.
/. but come on! geeknes has a limit!
What kind of wakco would have a PC in the kitchen?
I know this is
when everyone has this kind of thing available to them, I really hope public awareness about donating your unused proccessing time is raised. It could be in the form of little cards sitting next to new computers-
"This system is so fast and powerful that rather than you waiting for it to finish what it is doing, it may spend most of its time waiting for you instead! Why not give it something to do with its free time? Please take one of these free CDs containing information and software which can be used to help avance science, medicine, or meaningless wank-jobs like key breaking. All that is required to help is for you to install the project which intrests you most, the computer will do the rest!"
or something
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?
I guess you've neve heard of usenet...
All kidding aside I'm archive the crap out of tv shows and music...The TV shows come from my replay unit and the music is from CD's and LP's that I am in the process of converting to FLAC Between two run of the mill low end boxes I've got aprox 3/4 a TB of storage in active use, (15 + 200 in 1 box) and (80 + 180 + 120 + 120 + 120 in the second); 1/4 TB of storage sitting around in transitory use (The replay has 120 gigs and there's a 160 gig mp3 drive and a 75 gig misc drive sitting on the shelf), looking for a spot. Roll in 100 plus DVD-R's sitting in cases on the shelf and I'm cramped for space right now at 1.6 TB. Right now its cheaper to archive to DVD for me, So thats what I do while I watch out for bigger hard drives. My sweet spot right now, for new hard drive purchases, is a drive which doesnt exist, a 500 gig plus sub $150.00 drive
And for those who ask why its a hellof a lot cheaper than drinking and it satisfies the compulsive packrat collector in me so I carry on.
The whole of longhorn will be in .net, no exe binaryies what so ever, thats why it needs a dualcore 6ghz CPU. Now even java will run fast :)
.net binaries be a lot smaller, so the whole system would take less than 300meg?
Though where does it need 1tb? wouldnt the
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Because most of us dont want to settle to restarting an App every day or reformating every month. We don't want cheap windows workarounds, we want software that works.
/. users, and we aren't the normal buch (in terms of quantity) :)
I don't disagree with your point, I'm just feeding...
Most of us means
However, with CAP H....
The reality is that you do drive a car that requires oil change every 3000 miles or the dirt will kill it. Engine rebuild every 70,000 miles. AKA, VW Aircooled engine circa 1969.
Computers still have a LONG wan to go, horn or not.
Regardless of what the 'average jo/joe' user wants he/she either deals with the (current++) reality or not. Not == moves on to something else (other than computers; GOTO ELSE).
Whatever happened to optimizing your code? Are programmers getting lazier, or are we just trying to force everyone (including those with virtually non-existant budgets) to buy the newest PC ever few years?
....but I think anything that important (I'm talking an operating system with lots and lots of...stuff...) should be optimized so that it will run under much lower specs.
I fall in the lazier category because I do not write programs for people other than myself (normally anyway).
If you think I'm wrong, then please...flame away, for this is just my opinion.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Would you like to provide some backing on this? I've shot this down enough times, I suppose I can do it with you as well.
C'mon, let's have it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
yeah its not in there as i recall... their was an article in something... maybe e-week a while back about that. so if he said it, it wasnt there...
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
Hell, I remember seeing that quote as a tag-line inserted by users with their off-line mail readers on BBSs....in, what, 1993?
That meme has been bouncin' around the world for longer than mainstream intertnet access..
Seriously though, this title is offensive to Italians, you insensitive clod!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Meanwhile, LINUX runs just fine on a Big Mac.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Then you need to fix your machine -- something is badly broken.
PIII overclocked to 933 runing Mandrake 8.1 -- under 3 seconds startup. 512MB CAS2 with only 4MB free, though 150MB of that is currently being sucked up by disk cache.
WinXP on a 2.4 GHz P4 takes almost 5 seconds if I try to start it while Windows is still initializing. Otherwise it's under 4.
The problem is between your PC's screen and your chair, not Mozilla.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
...for the average home video editor. Since the majority of home users use Windows and don't want to spend the $600+ for a decent video editor, the current mid-range machines are good enough. Anyone serious about video editing is going to get a Mac or and Avid system and spend several thousand on hardware then turn around and spend at least another thousand on software. Home users don't need 4GB of RAM to edit grandma's birthday party. 256MB is fine. Professionals would not tolerate such a small amount, but it is fine for most people. I'm making a feature film. My next machine will be a G5 with at least 1GB of RAM and as much hard disk space and as many processors as I can afford. Final Cut Pro likes big machines. In contrast, my parents may someday want to put together the old home movies to make a DVD. They will be just fine with a wimpy Windows machine running Sonic MyDVD.
I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you. real cheap, only 5 million dollars, what a steal!
IBM decided to use the 8088 which could only address 1MB and IBM reserved some of that space for ROM BIOS and hardware functions. This was not MS's decision, it was IBM's.
But that means that your computer will become a Continuous Blue Screen System (CBSS)
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Hmmmm.... in Judge Dredd the eugenics program was called Janus. It all falls into place... Tux is the Judge, and LongHorn the psycho brother. Hover bikes and all.
Watching movies makes me smart.
Given that :
1. Longhorn is to be released sometime around 2009-2010
2. The average of these resources double every 18 month
We can deduce that these requirements will be the average config at that time.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Something is really wrong with your math. You should be considering FLOPS or some other measure of speed.
Mhz to MHz comparisons are only valid within the same generation of CPU
You ignore the changes in chip generations. A Pentium I chip @ 75Mhz is FASTER than a 486 chip running @ 75mhz. An alpha EV56 is faster than an EV5 at the same clock frequency.
Just look at AMD vs Intel if you want a current example of how clock speed isn't the only factor.
Moore's law deals with the overall speed of the processor NOT the clock frequency.
Bah. I edit Wikipedia, and if that's not tab-intensive, I don't know what is. :) Who wants to go to RC patrolling? :) there's your 50 tabs right there, plus a few to check potential copyvios, see the talk pages, drop {{subst:test}} on all the newbie let's-test edits, notice page histories, keep an eye on your boilerplate and on Votes for Deletion... :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too. "
... compared to Battlefield Earth.
Perhaps, but what if you said something that was taken out of context? I bet a lot of movie reviewers are fumin over this type of behaviour. "Matrix Reloaded was awesome..."
"Derp de derp."
Actually, Mozilla Seamonkey (the suite) has the option of "cheating"... What with there being a screen asking if you want to turn the feature on and all. In Windows anyway.
Somehow I get the feeling this "average" Longhorn system is what MS is projecting to be what's on the shelf at Best Buy. It's most certainly not the "minimum requirements", which is the logical fallacy that gives this item its sensational value.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Longhorn will have several "tiers" of user experience, so it'll still work on low-end hardware and run all the apps even, but the support for Avalon/Aero will be scaled back to what the actual machine can support.
That's why these projections seem so incredibly high. And I'd say they aren't that high either. I'll be surprised as hell if 4GHz processors and faster graphic accelerators don't come out next year.
That's hardly a citation, nor does it give the context it was said in, the date (not even a vague year as is wont for MLA). I can easilly fabricate a citation as well.
"Windows is the epithet of computing power." -All of the anonymous cowards on Slashdot.org.
Now, I *know* that you *know* that the above citation is factually incorrect under any given circumstances.
Your flacid attempt at sarcasm is a little less than underappreciated.
The person at the top of this is just making a point, no one has proof. Then again, who cares? Just go download the clip of the bluescreen on CNN with gates and his windows98 "Plug and Play" and laugh about it. Because that one definitely happened.
I don't know how idiots like bonch can get modded up with obvious falsehoods while true statements like yours languish. But I guess people are too lazy to do any digging on the subject and figure if it appears on a "urban legends" website, it must be true. Never mind all facts to the contrary.
You're wasting your time trying to convince an MS fanboy like bonch that anything his beloved Bill Gates says is false. And oh yeah, just like everyone else in this thread, YHBT, YHL, HAND.
Maybe that's why it's taking so long to release Longhorn.... they're still trying to compile it!
... Microsoft's forthcoming "Longhorn" release of the Windows operating system has been delayed until 2020 when the required hardware becomes available.
Myself, and the company I work for. And there is evidence of a move... maybe not so much in the US but definately in Canada... particularly in certain gov't agencies.
pfft! "unless you want to look cool or got it for free"
Well hhmm, my 15,000 RPM U160 drive I bought brand new for a whopping $100 bucks off of pricewatch defrag's in 5 minutes, loads games in 1/10th the time the basicly same box next to me does with SATA, has a 5 year warranty and an MTBF 10x greater than your IDE/SATA drive. Also it copies a gigabyte from one place to another (even in windows) in around 5-6 seconds. No, no advantage to U160 at all, nah.
Oh and on a non competitive note, I would use SATA if they came in 15K RPM flavors. RPM == speed.
It was your good friends over at Microsoft who testified during the antitrust trial that IE was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed without crippling it. So I guess it was your beloved Microsoft who started that meme, eh?
Next time you go spouting off, you might want to check your facts first because when you don't (which is, after all, most of the time) it makes you look like an ignorant pile of bull feces.
those specs will seem dated.
yep totally true. I'm running an athlon xp 3200, it's fast don't get me wrong. but untill I dropped the 15K RPM U160 scsi drive in it I didn't know what speed was. Your right about the instant install of apps, it takes longer to type the command to start the installation than it does to install
By the time Longhorn finally arrives, the AMD64 instruction set should be firmly entrenched at both AMD and Intel. Since from the looks of it everyone is going to have to buy new hardware for Longhorn anyway, Microsoft could save themselves a lot of time, money, and grief, by making Longhorn AMD64 only. It might even run better in that environment.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I can imagine that the system when in use for some time for video editing or something simmillar may need 1TB. But when you install a bare OS - is that what you need 1TB for? And then you start loading the applications? What is the expected ratio of OS/Apps?
How come such an application as an operating system can demand such absurd requirements? Isn't an operating system supposed to sit quietly in the back making sure the actual productive applications run smoothly?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
None of IE is in the kernel and that link says nothing to that effect. What is does say is that IIS has some kernel level optimizations, which is exactly the same thing tux in Linux does.
I'm currently a moderator, but no-one has clarified the BS on this thread. Moderators, please moderate accordingly.
-Jon
this is my sig.
If these requirements aren't really needed then it's just a marketing plan to encourage adoption. If the accounting department budgets for these massive upgrades an IT department will upgrade more machines (rather than tell accounting "No we really don't need all that money") which of course will lead to faster and wider adoption than just the "cutting edge" which they budgeted for. It will make Microsoft and everyone's IT department's look like they are saving massive amounts of money.
If these requirements are really used, it'll be to support the huge DRM encryption and decryption lock-ins at all levels of the computer hardware. This makes things like DVD's and CD's lower cost on Windows. But If everything is encrypted, your data will be locked in as well and you'll be glad to pay whatever "protection fee" MS markets (in the form of service plans and OS upgrades) because you'll have no other way to get use your own data.
Yo, morons!
The article is about Longhorn's requirements.
Who gives a shit how many pages you have open in your browser?
I have ONE - count 'em, ONE - page open right now in Opera 7.23. The only time I have more than, say, two or three, is when the idiot ad sites open in the background (then of course I do "Window Close All But Active").
50 posts about this crap...
With 2GB of RAM needed for Longhorn, maybe you should be worrying how many gigs of RAM it will take to open ONE PAGE in whatever version of IE they cram down people's throats with this hog.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I have a quite ancient P2-450MHz with 256Mb of RAM and it takes around three seconds to load here.
rather, a WOPR
The first one that comes to my mind is "Eight to Twelve Years at Hard Labor" but I'm perhaps a little too quick to rule out capital measures.
This definitely confirms ties between MS and SCO. They are smoking the same ultra-powerful crack, that it must come from the same dealer.
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
They are planning a completely voice-activated operating system. This will render keyboards etc. useless. In the end they will include a 3rd world real person to obsolete the computer and make the assistent more realistic.
Good points. There are always two sides to every story, and the "other side" is often ignored completely at Slashdot. A bit off-topic, a bit trollish, but also something that more Slashdotters need to realize. Someday most of them are going to realize that not everything can be free.
Not to say that free is bad. Man, there's some amazing free stuff out there -- more power to 'em. And the free stuff helps keep Microsoft on its toes, so it is probably (in the long run) good for Microsoft, too! Linux will continue to improve, and it will continue to be used by a lot of people. But Windows will also continue to improve, and it will also continue to be used by a lot of people. Windows will always offer features that Linux can't provide. And Linux will always have some characteristics that Microsoft can't provide. Some people can do without the extra features of Windows, and will prefer the simplicity and raw power (and price!) of Linux. Others will want the extra stuff Microsoft can offer, and are willing to pay for it.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
"Not everyone is a gamer who has to buy a new system every month or two."
So don't buy the new OS. If win95 still runs your solitaire and you are happy with it, keep on trukin!
erm...try 50 IE windows and watch your machine struggle. At least Mozilla can sort of cope.
I'm starting to wonder where you people come from.
40 tabs open?
Gee at the worst I may get 4 at a time.
Whats so hard about restarting a browser anyway.
and what kind stuff are you doing to your computer that you have to reformat every month?
some mothers children...
Who run Barter Town?
"One of the main reasons for switching to linux in the past was that it was possible to utilize older hardware that the commercial OS's would not support well."
That is still true today. A current Linux kernel supports all older hardware to such an extent that virtaully any computer you can get for free works fine. That should be good enough in terms of backward compatibility.
How about Windows? Is there any current version that works on a 486?
In my day we had 8-bit machines with approximately 40k useable RAM. We had to load our programs from audio cassette tapes (remember them?) at a rate of maybe a thousand bits per second. It often took many minutes to load a program that was 32k in size. My machine had 128k RAM. It still used tapes for loading games. Starglider 128 used to take 15 minutes to load. You could buy a disk drive, but none of the commercial software worked with it. I sometimes get impatient with my dual processor 64-bit workstation, but it is 4 years old now (450MHz processors), and modern software just keeps on getting bigger, and more of it's written in C++ which is dreadful for start-up times.
Stick Men
If "Mozilla ain't cheating", how do explain that FireFox, Opera, etc are twice as fast?
1.21 Jigawatts!!!
1.21 Jigawatts!
Tom what was I thinking? Where am I going to get that amount of processing power? How am I going to send windows back to the future?
IE loads faster because it loads up most of it's components during Windows bootup
Windows NT 4.0. No Active Desktop, no shell-integration. IE still starts within 2 seconds on a PII-class system. NEXT!
Microsoft cheating can't make up for the fact that Mozilla's UI is written in JavaScript and contains it's own mega-bloated toolkit layer.
Odds are you just closed Mozilla and it was still hot in disk cache.
Of course its marketing strategy. Hardware vendors will help to push the new windows os forward, to increase sale of new systems. If it would not create demand for faster computers, computer vendors would instead push towards linux to lower cost. Only by increasing the 'demand' in some way, ms$ can sell windows.
"And how many people do you know that care about video editing? "
*raises hand*
Not only do I care. I have dedicated hardware in my machine to pull it all off.
While I think this article exagerates, it reveals something else, which the parent post and the MS streaming patch server post hints at. Your pc will be 0wned by MS. If you own 95% of the pc's in the world, what would you do? If you're M$, you'd set up the worlds largest grid computer to crush you competitors. Those competitors right now are 1) linux and 2) google. The linux angle is well covered here, but everyone's forgot google. Remember, longhorn will not have a hierarchicial file system, but an object relational file system. This is a feature to let you just save stuff and smart sql queries are supposed to index it so you can find it or make sense of it later. Of course, if your stuff is already indexed, it would make it awfully easy to add pointers to it from another computer on the net. Heck, that computer could even index the index making it oh so easy to find neat information on 95% of the worlds computers. The google index will look tiny compared to that. And the upside to all of this? You'll have to pay M$ (in some way) to use any of this, including your own system. ...and you thought passport was for secure remote authentication.
Sure, I may have the details wrong, but I believe the stategy is right. If google show ANY sign of weakness (such as selling out to IPO and feeling pressure from a million investors with the planning capacity of a fruit fly), M$ will kill them. I also predict M$ will win, google will fail, no one will be able to catch up in the search martket after that happens, and innovation and creativity will grind to a halt. Yet one more nail to go into the coffin of the western world.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
I wonder if the dual core prediction to to help licensing sales? Oracle, in it's infinate ego, charges you for TWO cpu licenses and makes you upgrade to enterprise edition if you have a dual core cpu (like the power4). Check it out
Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a Processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by your third party users. For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors.
As M$ and oracle a jointly proven, there is not limit to greed.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
I can't remember when the trend started, but a lot of Windows installations include the complete contents of the install CDs (i.e. all the cabs) on the hard disc. Of course this bloats the size a bit but for most users it's 650MB they won't miss in exchange for never having to hunt for the install CD.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Hehe that seems like bribin the hw verndors.
Anyways it is yet another nice innovation
from the "freedom to innovate" popel
- Chilly Billy the DNS blocker
...it's a wrapper for IE, so you don't get OSS kudos, but it Just Plain Works. Great bit of software, I put it on every machine I build now...
You've got some serious tuning to do then. It only takes 2-3 seconds to start on my old powerbook.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"Must be the windows version underlying Mozilla."
Firefox is fine with Windows 2000 on this Celeron 366.
Well, to be fair, emacs doesn't have a text editor either.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
BLOODY HELL!!!
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
Of course software drives development - without software, hardware is useless. So that is not a very useful statement.
However saying, "Welp we are done for now" seems absurd for a number of reasons.
The simplest and best example is hard drive space. If you had told someone from just 10 years ago that some people would have 300GB of hard drive space in something that didn't even have a keyboard or net connection they would laugh at you. "Why do you need so much space?" TiVo only gets better with the more space you have. The sheer amount of space that people use today, without thinking of it is all the proof you need to see that what ever is created will be consumed, whither people "need it" or not.
For you to say "Most of those imaginings are possible" just shows where yours stopped. There are so many things that still have yet to come that don't require a "self-learning and fully adaptable artificial intelligence". Voice & visual recognition, moving devices in three dimensions, allowing 4 different users to do 4 intensive actions at the same time (playing games, watching "HDTV", ect) , sandboxes to protect from viruses or goodness knows what else.
I am not certain what "near term" is for you but for me it is 5-10 years. 10 years ago almost NONE of what I use my pc for did i do then. No net, no mp3, no video, no full 3d environments. To assume that we have run our course for the near term seems totally out of place for what the last 50 years of computing have shown and what can be seen in the near term.
If by near term you mean the next 1-2 years, I can agree with that. I would say though that the near term for longhorn is how long the product will live and I am guessing Ms plans to take it the next decade. What apps dominate the home environment 8 years from now I have NO clue. Maybe there will still be a "shortage" of processing power to do all the next, cool nifty stuff. But I doubt it and so does MS.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today
Well, MacOS X 10.3 currently has most of the things Microsoft is promising with Longhorn (e.g., hardware accelerated GUI), and my Powerbook "only " has a 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM, and 30 GB HD space...
it doesn't matter what you're doing.
129 processes and 90% idle just means they're all swapped out and you're sitting staring at 'top'. hardly something to brag about.
... it sort of explains the 'long' in 'longhorn' ...
Starting other apps, such as postscript viewers, Acrobat, Photoshop etc are all perfectly fast. Other people don't seem to have a problem with Firefox at all, and then in threads like this some people have the same problem as me. So I'm certain that Firefox has a problem, but I'm damned if I know why that is.
just opened 60 pages(mostly random slashdot postings) and IE5 on my old 512Mb NT machine coped just fine, didn't even swap.
so watch yourself crash and burn.
would be the motto you claim to state but it is not what you said.
You just said, (to paraphrase) "80 GB is all the space an OFFICE user will ever need." That to me seems like a bad idea because it is the same sentiment with just a slightly smaller group.
You are correct that many work environments don't require a great deal of space to do the majority of the work however that doesn't speak to what people WANT. Maybe people will want to sync their mp3s to the computer at work. Maybe the extra space will be used to store distributed data instead of relying on only one sever, maybe all the training videos are.....,maybe...maybe....make up your own.
People tend to use whatever space they have at hand and then become convinced that is how much resources they need. In addition there maybe apps that truly are useful and we just haven't thought of yet that DO need the added space.
There is going to be a change in how computer are used and what people need. The interesting stuff is gong to happen at the low end but the cutting edge stuff happens at the high end, the market place longhorn is aimed at.
What an office will need 5 years from know, who knows. Could be either the high or the low end. Likely both and that's why suggesting it will be a hard sell seems premature to me.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
Im thinking, what with the architecture switch for XBox, I cant help but wonder if they are planning on enabling longhorn for these next generation chips. With specifications like these I can imagine a new Longhorn enabled (god forbid) PC being a substantial financial outlay.
...
Having said that, it is about time current yet dated PC architecture was ditched. As much as I avoid microsoft like the plague I cant help but think i'd have a miniscule amount of respect for them for making an architecture switch. From what i hear anyway Longhorn with its DRM palladium nastiness is probably going to loose a great deal of legacy compatibility anyway so now would be as good a time as any to do this? I dont see how they can retain much legacy without leaving the OS full of holes.This doesnt neccesarrily mean longhorn is going to be any good though!
Thankfully I dont really give a toss about Longhorn anyway. I mean in the UK 27 of our coastguards services computer networks were put out of service due to the Sasser worm. That meant they had to rely on paper maps and slower more traditional means than normal. Whoever was dumb enough to use such a known insecure OS in such a critical environment I'll never know. The moment someone dies because of a fuck up like this lets hope its accounted for. People have got a couple more years of security hell from redmond to put up with, im not sure that when longhorn finally comes out people are really going to be dumb enough to lock themselves into another insecure, high cost hardware/software upgrade cycle. I think there is going to be a lot of change in the next few years, whatever happens though lets hope that its for the good of mankind and not some corporation bent on world domination.
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
It's a funny mem BUT just a few factoids to crush this into past.
1. Unix programmers were already demanding a minumum of 4 megs for research. (They wouldn't get said machine but they would demand it)
2. The original PC was shipped with 64k expandable to 256k. To get 640k you needed to get a PC compatable and an aftermarket memory board.
3. Moterola had already released the 68000 with a max memory of 16megs.
I'm sure SOMEBODY said it but it wasn't anyone representing IBM or Microsoft.
I think a lot of people FELT that Bill Gates was saying this by refusing to produce Dos 286 as planned. But the actual reason was becouse Microsofts programmers weren't able to make it work.
Classic Dos was trapped in 640k becouse of the fact that there was no way to access past 640k on the 286 chip when running software intended for the older 86 chip. Intels design screw up.
There was a myth that the 640k limit was introduced in MsDos 3.
Also I remember someone saying "64k is more than enough for anyone"... and it had nothing to do with Microsoft or Bill Gates.
I don't actually exist.
Just use the mozilla composer, then load the page and do save as text ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
With thies requirements I'm pritty sure the planned release day isn't anytime soon.
Wouldn't it be funny if Intel couldn't produce a chip powerful enough?
Or better yet... What if we end up with a RAM shortage (it's happend before) and nobody could actually get enough ram to actually do the job?
And remember kiddies Microsoft tends to lowball the specs a little so the industry experts end up inflating Microsofts recomendations by a factor of 2 to make them more realistic.
Now.. what if the only way to GET those resources was to emulate a PC on an iMac G25?
I don't actually exist.
Even further off topic, but that reminds me of a story I heard from a teacher. A parent complained that her child was learning bad language at school - "He doesn't fucking learn it at home, I can fucking well tell you that".
rant
I would like to see high quality language translation cheaply available.
So would we all, but it's not gonna happen.
Why not? Because even if you manage to come up with a way to make a computer handle context and nuance, a good translation often relies on the imagination and writing skill of the translator.
Look, forty-odd years of top-level academic research has failed so far to come up with a good theoretical approach to machine translation. That is to say, you could provide the best machine translation experts with a cluster of 6 exahertz machines, with petabytes of RAM, and they still wouldn't be able to produce anything that sounded remotely like a human translation.
In the 1940s they thought it would be there by 1960. In the 1960s they thought the computers of 1980 would be able to do it. In the 1980s they thought we'd have it by 2000. Here we are in 2004, and we still don't have it. And only a fool would expect it to be there in 2008.
Babelfish as it stands is laughable - it's still at level 1 in your categorisation. Feed it "My Japanese is bad", translate from English to Japanese. The translation is fine - except that the word it uses for "Japanese" means "an inhabitant of Japan" rather than "the Japanese langauge". Nice one.
this whole thread is a waste of time ... everybody is laughing at MS just because is cool to do so on /.
when longhorn will appear in 2006(optimistically speaking) this would be a LESS_THAN_AVERAGE computer
let's see:
dual-core CPU - average to high end market TODAY .. in 2006 this will be way under-average stuff
CPU running at 4 to 6GHz - today's high-end is 3,4ghz ... 4ghz is supposed to come by the end of THIS year... by 2006 this will be less than average
a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; average new computers of today come with 512MB ... it's quite sure by 2006 2GB will be the average
a terabyte of storage; high-end today is 300GB ... and the storage doubles(or more) every year => 1TB could easily be average in 2006
1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port ; that's high-end today ... by 2006 it will surely be low-end
802.11g wireless link; same as above
a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today ; the new generation of graphic chips, schedulled for this summer/fall, already runs with almost double speed compared with the today high end ... 3X by 2006 will be less than average!
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gates never said that.
Who gives a fuck? It's a funny saying. Laugh.
It's already said the avrage person will not need a "top of the line" PC unless they play video games.
Nothing used in the office or Internet today needs such power.
So why dose Longhorn need so much processing power? Obveously those requirements are not for the apps. Most of that is needed by the OS itself.
So what is planned for Longhorn that it needs such resources?
And more importantly....
Can we do it in Linux TODAY?
What I'm saying is that's a lot of features and I'm sure there are a lot of potental Linux projects in that. If Microsoft is going to tell us what Longhorn will be doing years from now maybe we could recreate those features in Linux TODAY as sepret projects.
(Of course you couldn't install them ALL at once but if you had only what you wanted installed you wouldn't need anywhere near as much as Longhorn will)
I don't actually exist.
an OS that requires 250 dvd's? pfft even MS isn't that dumm!
Yawn! yes we know it's not true yes we know that it is repeated a lot, not having a sense of humour or complaining about those that do just makes you look sad and lonely throwing in references to memes (the word of the day on /.) makes you look like a sheep.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Thanks for sparing me the slew of obscenities, BTW. Oops, no you didn't ... too bad. Well, maybe you can say some nice things about my mother in your reply?
:p
She's pretty good in bed... is that the sort of thing you meant?
Gosh. The same system requirements as War Operation Plan Response (WOPR)? That's what I call vintage. Maybe Microsoft has finally worked out that green text consoles provide much better UI than Avalon.
As for text-editor, having been forced to used textarea-boxes like they where editor-buffers, I have to say that even if I prefer ViM over Emacs, even Emacs beats textareas any day.
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
Whats that saying, "assumption is the mother of all cockups". That kind of assumption, and also sloppy spelling are just a sign of laziness.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
...at least we know they don't have any good relationships with HW manufacturers...
That sounded like an assumption. Consistent sloppy spelling and hand writing is usually a sign of dyslexia.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
mspaint ? MSPAINT ?
--- Always Make The Same Mistake Twice, Just to double check...
So, "requirements" are:
-Gigabit ethernet,
-2 Gigs of RAM,
-802.11g and bluetooth,
-dual core@4 GhZ (well OK, dual proc @ 2x2 GhZ),
-half a terabyte of storage
Oh, wait... Is microsoft saying we should be getting today's Powermac to run their 2006 OS?
*ducks*
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
You know, of course, that Opera has popup blocker, right?
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Every new version of windows requires 400% more space and runs 400% slower than its predecessor
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
First of all, 50 open tabs for days is so unbelievably illogical that I can't even begin to imagine what you're doing.
i do around 40 tabs every day. I have a folder full webcomic links that is set to open in tabs with a single click on the folder. On my 350MHz G3 at home, it takes a couple of minutes to open and render all the comics. At work, on my 1.8GHz G5, it takes less than a minute. In both cases, this is using the latest versions of OSX and Safari. I'll have to try this with Mozilla.
I drank what? -- Socrates
For nigh on 15 years now, nerds, geeks and jealous competitors have been blasting MS for bloat and requiring $$ hardware upgrades with each new OS generation. I can see it has really hurt MS sale and market leadership. You think the people who SELL hardware are exactly unhappy about this
It was amazing slooooow...
;-)
It was one of the fastest machines shown on the CeBit 1992 (Turbo means 33MHz, the standard ColorStation came with 25MHz). Hundreds of people were amazed seeing how fast it was.
So when Longhorn will be released in 2007 (sic!) we have 20GHz CPUs.
But that's how it is with a monopoly: one man screws up, and everybody suffers.
[this
XP ruined MS and Longhorn will be worse. Bloated. Completely useless garbage code.
Since XP I've moved on to a slackware desktop main workstation. Never looking back.
Not to mention by the time Longhorn actually ships that kind of system will be a boat anchor.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
It's not actually that unreasonable, given the rate that computers evolve. Longhorn might not even be released for 4-5 years. Five years ago, how many laptops had 512MB RAM? Or a 60GB hard drive? Also, I remember the initial Windows XP specifications being ludicrosly excessive, but it ran fine on my 300MHz VAIO with 128MB RAM. And, finally, 640K might have been enough for anyone. I used to own an Amstrad 1640 with that much RAM and a 10GB hard disk. If I just used it for word processing in TXT format, and playing Digger, the 10GB and 640K would have lasted a lifetime.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
D'oh! That should have been 10MB, not 10GB. Shot myself in the foot there...
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Autonomic Computing
It's been the policy of some Operating Systems (FreeBSD and OS X, for example) for a while to use 100% of your RAM, on the basis that if it's not in use then it's wasted. The operating systems will speculatively cache anything that look potentially useful on the disk, and will over-allocate RAM to existing processes (at least in the case of OS X. Not sure about FreeBSD) so that malloc calls will return quickly.
Autonomic computing takes this even further, and says that the CPU should be in 100% use at all times. If it's not in use by applications then it should be indexing files, and predicting things the user might want to do in the future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just a normal computer nowadays, isn't it? I mean the specs are not way off what I would consider a very fast machine, and I would definitely configure it that way even nowadays, exept for the graphics card and the processors that is. All I lack is the money and Windows whatever as an incentive to buy this. My Linux Box runs at virtually one-third the speed of everything that is suggested, and I do not get bored while loading kde. But then, I am used to work on medium sized Beowulf...
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
Ok 1995 we have windows 95. Now its approaching 2005 and long horn is coming out - we all agree so far?
Ok you say your list of important items have changed so lets break down the reason: 1) In 1995 you were either 10 or 20 years old not worrying too much about where money came from. 2) After either graduting high school and/or college (roughly 2005) you have to pay for items 3) Priorites change over time.
You have just demonstrated that people want to quit learning IT stuff at some point in their life and that your goals in life isnt to run quake @ 300 FPS but to get a higher paying job. No news here just typical ostrige senario...
I've got a really old 10base-T SMC ISA network card I never could get running...At the time, I was trying to turn an unused 386sx into a firewall.
The way Linux development used to work, if a piece of hardware wasn't popular, nobody wrote a driver for it. This is still true today, though to a lesser extent. (There's a lot more attention given to Linux today. Including programmers programmers paid to work on the kernel.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
a text editor: is a wysiwyg html editor good enough?
;)
a lisp interperter: well its not lisp but it supports javascript
a built in operating system: well they are soooo close
afaik the xul interface of mozilla supports writing of your own apps which should be running almost everywhere where mozilla is running, see calendar
so i think mozilla is a bit more advanced than emacs
-- Karma: beyond good and evil - mostly affected by posting political
how else will skynet have enough juice to defend the country?
|plastic....or gasoline?|
I thought the 640k limit was a restriction that IBM put in, and Gates merely quoted their reasons or somesuch? Remember, IBM didn't want the PC to get too good - they had their "little big irons" to sell.
(Consequently, Compaq released a 386-based PC before IBM, because IBM had a vastly more expensive computer with the same performance they didn't want to ruin the market for.)
This may seem a lot now, but by the time Longhorn eventually comes out it will easily be underpowered!!!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Try opening some web pages in all of them instead of just having 107 "about:blank" tabs :-)
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
Then I can look at my testing web server. No load on this at all- I'm the only user 3.0Ghz P4, 1Gig RAM. Mozilla takes 15-20 seconds to start. But that's running Fedora Core 1.
Then there's the real web server- Dual Xeon, gig of RAM, RH9. 15-20 seconds to start.
Once it starts, it's fine on speed, but my kid gets up faster than it does.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I made the exact same comment yesterday about the Java Desktop, but I'll say it again. Those are the most insane system requirements I've ever seen. There's nothing MINIMUM about that. Is that for real? I've been shocked two days in a row by how bloated software can be from both Sun and Microsoft.
I fear the bloatware that tomorrow brings.
Life today. Uncertainty tomorrow.
I don't think my Pentium III 933Mhz will ever be able to run this thing.
Seriously now, how does he expect we pay for the hardware to run this thing. I crave for the days where we could run operating systems in normal, regular computers.
Porn... What else?
As people are supposed to give a flying fuck what YOU think.
Everyone thought they were a joke once upon a time. But they're not - they're really that dumb, that bad.
'We never worry about code efficiency; if the code gets too slow, we just throw more hardware at it.'
- Microsoft programmer
PS. Anyone who fails to see the connection between this and this needs brain surgery fast.
"dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz"
Just imagine how fast Win2K would run on this hardware. I have yet to see any reason to install anything newer.
(S+C) x (B+F)/T = V
"Steve jobs will manage to create a pointing device with no buttons at all. Mac users will claim this to be a revolutionary feature."
t ml
.
This was posted ages ago on rec.humor.funny:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q1/macnokbd.h
It also predicts the abscence (sp?) of a keyboard . .
Judgement Day, Clippy becomes self-aware. Corrupts all Word documents.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
"...and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
That sort of hardware won't ship for perhaps 10 years. I think we have plenty of time to get used to XP in the interim.
That doesn't make those stats fine. For instance, what the hell does an OS need with a bleeding edge graphics card? What would you be doing with an OS that requires (for a home user) more graphics power than any of today's bleeding-edge cards (or yesterday's mediocre cards, for that matter)?
but by 2007......all those requirements will be already standard for a home PC. As humans, we tend to forget the past very quickly unless we are reminded of it once in a while. Well as I recall, in 2001 a PIII 733MHz was the fastest x86 processor you could buy, and 64MB's of RAM with a 15 GB's of ATA 100 HD was the standard. A 17 Inch Flat CRT was becomming standard for some systems. That was less than 3 years ago.
The bottom system today which I purchase for my company, for $399 Canadian Dollars ($270 US roughly) comes with an 80GB HD at 7200 RPM.
So think in terms of how *fast* computing power grows and how equally fast its price falls. By 2007 I'm thinking most of us will be running and coding for 64Bit systems.
I have Run WinXP on much much less power than MS recommended. You have to understand that Microsoft will try to take advantage of whatever they can, so if they think that a terabyte of storage will be standard by 2007, they will put that as the recommended space for Longhorn.
The concern should not lie on how much power Longhorn will require 3 to 4 years from now, the concern should be: how much better will it really be?
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
So what will these new longhorn computers go for? Say, something like $8,000, since people already pay $3,000 for plasma tvs, and something as souped up as these machines aren't going to have you're current crop of crt or lcd monitors.
Now, let's assume, that because of the price, they only sell 1,000,000. $8,000 times 1,000,000 equals $8,000,000,000!
You could feed a lot of hungry people in the world for 8 billion dollars.
Did you use "Fill with Color"? That would explain...
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
I was writing a review of Office 97, which shipped on something like 5 CDs, totalled more than a gig when installed. I asked the PR flak if that wasn't a little bloated and he said, "We expect in a few years it will be very common for PCs to have multi-gig hard drives." To which I responded: "So Office 97 is designed for PC 99." He refused to respond ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
Quit being anal.
Unlike RAM, there is a substantial cost to having the CPU run at all times - electricity. Right now there is something like a 60 watt difference between full-steam and idle on modern Pentium IVs, and the split is likely to grow over time as CPU power draw goes up. I wouldn't leave a light bulb on when it's not in use (most of my bulbs are 60 watts), so why would I want my computer wasting that much power for calculations that are unlikely to be used anyway.
Well, I think I read that about the same time in other electronics magazines.
What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
Video.
Encode, decode other streams, save lots and lots of HDTV shows. You'll need all those resources in your new PC^H^H PVR.
Because videos are noisy and quarters are typically cramped, I don't foresee video taking off as much in the workplace.
How many IT departments will feel any need to upgrade their hardware and software? Oh, well, I forgot, there's always the new Powerpoint email attachments from sales and marketing with new laptops that have to be decoded back at the salt mine...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Bill Gates has opined that hardware should be free. So, I think we can take it that MS will be giving you the hardware to run their new OS. I wonder how it will feel to wipe that $1000 OS off that terabyte and install a free OS on that free hardware. Mmm...
Whoops, okay - time to admit mistakes: IE is tied to the SHELL, not the kernel. My bad. I always forget that little niggling detail since trying to remove anything you don't want from a Windows system is like trying to remove a pin from a live grenade.
Now, let us go back through all this and play a little game, shall we? It's called "Who Trolled First".
You said.
I said
And then, you trolled with this
Aw, pity I didn't respond to that in a civil manner. Guess I'm just not afraid to drag myself down to your level, hmm?
At any rate, I'd like you to point out now where I denied there was a memory leak? Oh, you can't? Sort of makes tracking down all of those /. posts about it a useless endeavour, doesn't it?
Next, let's talk about bug classification. Hmmm... you keep 50 tabs open for days... you don't use bookmarks, apparently... so the developers should jump right on that bug so that you can leave your browser running unattended for days with an inordinate amount of pages open? Mmmm... no. It's called prioritization, ever heard of it? I'm sure there are more important bugs to fix before 1.0, since this is a PREVIEW VERSION of a web browser. Oh, right - you probably weren't paying attention to the fact that you're using a preliminary build, were you?
Continuing onward, congratulations on finding the link to a site that specifically disavows any useful, public content. Woohoo. You're so smart that you managed to find some stuff that I developed for WORK where I have to use INTERNET EXPLORER whether I like it or not. I'm not exactly certain how that means IE is "my browser" since I haven't opened it intentionally in a good year and a half or more on my Windows box at home, but go ahead and pretend otherwise.
Congrats. You are yet another member of the ever-growing pile of people who have tried to call bullshit on me. You could live vicariously through the two folks who caught my slip up on the shell / the kernel, but that's no way to live. Keep playing though, maybe you can find something else to catch.
By the way, I'm sure your mother is a very nice lady, and she probably even has some wonderful recipes and a lovely singing voice.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Yes he did. Here is a quote from this :)
article from the toronto star, I found this simply searching google news for bill gates 640k
-----Quoted-----
In 1943, the chief of IBM said he figured there was a world market for "maybe five computers."
"But what is it good for?" an IBM engineer said in 1968 when commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home," Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olson said in 1977.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody," Bill Gates (you might have heard of him) opined in 1981.
A scientist working on the A-bomb told Harry Truman it would never explode. A Western Union executive said the telephone had too many shortcomings to be a serious communications tool. Wilbur Wright told his brother Orville in 1901 that "man won't fly for 1,000 years."
He wasn't talking about memory, he was talking about dollars earned per minute. And he didn't mean anyone, he meant himself.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The vertical scrollbar bug with lots of tabs has been fixed a LONG time ago. I don't know if the fix has appeared in any Netscape version, but try a recent Mozilla version if not being able to open lots of tabs annoys you.
God, I wish I had a PC that beefy. And if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't bog it down with MicroSloth software. Linux, with a full-blown KDE and Seti@Home, baby.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
a dual-core CPU
.net being CPU indepdendent...nah.
The only CPU roadmap that even shows these, let alone within the next 2-3 years, is the PowerPC. With the Xbox2 going PowerPC, and
running at 4 to 6GHz
We'll have CPUs at this speed on the desktop, but not laptops. And the desktop CPUs with these chips are going to suck massive power and need massive cooling solutions. Yikes.
a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM
RAM quantity has been slowing down. Dell still ships 256MB in most of their PCs. 2 GB is an 8x increase. The trouble here is that massive increases at these levels don't scale nearly as nicely as increases did in the past. At these levels, there are noticible power consumption increases from adding more memory. And memory prices have leveled off, with price hikes expected. We'll need to see some pretty drastic price decreases for 2GB to be the norm.
up to a terabyte of storage
Believable. Backing it all up will still be an issue.
a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link
Believable.
a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
No, sorry. ~35% of all PCs still ship with motherboard graphics that aren't even to the level of a GeForce 2 (e.g. no hardware T&L pipeline). Maybe the specs mean 3x the power of one of these? But if we're talking 3x a Radeon 9800, then no, it won't happen. We're getting huge boosts in graphics card power with the new offerings from ATI and nVidia, but at the same time the power consumption and cooling problems are increasing TREMENDOUSLY (i.e. you need a 480W power supply to use the new nVidia cards). These are not consumer level cards. None of these cards are anywhere near suitable for a laptop either, which is where the market is moving.
I clearly remember a manual for an Apple III stating that 128K was more than sufficient for any computing task. My dad and I found that while we were scouring the manuals trying to figure out why the configuration utility kept crashing with a stack overflow. Turns out the configuration program needed 256k
Clearly Bill Gates stole that statement, bastardized it like everything else he steals, and pretended he was responsible for it.
Some things never change.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And it comes with all the free spyware you could ask for. IE sucks, it's a bug ridden virus vector. Wrapping it in a shell that adds some of the functionality of a real browser doesn't change that (though I do carry a copy of crazybrowser on my USB memory key for when I can't install a real browser on a clients system). When people see me browsing without any flashing ad's or popups the experience is so jolting that they invariably ask me what I use, I tell them that I use Mozilla with a couple of addons to make my browsing experience much better (I have a click for flash plugin, I've turned on popup blocking, turned animated gif's to once, etc). This almost always results in the person asking trying out Mozilla.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I heard there's a "Linux" extension to Emacs that lets you edit text with vi.
Did you love this world
And did this world not love you?
Don't give in 2000 man
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Good point. Before testing Mozilla's startup speed, please apply ice to your disk cache.
Somehow this reminds me of the excelerator spray that loctite sells to make thier "instant adhesive cement" dry even faster.
Doesn't that mean that thier instant adhesive is actually "virtually" instant?
.... a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
And it STILL won't run Doom3.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Seriously, if that's what micro$oft is recommending for hardware for their OS what in the world will it need to run SQL, exchange and their other must have servers.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
YEAH GRANDADDY!
wow. an indie reference on slashdot. wtf
ps - first comment ever.
pps - i noded up the everything2 link for the sophtware slump
This thing must be HUGE. It'll probably take about 9000 floppies to install this bad boy!
True.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
With all the Wintel conspiracies flying around I figure someone would have mentioned it by now.
Could it be that the chip manufacturers are begging MS to make a bloated OS? Could it be that if they require dual procs that Intel's revenue doubles. They sell twice the processors just like that.
For the past 5 years or so the trend in business has been consolidation of business logic to servers, and moving clients to the thin client. This means businesses can wait longer to upgrade hardware and buy cheaper hardware when they do upgrade.
This seems like an entirely different plan for MS. Remember "My Services". I was never going to have to install another application ever again. I was just going to rent time on a MS server to write my word documents. Everyone at MS said that Web Services were going to do all the work and that all my computer had to do was show the results in the web browser.
My guess is that the real reason longhorn needs a dual proc configuration is because the DRM and encryption on the music I listen to will be so intense it will require 2-4 ghz procs to decrypt it in real time.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
I don't believe you.
Pixar's needs are irrelevent to home video editors and 8GB is, too. The G5 systems still have integer performance inferior to current PC's and stability is not an issue. I doubt you've ever used a PC for video editing.
No, video editing is not a strong argument for buying a Powermac system, just as iPhoto and iTunes are not. PC's do all these things, too, and you get far greater choice of software without the obligatory vendor lockin.
Just how will Steve meet the requirements he's so attuned to? Put whatever IBM gives him in the next box? You don't really believe Apple designs the processors and chipsets in these things, do you? Processor by IBM, hyperlink by AMD, PCI/AGP by Intel, video by ATI. Please!
Pfeh. You kids and your toys. If backing up to floppies is good enough for me, then it's good enough for you!
How is this news? Microsoft is EXPECTED to recommend is NOT the same as Microsoft HAS recommended. And, is that a server or a workstation? It's also not an "official" recommendation, just from some unnamed source "close" to MS. Uh-huh.
Seeing as the article mentions the first beta being released sometime in the 2005 timeframe means we won't see it RTM until at LEAST 2006. Computing power doubles every 18 months ring a bell to anyone? These are probably the estimated specs of the average shipping OEM PC of the time. Regardless of what OS is shipping on it, the OEMs are going to ship these monsters anyway.
The hardware industry isn't making faster and faster computers because people NEED them, but because they WANT them. My PIII 1Ghz has served me well running XP, and I have no need to upgrade anytime soon, and doubt I will for Longhorn. However, if I were to buy a new PC that comes with Longhorn, I'm sure those are the specs I'd get. Not because I'd want them, but because that's all there is.
Hell, I just put a computer together for my Mom from Dell. I couldn't put less than a 60G hard drive on it! What the hell is my Mom going to use 60G for? I do video editing, and I don't even have a 60G drive!
MS bashing is all well and good, but making up news to do it is just plain, well, wrong.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
That's just great. I've been telling my customers the new PC's they buy will be useful much longer than those they bought in the past. I was hoping the obsolescence curve would grow less steep.
http://www.techyrants.com
well in 1996 in a public speech he didn't refute the quote when it was used to introduce him..... http://www.empireclubfoundation.com/details.asp?Sp eechID=747&FT=yes
YHBT. YHL. *plonk*
gg
PS: You didn't render the parent's statement invalid. You simply mentioned who Wired quoted.
Hey, anything to keep the actual amount of meat down. Meat's expensive!
I except to see a much fancier BSOD...
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I read that the [in]famous quote you mention was actually a misquote but regardless, the "computer" that got us to the moon was not a full-blown media center/gaming device/archive/web browser/etc.
That's because computing power necessary is inversely related to the operator of the device. Microsoft has realized that Joe Sixpack is no rocket scientist.
--laz
"Just remember, it takes a village idiot." -- The Motley Fool.
Well now you know why they need at least 2GB of main memory, on boot up Longhorn will load into its ramdisk 1.5GB of executables that it deems worthy.
"Just remember, it takes a village idiot." -- The Motley Fool.
I would be seriously interested in hearing what other people would use a 64-bit 6GHz processor with a terabyte harddisk and gigabyte of RAM for? Doom 4, Half-Life 3, Office 13. And dancing hamsters.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
These cannot be the real stats necessary.
..... Carry the 1, multiply by 3, cross out this, that and the other...
2006. Thats
Two years away. So the BRAND NEW, top of the line system that I cobbled together, with a 3400+ Athlon 64, a gig of ram, and a Radeon 9800Pro, will barely satsify the minimum requirements of Longhorn?
Thank God I gave up paying the Windows Tax, and I pity all the companies who haven't switched to a more sane operating system.
Suse 12, or whatever the hell they release in 2006, will run just fine on my system.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
A 200-stage pipeline will only realize a performance gain on instructions that take 200 cycles to execute. The bulk of instructions that a CPU executes tend to end up being pushing words around. Even on a bloated Pentium, that does not take 200 cycles.
That makes no sense. You're obviously not a chip designer. The number of cycles needed to execute an instruction is defined based on the number of stages in the pipeline that implements that instruction. When designing a pipeline you consider the overall exceution time of the instruction in nanoseconds.
e.g. Lets say you have an instruction (or some other task) that takes 2ns to execute. You want to clock your system at 1GHz; that's 1ns per cycle. So you build a two stage pipeline for that instruction. Now that pipeline will be able to pump out results for that instruction every clock cycle.
Aw crap, ninjas!
> The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:
:-P
> 6 GHz --> 0.17 ns per cycle. Light travels 5 cm (about two inches) in 0.17 ns, and information
> cannot travel faster than light. This means that even at the speed of light (electrical signals in
> typical electronics propogate at ~0.8 c, IIRC) it will take almost the entire clock cycle to get
> information across the chip, never mind whatever time it takes the transistors to respond.
Pipelining is a well-understood technique that was introduced to the x86 world with the 80486 processor (that's the one that was a generation before the Pentium for you new folk). The idea is that each stage of the pipeline acts as a dedicated, specialized processor with limited functionality that hands off its results to the next stage. It is analogous to the Assembly Line, where each worker has a specialized task and hands off each in-progress product to the next worker in the chain.
The key here is that the electrons only have to pass through *each stage* in a single cycle. If your cpu is 4cm across, then the electrical signals (according to your number) would take 0.17ns to cross it. But if the cpu were separated into ten stages, then the signals would only need to traverse 0.4cm during each cycle.
Naturally, the tradeoff is that when you increase the number of stages, then the number of cycles that each instruction needs to complete increases, so you get penalties from erroneous predictions and cache misses and the like.
So your 6GHz limit only applies if your cpu is a one stage processor. Most consumer desktop processors have ten to fifteen stages. The Pentium 4, depending on how you count it, has as many as twenty-eight stages.
> In the meantime, those nursing dreams of 100 GHz chips had better look beyond nanotech to
> picotech-- atom-sized transistors.
I don't think that I disagree here, despite my above comments. To do these frequencies without a dramatic decrease in transistor sizes would require an absolutely obscene level of pipelining, to the point that performance would take massive hits and operating temperatures would be quite Venusian.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
They won't. They'll say "Fuck it. What we got works".
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
That's the size of the install.
Then you'll have to do Windows Update at least weekly. Longhorn is expected to move anti-virus, media player, internet explorer and who knows what else to the operating system. That's a lot of application space stuff in there.
Then add DirectX, XBOX style DRM plus checksums stuff, dotnet run times, and maybe even some MSDE type database to keep track of everything. INI files will probably all be replaced by XML.
Don't forget the "checkpoint backups" of all those files from the last time it worked.
MS Office 2006 will no doubt dump a ton of files in the Windows directory as well. Almost every program I install from Microsoft increases the size of the Windows installation.
Microsoft insisting every program they make must integrate with the core OS is bullshit.
Check here:
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/newlywed.
for details on the "Up the butt, Bob" story.
Recently a Newlywed Game clip (from a Game Show Network rebroadcast of the show) has come to light
So, it DID happen. Despite the YEARS of denials, despite the $10,000 cash reward Eubanks offered (HAs Gates offed a reward? He must be less sure then Eubanks, and Eubanks was WRONG!), it DID happen!
So, denials mean nothing.
or try playing one of your favourite classic XT/AT games on such a system - larry dropping his clothes and climbing the hooker in less than a microsecond...
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Makes me think Chuck Moore has been right all alone. The real future is smaller computers that are very low power, simple and ubiquitous. Every day, Microsoft reminds me more and more of the IBM of my youth.
What's worse is he was quoting a Wired article written by John Katz.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'm going to ask... ...what is the "business reason" for any corporation, to upgrade to this OS, its hardware requirements, and the need to rewrite every piece of software to deal with WinFS and Avalon?
How does changing the OS, hardware, and software, going to "increase profits", and "maximize shareholder returns"? (Other than Microsoft's and those people reselling Microsoft.)
> Processor by IBM, hyperlink by AMD, PCI/AGP by Intel, video by ATI. Please!
Also sounds like a generic beige box to me...
The only ones really making their hardware is Sun, I think (SGI too, perhaps? Or at least partially?)
Finally found a use for the EMC Terrabyte storage unit I bought off E-Bay!!!
"...oh, we didn't mean that it would be the minimum requirements. we meant that when Longhorn comes out, that will be the most likely level of new machine currently being produced..."
It is all spin - that way when people see the real requirements are 2 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 50GB HD, they will say "oh, ok, that sounds much more realistic!" even though 98% of current computers don't meet the criteria.
""a framework for end-to-end server management" that is based on SOAP."
Apple comes out with a dual-G5 with fast everything, and y'all start skipping down the street with your iPods up your buttholes saying "It's a Thupercomputer! Itth fathster than a PEE-THEE! Tra-la-la"
So Microsoft, if the story is true, has set the bar high for their next OS, and you all are saying "What ever happened to 640K being enough."
Why can't you be consistent?
Best Buy can have you arrested
Ofcourse my friend was playing 6 movies* simultaniously on his laptop** just fine last year. Granted he used Gentoo and mplayer, not XP and WMP.
*movies
seperate 480P 1-hour clips playing off the same partition
**laptop
IBM T30
1.6GHz P4 CPU
256MB RAM
16MB Radeon Moblilty 7500
40GB HDD (like it matters)
AFAIK, it was "640k ought to be enough for anyone today". I used to have it in my sig (the uncorrected version), but someone told me that he never said it in that context, and I removed it.
OK, I can see a lot of talk about "possible or not", but what about that very fundamental question: what is a machine actually doing with so much horse power?? Don't forget that MS tends to promote 'standardisation' on the premise that your support is then easier (yeah, right).
;-).
Now, what I want to know is: why on earth do I need a box with half a Cray One worth of processing capability (and probably an equal demand of power) to do something as simple as word processing? Even the average broadcast video editing suite has less unless it's been a recent install (and I'd use Macs for that, not PCs).
Every fibre in my engineering mind cries out at such a mindless waste of computing power.
Unless, of course, I'm gaming
Insert
You faggots want to take this to the bedroom and spare us the mind-numbing brattle?
Nah - this is all just to load the EULA...
It was because the processor they chose had a 1MB address space, and they had to have room for hardware (look at the Apple II/II+ memory map, and see why there's only 48K RAM max).
You will need a quad processor if you want to play minesweeper.
Correct me if I'm wrong since I am not all too familiar with DOS but didn't DOS only support 640k for awhile? If so I think that shows the proof right there...If not then just ignore that comment :)
And just because Gates denies it doesn't mean he never did say it either. For my example, I quote one of the greatest quotes of all time.."I did not have sexual relations with that woman." OO didn't you Bill? Didn't you?
If you would think instead of flame for a second, you would realize what he means by "slow loads". He isn't referring to page loads. He's talking about the program starting. That is also because of MS having most of the program included in the kernel. They have more than half of IE loaded all the time just because you're in Windows.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Sigh....and I just bought the parts needed for a new computer! Now Microsoft is telling me that I'll likely need to ditch it for a new one two years from now! Ugg! Then again...think about what Microsoft will require , say, twenty years from now! We'll likely need a nuclear powered Intel processor, dubbed the Pentium Pu (Plutonium powered), and liquid nitrogen cooling! I will say one thing though....if Microsoft screws the pooch with this release, it's a guarantee that everyone will jump ship and run to Linux! :D
Jeff Whitfield jeffwhitfield@gmail.com "I can learn to resist anything but temptation..."
Oh yeah? Well I've got, um, 6 computers with, uh, 12 windows each, with...100, yeah 100 tabs in each of those! and a partidge in a pear tree.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I completely agree. A mac is a PC with an alternate processor supplied by a 3rd party. Not distiguished in any way, it's simply gratuitously different. The combination of the non-standard hardware and proprietary software creates a product that isn't easily compared with others in the market. Make Apple strictly a hardware company OR strictly a software company and it would fail. Thankfully now with the G5, it's at least competitive.
Now, there's nothing wrong with not making your own hardware. It's just that you sholdn't pretend that you do when you don't. Mac fans need to get over believing that their macs are anything other than 98% PC's. They benefit greatly from commodity PC parts like memory, IDE drives, ATAPI CD's and DVD, PCI busses and leadership video hardware. Apple contributes to none of these things yet they would be nowhere without them.
The biggest different between macs and PC's is the attitude.
So far we've heard about how good one guy's mother is in bed, and we've also heard how one guy gets crabs in his goatee from someone's dad's ass.
So we've had an old classic, and a new one. I'm satisfied!
An odd thought occurred to me reading your post. (also from my newish experience with MYIE and tabbed browsing)
Does any browser offer a "tab grouping" function? I was thinking that you could have small integer buttons near or on the tab bar that would let you group your tabs and move between the groups easily, eliminating the clutter from other subjects. Research paper tabs on one tab group, RGMS pr0n pages on another tab, slashdot articles and replies on another.
Just an idea.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Efficient and intelligently engineered software just costs too much to be comercial. Let's sell the prototype and charge them to upgrade to the real thing. - secret MicroSoft memo on business model ca. 1985
I've been using IE for at least 3 years. Netscape had a bad bug where every once in awhile, the buttons would go nonfunctional, and you'd have to open windows only using right click->open URL.
The only way out was to ctrl-alt-del and kill off Netscape.exe.
Version after version of Netscape came out with this bug. Finally IE got stable enough that I could switch over. I don't know if Netscape has fixed it; I doubt it. I don't care at this point.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
By "once in awhile", I mean several times every evening, which is pretty sad.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I read the GB, and didn't raise an eyebrow. I must be slipping.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
> 640K was enough for anyone. Reckon not....
They've moved from "640k is enough for anybody", to "$640k is what everybody needs."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...that digicams will produce in 2008 or whenever longhorn will hit the streets...:-)
seriously though, try running noise removal software like neatimage over a batch of 6MP pics of today and you are glad you already have 2Gigs of ram on your machine and wish you had a 10Ghz cpu in there.
or trying to keep all those 36MB photoshop files of the 1000s of pics you take and you'll understand how a few 100gigs of disk is quite limiting...;-)
remosito
Imagine a beowulf cluster of Longhorn PCs...
Anyone else suspectable to the idea that clustering such bloat might slow down time?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
"Does any browser offer a "tab grouping" function?"
AFAIK, all tabbed browsers have a grouping feature. It's generally known as a "window".
Nope. I'm pretty sure that the new DVDs coming with HDTV-resolution encoded in Windows Media 9 will kill a 1GHz CPU without even trying.
But that's just me.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
How much memory should i get if i'm going to start in on a movie in Final Cut Pro(3 maybe 4)? 512Mb, 1G more, less? I haven't heard if FCP will actually access the full 2Gb. Does anyone know if it would make a difference to use 1Gb or 2Gb of RAM and more importantly how much of a difference? I'm thinking of working on a powerbook, yeah, definitely a powerbook.
Donuts never lie.
Good point, though it doesn't explain how an operating system (for christs sake), a technology present only to enable other tasks usage of machine resources in an orderly fashion, a layer between the hardware and the applications, can require such assine amounts of resources.
I still think XP is bloated like hell. I can't imagime the code rot lying beneath the hood of the OS, but I know it's there. The fact that I use it, is because I have the hardware to do so and still have resources left for the tasks which I'd like to do.
Everyone allways says that "with this I'm leaving MS", but this is it for me. Those insane specs combined with intentional DRM infection...
BSD or Linux. With this there is no other way. (I'll leave the door open for OSX when I got cash thankyou)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
what the hell does an OS need with a bleeding edge graphics card?
The same thing God needs with a starship?
Volumetric desktops. Instead of just having a flat desktop, it would be laid out in space, extending the window on top of a window in a way other than which one was drawn last. Being able to rotate windows in space and have related tasks arranged in spacial locality. Your desktop will no longer be drawn; it will be rendered.
But then, your wallpaper will be mapped onto an all-encompassing sphere at distance infinity. Though you may be able to choose the shape of your universe, which will be nice for those who want a pattern of crossing yellow lines in a grid on black for that ST:TNG holodeck feel.
Seriously, they've been working on such things for awhile. Except they've been rooting them in mundane concepts like art museums or items on a plane extending to infinity. IMO they should stick to a formless void and let the user create his own rules for object behavior. Provide a few simple relational behaviors the user can use and open up a way to easily create new ones.
What I find interesting is the dual wired and wireless networking requirement. That's an "and" in there, not an "or". Sounds like they want drive-by license verification, turning wardriving to their advantage. No need for audit raids anymore; they could just fly over entire campuses.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I tried messing with Opera and Firefox and such, and no luck there (even tried some of the bizarre batch file routines that are supposed to make them work, but no dice).
Does crazybrowser work around this problem somehow?
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
Sure, dual core 4-6GHz cpus and 2GB RAM for a recommended system..
BUT APPLE IS FORCING ME TO BUY A NEW OS EVERY YEAR!!! Jobs called me yesterday and said if I didn't buy Tiger, he'd kick my ass!
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Stop mocking me!
Someone allways has to bring along facts... Even on /.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
"Money gets you one more round, drink it down, you stupid clown. Money gets you one more round then you're out on your ass!"
Yeah, but there is no WMP on those computers.
The reality is that you do drive a car that requires oil change every 3000 miles or the dirt will kill it. Engine rebuild every 70,000 miles. AKA, VW Aircooled engine circa 1969.
Computers still have a LONG wan to go, horn or not.
To carry your analogy in a different direction, my systems running something released as stable get periodic security updates, which is a bit like checking to see if there are any recalls or mechanical failures in a car. I periodically go through the logs and filesystem to make sure that nothing 'funny' has shown up. I equate this about to the level of checking the tire pressure from time to time, and making sure that there is enough antifreeze, oil, and brake fluid in the car. Mind you, the occasional SSH update or whatnot has to be done, but that's like adding air to the tires.
My point with all of this is that a properly built OS doesn't require heavy maintenance and just works. That should be all that there is to it. Mozilla doesn't get hijacked by websites, email viruses don't infect my linux boxes through Pine or Mozilla Mail or any of the other clients, and when it finally is time for a major upgrade, the path exists and is viable. Most of my systems doing anything of importance are Pentiums, Pentium 2s, and a couple Pentium 3s. Nothing over 600MHz. I expect that after I upgrade their OSes next, they'll still work just fine for a few more years.
Writing good software for a given platform is the right thing to do. Writing more bloat on to existing broken software is just stupid.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I went to a demo by an MS rep on the "Avalon" display technology and he said the same thing. He mentioned that 1) the hardware guys want them to push the requirements because it sells hardware and 2) MS has been frustrated for a while that since they don't have control over the hardware, they can't exploit features that will let them do cool things with the UI (a la OS X). Currently, they program so the OS runs on the lowest common denominator (within reason). They would like to raise the bar on the minimum hardware requirements so they can guarantee a better user experience for everyone.
As far as 6Ghz 2G RAM and 1TB HDD, who knows... it sounds nuts, but Longhorn isn't due for 2-3 years. It's tough to say.
according to this website:
e .h tml
/. article
http://www.nextl3vel.net/Chris123NT/4053/LHGuid
The following are the system requirements for the test builds:
Longhorn System Requirements
Minimum:
* 500MHz Intel Pentium III Processor or higher; AMD Athlon family of Processors
* 256MB of RAM
* 3.5GB of free hard disk space
Recommended:
* 800Mhz Intel Pentium III Processor or higher; AMD Athlon family of Processors
* 512MB of RAM
* 6GB of free hard disk space
A reasonable request... and a far cry from the ones posted in the
Took a screenshot of a random application (nothing complex, not fullscreen or a video overlay.), paste into mspaint, save, leave it open for a few hours out of lazyness.. all of a sudden my counterstrike drops to 15fps so i check for any leaking apps considering I've rendered and encoded to xvid while playing cs before without my fps droppping, and then I notice the only app taking any abnormal cpu was mspaint. I'd submit a bug report, but I don't think MS keeps any public BUTS.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Well, I doubt Mitnick did too, but we used to whistle the initial connection sequence into the phones at the University of Delaware in the 1970s.
With the 300 baud acoustic-coupled modems you could do it, and once you got the sequence down (turn on hard-copy terminal, pick up phone, dial number, whistle, slam phone into rubber biscuits, wait for login prompt) it was actually faster than the way we were supposed to initiate connections.
When they converted to 1200 baud we couldn't do it any more.
Well, we use it as a joke, there's nothing to stop us, and for all it matters it's now a cultural truth, it's HIS responsability to prove he didn't say it, but since that's not likely to happend... we can still enjoy moking him. :)
Just let Gates defend himself, if he needs or wants to, I don't remember reading about him asking for help.
In other words, when Microsoft integrates their filesystem and HTML browser, it's a huge whiny deal, but then KDE comes along and does the exact same thing and suddenly it's "innovation." Just pointing it out.
The only person I've ever heard say the integrating Konqueror into the the file browser is "innovation" is you. Care to back up that assertion? Didn't think so.
bonch: The King of Straw Men Attacks
.. when Longhorn is released, that's all Dell and HP and every other high-volume box shifter will be shipping anyway.
Who cares?
What's happened to John Katz, anyway? I haven't seen an article of his referenced here in a long time.
John Katz references are getting to be as rare as Hot Grits, or All your (subject) belong to us".
load "windows7"
This fixes the div problem:
<style type="text/css">
body {
margin: 0;
}
</style>
Of course, if you use the preloader. :)
> Clearly Bill Gates stole that statement, bastardized it like everything else he steals, and pretended he was responsible for it.
Then, when called on it, he claimed he never said that, or that it was what the consumer wanted at the time. Evil conspiracy, indeed.
I know this is perhaps slightly off-topic and I certainly don't want to start another WM or M$ vs. Linux flamewar, but I was wondering about the actual usability improvements planned for the Longhorn UI. I am sometimes yet amazed of the sheer amount of great options fluxbox 0.9 gives me (only speaking for myself - which is pretty obvious as I am the one typing, but perhaps not quite), and it only 'weighs' 1MB or so. When I have to use a Windows Box, the lack of simple things like virtual desktops, 'remember' and layers (or at least always on top?) is a great burden to me. I know VD are on the way in Microsoft's product, but it is for these things that sometimes it's just hard for me not to think the big players are holding obvious improvements from consumers, so they can be marketed as features when it is absolutely neccesary. And I do remember that fluxbox -and the like- runs on top of a monumental, complex, cumbersome X server and only provides basic functionality. Functionality is what it's all about.
O make me a mask
I was in college through the 70's, and let me tell you, typewriters were not 'fine'. Make one mistake, and you could end up retyping an entire paper. And the first time I used a primitive line-editor on an HP3000 around 1977, it was obviously a huge improvement.
True, there could be some new technology that will make me need something faster than a 2.8Ghz machine (which you can get today for around $600), but what could it be? Not that many people are going to care about video editing, just as few people care about sound-editing (which current machines have made possible).
"Prattle", moron. Human beings don't make brattling noises very well... unless they're bones are shaking or something. And, while it may get on your nerves, I don't think brattle would dull your mind anyway.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
"Their", moron. They're is a contraction, their is possessive, and there is positional.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I can't remember the last time I wanted or even needed to run SIX videos while playing Quake in the BG.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My computer was bought primarily to act as a DAW. When I had a 750Mhz machine I got tracks finished, but when I got this (2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM) I was maxing it with the first project I did. I'd estimate that the last-but-one tune I made would have required a 20Ghz processor to play back all in realtime. By the time I finished I had mixed down so many high quality VSTi's through so many high quality VST fx - pretty much every element of that tune (eg, drums, bass, flute) would have maxed my current CPU to do live - and there were about 10 major 'elements' to it.
...laptops!
a lot of people are making a fuss about the desktop pc, but it seems we are forgetting those important laptops.
if you think a desktop will be underpowered for the longhorn job, just imagine what it will do to your poor laptop, which by nature will always be slower then your average desktop pc (ok, perhaps there are killer laptops out there, but _most_ laptops are slower.)
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
If I still had my old OS/2 boxes, I would look it up. As it is I'm going by memory. I'm thinking of the minimum requirements, and OS/2 4.0 had a lot of optional extras, like VoiceType, that required more RAM than the minimal setup. The default install was definitely more with 4.0.
You may be right about me thinking of OS/2 2.0 vs 3.0. You're memory starts to go when you're an old fart like me.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I'm sorry to ruin another one of your sigs, but the RIAA aren't really litigious bastards. That's just another urban legend.
Sure. Problem is it occasionally blocks valid site popups. Can't tell the difference between such and the ads. And I'm too lazy to do this myself on a case by case basis. Letting it pop up in the background lets me see what it is without having it in my face. Closing them is no problem with the "Close All But Active" command.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As usual, Einstein is way ahead of you pole waving Classical mechanics geriatrics
From define:litigious:
inclined or showing an inclination to dispute or disagree, even to engage in law suits; "a style described as abrasive and contentious"; "a disputatious lawyer"; "a litigious and acrimonious spirit" (emphasis mine)
From Dictionary.com (bastard).
Slang. A person, especially one who is held to be mean or disagreeable.
I would say the RIAA fits that description.
BTW, removing it wouldn't really ruin my sig - it would give more room to put notices of what's in my journal.
The same think was said of Bob Eubanks and his famous that'd be up the Butt, Bob quote. Bob had a prize (of $10000) on it, which went unclaimed for years. Eventually, however, somebody did dig out an old tape with the embarassing quote. Ok, so the wording wasn't right, but the basic idea is there.
And, Bill Gates didn't even put up any price money! Which is really too bad, or I'd have turned in my January 1982 copy of Chip magazine long ago (this is a German computer magazine, which carried the quote only months after it was said). The quote was mentioned in passing, in an article describing the PC architecture in general. The magazine made no snide comments nor poked fun at the quote: indeed, at the time it looked pretty reasonable. So, if this is a hoax, it's a pretty old hoax, and one which was prepared pretty well, being started at such an early time when it was not yet obvious that the comment would become so embarassing later on.
I won't say that I necessarily have the SAME 50 open for days, but I definitely have 30+ tabs open in Moz for weeks at a time. What's with the "beyond its intent" though? I used to have that many instances of Netscape up; now I have one instance and many tabs. In any case, I don't have a problem with speed. Maybe it takes a bit longer to load the first time after a reboot or being completely closed, but I almost always have at least 1 Moz window up. Also, Moz has always loaded pages faster (hell, it HAS to, because IE waits until it gets the whole page before displaying anything).
Usually have atleast 50 Mozilla windows open. When I used IE, I always had about 50 windows or so. No problem...
I need a sig.
These are not the end user specs! This is just to get the whole Longhorn source compiled under .net before 2006!
For the record, I have no idea what Opera is doing.
It's being a decently written browser, without a bunch of bloated crap tacked on?
Opera is most definitely the leanest, fastest browser out there, and still has at least two handy features that no other browser comes with (ability to reload previous sessions automatically, even after a crash, and the ability to open an entire folder of bookmarks with one click).
I don't think the average computer user will even know the difference. All they know is that they'll have a "new computer", that it's "fast", they that can store files on its hard drive, and that it has a lot of "memory" - whatever that is.
"...and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today."
How much of a graphics processor do you need in order to render a 640x480 blue screen with some incomprehensible text on it?
Look, forty-odd years of top-level academic research has failed so far to come up with a good theoretical approach to machine translation.
Perhaps they're going at it from the wrong direction. Instead of trying to come up with a full translation engine from the top down i.e. feed it any text and get a level four translation, maybe the better (cheap portable $50 iPod-type of translator device) approach would be to start at a word translator and then present the user with interactive paths when the device encounters ambiguity.
you enter: "My Japanese is bad"
device replies: Japanese - unattached adjectival noun.
Select:
Japanese person
Japanese language
Maybe the device should bring all of its internally programmed 'assumptions' out to the user to select. You'd tap out your selections on the screen. It would take forever to get a reasonable translation, but you could feel confident that what you are trying to convey is getting across.
Just a thought. It's time to get off the pot and get these devices out even if they are laughable just to get serious feedback from users for making them better and useful. At this point, anything is better than nothing. Except those Franklin Spanish-English devices that claim 50000 words but can't even find common verb conjugations.
By
Virgins who have had Bill Gates.
"Small, he's got bigger ideas"
Really? Damn! That bastard got a job writing for Wired? But, there's no Jon Katz filter on Wired. Now I've going to have to be weary of the author of every article, lest he shows up.
Zodiac Survey
so i think mozilla is a bit more advanced than emacs ;)
What about a psychologist? Emacs has some sort of doctor mode that emulates Freud. Kinda fitting lisp is supposed to be a good AI language.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
No, like many PC die-hard users, you're completely missing the point.
As much as anything, the Mac is about the OS and the applications. Can you run Mac OS X on your PC? I think not. Do you have Final Cut Pro or Express in a Windows version? Again, I think not.
I happen to use both a PC and a Mac, and each has strengths and weaknesses, mostly with their roots in either the OS or the software.
Hardware-wise, sure, a Mac is fairly similar to a PC in construction, other than using an alternate processor type. But the CPU is the "brain" of the whole box - so I'd say that, alone, can make some difference. Furthermore, when you buy a Mac, you generally get better quality of construction and interesting little "extras" that add nice touches. You also get technical support that speaks English and answers the phone in under 5 minutes most of the time.
Take Apple's Powerbook laptop, for example. If you want a laptop with a 17" screen, tell me which Windows PC laptop is going to be as thin and lightweight as Apple's? So far, the most popular 17" display PC laptops I've seen are an HP Pavilion and a Toshiba, both of which are thick bricks by comparison (and neither offers the backlit keyboard of the Powerbook 17" either).
But I digress.... When it comes to video editing, I run into hassles all the time with the popular consumer-grade Windows/PC packages. Take, for example, Pinnacle Studio. That thing has more update patches than you can shake a stick at, and if you don't apply them all, you get all sorts of issues with video freezing in the middle of downloading from your DV camcorder, GPF's while adding transitions, etc. etc. And Pinnacle is probably a better package than some.
On something like Apple's iMovie, you can buy all sorts of quality 3rd. party transitions and effects plug-ins (like "Slick Transitions" or the eZedia packages), and do some pretty advanced stuff, all for well under $200. (These things do everything from simulated snowing/raining in your video to transposing backgrounds onto blue-screens.) I don't see almost anyone producing worthwhile stuff with Microsoft's answer to iMovie, Windows Movie Maker.
Agreed, I can leave ten tabs open in firebird with no slowdown while running xchat, gaim, and xmms! And I can crunch ~40 blocks/day on a P3 1gHz for distributed.net RC5-72. All this and I still have over 30MB of memory free. I absolutely love having an OS that knows how to manage resources correctly, a lightweight GUI, and good apps that are debugged right. ;)
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
I don't think I missed the point at all. In fact, your point was not different from mine. A mac is different from a PC but it's not due to the bulk of the hardware components which are essentially the same. Of course I can't run OS X on a Windows box. Did I suggest otherwise? If Macs are about the OS and the applications (and PC aren't?) then why do mac lovers insist their virtually identical hardware is superior? Couldn't be because of the processor which, until the ^5, has never been competitive.
It's entirely possible to build a PC notebook with a 17" screen and a form factor like the powerbook. I would suggest that PC users want more functionality than that in such a large machine since that seems to be the case in what's offered. I edit video on a notebook and prefer the option of two internal hard drives, a real processor, and a much higher resolution screen. The 17" powerbook has absolutely no appeal to me with its puny hard drive space, low res screen and outdated processor. Like many mac products, it's pretty but not particularly powerful. Depends on whether you buy a machine for image or function.
Pinnacle has a long history of quality problems. I have no stability problems with Premiere or Vegas Video and haven't for a long time. As for MovieMaker vs. iMovie I could care less. I doubt there's much market for expensive transitions addons for cheap (or free) editing packages targeted at novice home users. Eventually people realize they don't want to use those things anyway (SpiceMaster being the exception).
Rolling Stones
Grandaddy is cool too, though.
I'm a 2000 man.
No, that would be the spyware infesting your windows box.