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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.'"
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
A better question to ask is, what the fuck is an operating system doing with those resources? I understand wanting those specs to run simulations, data processing, or games... but what does longhorn do that no other OS offers which requires such specs? The memory and CPU expectations are particularly egregious. I can still run NetBSD on a Sun 3/60. Yeah, maybe I can't run and ssh2d, but the core OS runs just fine. Sheesh... 2GB of RAM and a 6ghz CPU with a high end 3D graphics processor -- for the OS??? Christ, give me a PDP-11 running RT-11. Guess I'm a luddite. PIP me baby!!!
Naked Rayburn
This may be modded as funny. But even 2008 seems too early for these kind of specs. Give me a break, 2GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of disk space. It's rediculous. Computer retailer's are still shipping computers with 256MB of RAM and 40GB hard disks.
It probably won't be uncommon for that much RAM to be in a machine by 2008, but 1 Terabyte disk space seems a little rediculous. And longhorn is suppose to by release like early 2006 isn't it?
I'm not convinced that this article is for real.
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.
Slashdot is no better than Simone:
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Right now, the average home user is probably close to a 500 mHz Celeron. The average new XP machine might within shouting distance of a 3.0 GHz P4, sure.
Thus Microsoft's estimate of the average Longhorn machine sounds plausible.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Note that that isn't just some cheap out of order execution multi-pipeline trick like hyperthreading, but two full ALUs with an integrated MMU on the CPU core. Essentially SMP on a chip. Rock on!
Naked Rayburn
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...
Microsoft is deliberately making your PC obsolete. For no discernable reason.
No, there's a very good reason. If your PC is made obsolete, you'll have to buy a new one, which just happens to have MS Janus(tm) DRM built in.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
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
I'm not so sure. I think hardware makers are going to find it hard to sell this stuff when there's no demand for it.
Yes, but there will be demand when Microsoft tells the hardware manufacturers that the only way they will be allowed to maintain the OEM agreement is by selling machines exclusively with Longhorn installed...
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
And not everyone is a graphic artist or engineer. I'm an engineer, and while my machine does have 4G of memory, it also has dual 1 GHz Xeons, and if it has any 3D hardware, the Linux version I'm using doesn't use it. The only time I notice any limitations is when I run too many Modelsim simulations at once.
Most office computer users are bean-counters, secretaries, powerpoint-using middle managers, etc. These people do NOT need 3D graphics, 4G of RAM, or 3 GHz CPUs. What's more, their companies are not going to give them this hardware just because MS's latest OS recommends it. Intel and MS are already having severe problems with their quarterly results because businesses are now extending their computer upgrade cycles from the customary 3 years to 5 years or more, despite Wintel's desperate cries of how much "productivity" they're losing by not equipping secretaries with 3 GHz processors so they can run Word faster. Businesses, which drive a huge portion of computer sales (probably the largest portion), have finally wised up to the fact that they don't need to change computers so often, and unless Intel/MS make some changes to their business models which until now have depended on frequent upgrades (expanding into China is one tactic, though it's not working so well for MS because of piracy), they're going to be hurting.
> How does Microsoft Intend to Survive?
/. know better than anything I said in the last paragraph. We can see what Microsoft is trying to do. Hell, they've told the world! One Microsoft Way. It's not just their business address, it's their business strategy. We know that Gates and his minions, along with the ??AA and Congress, have possibly already won this. Have possibly already crippled the most important technological advance in history - the general-purpose home computer - and turned it into a content pipe to drain our wallets while only letting us run what they allow us. On the machines we buy and pay for! We see what's happening, but we're the minority. (I for one have been in the minority all my life. one light, one mind, flashing in the dark, blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts...) And when we try to tell people about this, they think we're raving paranoid lunatics.
Simple. DRM in BIOSes at the hardware level. Attacks on Linux via SCO etc at the OS level. FUD, loathing, and lock-in at the applications level. Patents, DRM, EULAs and DMCA at the legal level.
Remember the hidden APIs in Windows 3.x? They'll be at it again. Even better, Microsoft could put in "Trusted Computing safeguards" so they can Trust that only Microsoft's applications suite, IDE, etc will run. Bypass these safeguards, and it's charges under the DMCA and 20 years in max security prison as an evil godless communist hippie software pirate terrorist hacker for you, buddy!
Oh, and meanwhile they'll sue you for breaking the clause buried in the Longhorn EULA where you agree to only install Microsoft applications. Good luck in fighting off their army of rabid jackals with law degrees.
> People, Businesses, Universities, and others will not be able to afford to upgrade their systems to use Longhorn.
Can they afford not to? Since Office Longhorn will (because of Trusted Computing again) only run on Windows Longhorn, and will have incompatible file formats with any previous version, and after a certain date they'll only ship Longhorn, once you buy one new machine, you have to replace them all. (They've done it before, remember?) Intel, AMD, NVidia, and ATi, among others, will love them for forcing the installation of the latest CPUs and graphics cards even in the office. Intel and AMD, in particular, will be ecstatic to add the "features" to their CPUs that will help Microsoft to do all this.
Over the last few years, it's seemed Microsoft has this plan: Make consumers believe that lock-ups and crashes are normal consequences of owning a computer and not a result of poor OS design. Make them believe that viruses and other malware are normal consequences of surfing the internet and not a result of poor browser design. Make them believe that you really do need a 2 GHz chip to run the OS and a word processor (plus a top of the line graphics card for that paperclip). Make them believe that the only thing that can replace Windows, Office or Microsoft anything else is the next version, that nothing else is an "enterprise ready solution". In short, take credit for everything good that happens, and shift blame for everything bad onto something else.
And we here on
Maybe that's the clearest sign that Micros~1 has won.
Microsoft Windows Longhorn. Projected Release Date: 1984.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
And how many people do you know that care about video editing? I don't know any, and I really don't care about making my own videos.
Look, of course there's always going to be applications to take advantage of the highest-performance computing technology available. We aren't seeing ever-more-powerful Beowulf clusters and compute farms popping up for no reason. The scientific community can always use more cycles for better simulations, and the Hollywood people can always use them for better FX (of course, neither of these groups use Windows either). Certain engineering jobs require fast CPUs too for simulations, and others require advanced 3D graphics for modelling.
But none of these people are home users confined to a $2000 budget for a computer (or better yet, sub-$1k).
Gamers who can't stand anything less than 100fps also "need" high performance machines. However, just because some small groups of people with specialized needs or wants exist doesn't mean there's going to be a huge market for giant hard drives and 6 GHz CPUs. Are so many Joe Sixpacks going to rush to BestBuy just so they can get one of these super-fast machines so they can edit their home videos faster? I really doubt it.
The upgrade cycle is slowing, and most people who want computers have them now. I think this is going to cause the drive for ever-increasing specs to slow.
Lastly, why would an OS need all this power? The OS isn't supposed to gobble up all the machine's resources, because then you can't run these power-hungry apps.
No, we don't. Not all of us, anyway.
Sure, it's nice to drag the bottom end along to a higher standard... but the thing you overlook is that, many times, even the top end doesn't need that standard.
In my shop, I've got 50 odd machines, and 43 of them are toasters. The users use exactly 3 applications - internal email (no internet); a custom app that lets them answer the phone and transcribe info from a caller; and a custom app that lets them manage the results of that call. And, oh yeah... 3 of that 43 will occasionally make a spreadsheet, consisting entirely of static cells.
That's it. That's all they do, and that's all they WILL do. We don't want added complexity - literally, people can die if our stuff screws up. And quite frankly, a 486 is overkill for this.
Instead, I'm being force-fed a piece of crap that's so complex, noone can manage it. The first 12 hours of box's life will be me, uninstalling AOL, MSN, OE, Media Player, and all the other crap that is nothing more than an exploit vector if I'm lucky. How I spent my past week? $35k for a rack mounted box, no keyboard or video... and it has Solitare on it. It has IE on it. It has a cute little wizard that'll help me setup MSN as my dialup ISP. This, in a quad-homed box that'll have 3 fractional DS3s on it. Yep, the inclusion of NetMeeting on this thing really made my day, and thank god OE keeps getting reinstalled every time I patch.
So... no, sir... the potential "new development" argument doesn't fly. It is rarely appropriate, and it is pretty much responsible for the bulk of the MS exploits running around today. Unknown, unneeded, and therefore unmanaged features that are not needed by that specific install. Look at the exploits running around, look at who keeps "catching" them and why... it's all caused by these "new developments" being force-fed in an environment where these developments are *not* appropriate, and in fact not needed. I had to patch against a MIDI file exploit, on a rack mounted box with no sound card. Huh??!! Then consider that I had to patch my neighbor's box against Sasser... a box that has only a single NIC connected to a cable modem. No file sharing, etc, is needed by that user... and the user doesn't want it. Yet, we still have to manage it, even though it has no business existing in that install. You'll find that the bulk of the Sasser victims are a similar case, and this case is caused by unwanted, unknown, and therefore unmanaged features.
Consider how irrelevent most firewalls would be if this were NOT the case.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am