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.'"

Comments

Really? Because all this time I thought that....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

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.

And that will be the standard computer

[Neil Blender]

When longhorn comes out in 2008.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[sTalking_Goat]

When longhorn comes out in 2008.

ROFL! Such optimism. Next you'll be telling me that Duke Nukem Forever just went into public beta...

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[pseudochaotic]

Actually, Longhorn will include a time machine emulated in software, so that you can download your new computer from the future. That's why the requirements are so high.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[bee-yotch]

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.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[the_mad_poster]

Next you'll be telling me that Duke Nukem Forever just went into public beta...

Heh... only if the developers took a page from Valve's book.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Grishnakh]

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.

You definitely seem to be abnormal with your 1.25 GB of RAM; most people I think still have 128MB - 512 MB. I'm doing just fine with 512.

Even with Windows XP, most people have no use for more than 40 GB of disk space, if that. The biggest thing driving disk space demand right now is people wanting to store all their music as MP3s, or downloading a lot of movies online. I only do the music part (with my own CDs), and my 80 GB is still far from full. People who don't do music and movies (such as office workers) have no use for large hard drives. I really don't see how Longhorn could use so much disk space either, unless they're loading it down with useless video clips for some reason. Even MS couldn't write code that bloated, even with the hidden flight simulators.

Intel is already having problems with selling their processors because users are finally figuring out that you don't need 3 GHz to read email and surf the web. Intel's even sponsored video gaming competitions in Vietnam in an attempt to drive demand for faster processors.

All in all, while some home users (mainly gamers) will want equipment with these kinds of performance specs, businesses aren't going to like the idea of having to upgrade so much hardware just because of an operating system upgrade.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[chadjg]

Yeah, I'm optimistic too. Our friend Mr. Gates has said that in the future, hardware will be free or almost free. I'm wondering how or in what world that is reasonable. You'd have to sell a lot of advertising built into the OS to pay for a dual core 6ghz machine.

Clock speed goodness has slowed down lately. About the only thing that's still going nuts is hard drive space, or so it seeems to me.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[brokenwndw]

The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:

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.

In the meantime, those nursing dreams of 100 GHz chips had better look beyond nanotech to picotech-- atom-sized transistors. :-P

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[rastachops]

I'm currently running a 1.33Ghz Athlon with 1Gig Ram...... the same as I was over 3 years ago...
Why haven't I upgraded? No need... My system really does do all that I need it to, I keep trying to justify a new one, but can't. Other than for gaming, my system is still really quick (RAID-0 on two 7200rpm disks).

I think even Joe Sixpack will be fed up of upgrading and buying a new PC by the time longhorn comes out,...I highly doubt PCs will continue to increase in speed across the board - ie the distribution of PCs in use will widen further.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[hburch]

Who says the entire chip has to be in the same part of the clock cycle? You can make the pipeline 200 stages deep with each stage of the pipeline running on a clock with a different offset.

Such a system would allow clocks that run faster on larger chips than allowed by speed-of-light calculations.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[ProgressiveCynic]

I'm baffled as to why you insensitive clods modded this parent as funny - everything Neil says is deadpan true.

This is actually a very common technique in the commercial software world, advocated at least as early as 95 by Alan Cooper in The Essentials of User Interface Design: look at your project schedule, try to project what kind of hardware will be common by the time you ship, and plan for it. It's not rocket science, just common sense. And as others have pointed out, the specs they are targeting should be standard by 2006, let alone by 2008 when the beta program will end.

BTW, as an official Longhorn beta tester, I can confirm that this story is not a hoax: I was given these specs over a year ago at some of the early beta launch meetings, and while they've bumped the RAM up from 1 GB to 2, nothing else has changed.

BTW2, at WinHEC this week the graphics vendors are complaining that Longhorn won't be using enough of the vast amounts of GPU power they will be providing by 2006...

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[hburch]

4-6GHz requires a 33%-100% increase from current speeds. That's 18 months away at the most, according to Moore's Law. 3x on graphics card takes a little longer: 29 months. Certainly not far away. 1GB is also easy, as 512MB is mid-range.

However, 1TB >> 120G that is standard now, and 120GB is effectively infinite for most people. When disks were ~40MB, every time I got a bigger drive, it became filled in about 2 months. It now takes me longer than three years, which is about my upgrade cycle, so it is "infinite". 1TB would represent the largest growth factor from current standard systems.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[zentigger]

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...

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Utumn0]

Amen to that. No way businesses will spend thousands to upgrade their hardware just to be able to run new OS, no matter how amazing Soitaire it's got.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[mercuriser]

Sounds like MS must have shifted to writing Longhorn in Java or VB.NET to require those sort of Specs!

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[DavittJPotter]

About 2 years ago, I broke the "continuous upgrade cycle". I still play games - Quake III Arena mostly, UT2004, Flight Sim 2004, Dark Age of Camelot - on Windows XP with an Athlon 1500XP+, a GeForce 3 Ti500, 512MB of RAM, and a 40GB drive. I also do 'serious amateur' (25-50MB images) with Photoshop, and have MS Outlook running pretty much 90% of the time. Currently dual booting with XP is Fedora Core 2 Test 3, using Evolution, Mozilla, a couple terminal sessions, a Terminal Services connection, and the Bluefish editor.

For those requirements, this machine is perfectly adequate. Sure, my Photoshop could get stuff done faster. Sure, my frame rates in my games could be higher. But fuck, for most everything I do anymore, it's perfectly acceptable.

When this machine won't keep up with the games I want to play, or the programs I need to work with, then I'll pony up for a new one.

Most folks I work with/for are still on Pentium II or III machines, with 256MB of RAM being "a TON of memory, dude!"

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[moviepig.com]

...2GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of disk space...

...and your backup-storage will have parking lights.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[InfiniteZero]

So basically what you are saying is that, 40GB ought to be enough for everyone?

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[LuxFX]

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 not that ridiculous.

On the hard drive side, 250GB drives and even 300+GB are very easy to find in any computer store. I've also heard of 1TB external hard drives. It would be pretty simple to set up a system with more than 1TB of storage.

On the RAM side, most motherboards these days support 3-4GB of RAM. Mine right now supports 4GB; I run 1GB in it for now, and will be buying a second GB fairly soon.

And on the processor side, I hear of CPUs being overclocked past 4GHz and higher all the time.

So, even though these are the specs for the "average" computer, it's possible to have it today. And bottom line, if it can be done today, then there is no reason to think it wouldn't be average in 2.5-3.0 years.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[TedCheshireAcad]

A computer of this stature would have an incredible demand in my field. I work with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, specifically, microfluidics. Computing the solutions to atrocious systems of partial differential equations is a bear of a problem, even for a cluster. A 50-microsecond simulation takes about 24 hours to compute on my 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM workstation.

I certainly have a demand for this kind of computation power, and then some. If I had my way, I'd be working on a 100+ node cluster, but unfortunately thats cost prohibitive.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[TonyZahn]

And it will be shipped Temporal Express. "When it absolutely, positively had to be there yesterday: Temporal Express"

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[jtwJGuevara]

and Daikatana won game of the year.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[bishiraver]

At the risk of getting modded offtopic, I think the trend in CPUs is going to change dramatically soon, much the same way it has with video cards. Except, in a slightly different direction. Instead of getting faster, the direction they need to be going is getting less expensive to produce, less power requirements, and less heat output.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[fo0bar]

Next you'll be telling me that Duke Nukem Forever just went into public beta...

*sigh*

3D Realms will NEVER be capable of releasing Duke Nukem Forever with technology/gameplay capable of justifying the development cycle (which began 26 years ago next week). By extension, 3D Realms will probably never release Duke Nukem Forever.

But the jokes will continue indefinitely! Therefore, 3D Realms should release a Tetris clone called Duke Nukem Forever. That way it's released, it can't be compared to today's FPSs, and that lame joke can't be used anymore.

Duke Nukem Forever as a Tetris game... that would rock.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Deliveranc3]

Actually while you were sleeping DDR2 and DDR3 came out.

Also much of the RAM manufacturing was moved back to the west from Asia as prices there were being fixed.

After several lawsuits and DDR2 being scrapped as power hungry and inefficient DDR3 was drawn up with the major advantages being scalability to 2.x gighz (DDR) and a price of production several orders of magnitude cheaper than existing DDR.

there are some interesting articles over on CNET about the big box computer manufacturers fighting with memory makers.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[daviddennis]

Well, I have 410gb disk and 3.5GB RAM on my dual 2ghz PowerMac G5, which sounds like it might just scrape past the minimium Longhorn requirements if it was the PC equivalent.

But I spent about $4,000 making it that way, which hardly sounds realistic even in 2008.

Why did I spend $4,000 on a computer? Because I do CPU-sapping Final Cut Pro and After Effects work. Nobody spends this kind of money just to run the newest operating system. Well, not unless they're insanely wealthy anyway.

I think these requirements will be a tough sell even in 2008. I wonder if the hardware requirements are a major reason for the delays, since there's no way consumers today would accept anything near them.

D

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Naffer]

Duh... Overclock.
I'm running my light at 3.4 x 10^8 m/s.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Zordak]

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.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Ifni]

Actually, it may well be if Microsoft's vision for the future of computing comes to be. I am too lazy to pull the links, but Microsoft has made clear on numerous occasions that they are betting heavily on the multimedia convergence. So they probably expect that Longhorn will be powering these Media storage center/Tivo/web utility/TV/home monitor/kitchen sink computers that they believe will be the norm in 5 years.

And I half think they are correct.

Add in some of the UI improvements that are likely to come down the pike (verbal control, facial recognition, a computer generated face on your computer screen to interact with, etc) and the video card requirements (think real time near photo quality rendering) become more sane. The hard drive is required for the media storage, and the processor is needed for the human interaction, video encoding (though this will likely be handled by special hardware, likely in the video card), etc. I can't figure what the need for so much RAM is, though it could be to have an exceptionally large disk cache as the OS and apps will be very real time oriented and thus more heavily affected by swapping to disk. And of course the networking is to transfer large media streams to all the network connected media devices, etc, and wireless is central to Microsoft's pervasive computing initiatives (see research.microsoft.com).

So, yeah, I see the OS driving a demand for these machines.

Of course, I also see Microsoft releasing a lower end OS for the rest of the world.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Feanturi]

So, even though these are the specs for the "average" computer, it's possible to have it today. And bottom line, if it can be done today, then there is no reason to think it wouldn't be average in 2.5-3.0 years.

But to me, 'average' computer specs implies that I can have all of this for $2000 or less, including a decent monitor. When that happens for these specs I'll stop laughing. Oh it's inevitable sure, but for now it's rediculous.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[sharkey]

Duke Nukem Forever as a Tetris game... that would rock.

It's time to stack blocks and chew bubblegum. And I'm all outta gum.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[brokenwndw]

Sure. After all, 3 GHz --> 4 inches which is certainly smaller than your motherboard, which is one reason, I suppose, the bus runs at a fraction of the processor clock.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

The jokes are still legit--I mean, go here: http://www.3drealms.com/games.html It's at the top of the page! They're still working on that crap! Amazing!

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Deusy]

I think the trend in CPUs is going to change dramatically soon, much the same way it has with video cards. Except, in a slightly different direction. Instead of getting faster, the direction they need to be going is getting less expensive to produce, less power requirements, and less heat output. ...and more of them.

I wouldn't be suprised if 2-4 processor machines were not the normal in 3 years time.

Why keep going up, when you can go sideways and gain as much ground?

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[glitch23]

Even MS couldn't write code that bloated, even with the hidden flight simulators.

I take it you haven't seen how many CDs Flight Sim 2004 is on have you? It's on FOUR CDs. That's a good start to being bloated; given that a lot of that is probably graphics but still.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Timber_Z]

Actually where I work (Fortune 500 company) all the bean counter people have some much junk loaded onto there systems (Virus Scanners, 50 zillion company security programs, docking station programs, etc) that even a 1 ghz p3 windows 2000 computer is slow as mud.

I had to help clean the virus's off many of our VP's laptop's, and even without the virus those computers were just painfully slow.
The people with the 2+ GHz (Pentium 4's) seem to do just fine.

For myself, I just uninstalled all the company junk, and my system is fine.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[cbreaker]

While what you say is true, companies will buy the computers available at the time when the old PC's break down.

So, if in 2006 (or maybe 2007 when companies start releasing all their PC's with Longhorn) the PC makers only sell PC's with 2GB RAM and a terrabyte of space, that's what businesses will buy.

They won't NEED it to do word processing, but they WILL need it if they want to keep using Microsoft.

I'm sure MS will have some "gotcha" in Longhorn that will make it difficult to avoid. They will probably stop releasing versions of Office and their other products that run on older windows. Kinda like how Office 2003 won't run on 98 and you can't buy Office XP anymore.

Gosh, you gotta love a good monopoly...

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[ProgressiveCynic]

That is rather amusing! Sorry, Mr. I Know What I'm Talking About, I should definitely have refered to myself as a "Longhorn M4 Tester". I certainly didn't mean to imply that the product is farther along than it really is. As for M$ getting "beta" testers at this early stage, they happen to be one of the best companies around for getting customer feedback early and often. I had been playing with earlier builds for a while before then, but M$ gave out thousands of copies of Longhorn at their Professional Developers Conference last October, so it's actually in fairly public "beta". They don't like to refer to these early preview releases as betas, because it actually implies a much higher level of support and liability than they are ready for at this stage, but this is also the best stage to give real criticism that can still be incorporated before release.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Togakure]

Duh... Overclock. I'm running my light at 3.4 x 10^8 m/s.

That's not so dumb, underneath it all. It will get to the point where in order to get something done, it will be figured out how to 'trick' the universe into doing things like this.

I mean, there's already been a mathematician or two who've done mathematical proofs (or at least theorems or somesuch, I'm not a mathematician) that warp travel ala Star Trek is possible - the ship is still doing less than light speed inside a warp bubble. As far as the universe would be concerned, that ship hasn't broken any rules of physics.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[LaserLyte]

I agree. I think there's going to come a point where users simply don't need any more computing power. The fastest machine I own is 1.7GHz, and I imagine that will satisfy my needs for a few years to come -- I use 3D modelling tools, compilers, and a few other "intensive" applications, but the machine still operates at a reasonable speed.

Why would I *want* a bloated operating system that needs all those resources? Surely if I need that processing power, I would be better using a lightweight minimalist OS to squeeze every bit of power out of the system.

Also, with Microsoft's Secure Computing initiative, and all that crap, why would I choose this Operating System over an open, free alternative?

Finally, I think the world will be pretty much converted to Unix alternatives (Linux, etc.) by the time 2006 rolls around. During that time, we'll all be enjoying constant updates and improvements, the Linux kernel will have gone through many versions, and Linux (and BSD, etc.) will almost certainly be "READY FOR THE DESKTOP". And hopefully, Linux & co. will have dominance as the gaming and software platform...

Microsoft is obviosly attempting it's usual trick of tieing everything into the kernel, and building an all-in-one "user-friendly" solution...i.e., eliminating choice.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[fallen1]

And, hopefully, all the hardware manufacturers will realize what they (and we) already understand now - that no one will be buying this overblown hardware system for home/personal use (well, ok, no normal mom-and-pop home user will) _especially_ since Microsoft will be including the "we control all that you see and hear" modules in Longhorn. Why, oh dear God why!?, would I pay $2,000 - $3,000 for a computer system I no longer control? Yeah, I wouldn't and neither will the general public. Both in my professional and personal life, all the people and businesses I quote out and build systems for don't want to pay even $1000 for a desktop system now - unless they are a gamer, cad/cam, graphics designer, or something along those lines.

My greatest hope is that all the top hardware manufacturers see dwindling sales (and dollars) in the future if they adopt Microsoft's specs for Longhorn PCs and collectively tell Microsoft "Fuck you!" That would make my millenium.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[JCholewa]

> You can have information go faster than the speed of light. Your electrons don't move very
> far. They just bump into the next one, which bumps into the next one. Imagine this: you've got
> a 1 light year long pole. You shoot a photon/wave of light parallel to the pole. It hits
> then end in 1 year. I push on the end of my pole. The end 1 light year away moves almost
> immediately (small lag for compression of the material). I just transferred information faster
> than you did. Electrons have a longer lag than a metal pole will, but not enough to slow it down
> past light speed.

Your post is inaccurate. When you push on one end of an object, the other end does not immediately start moving. You just produce a wave of compression from one end to the other (kind of like how tapping one end of the object only produces vibration at the other end at the speed of sound, which is certainly not infinite), and the speed of this wave depends on the rigidity of the object. For instance, if you push on one end of a rubber pole, it will take a lot longer from the other end to likewise move than if the pole were made of steel. But there is no object quite rigid enough, even in theory, that does this faster than the speed of light.

Here's a place that explains it better than I can:

http://www.vscht.cz/mat/Pavel.Pokorny/physics/FT L. html

"If you have a long rigid stick and you hit one end, wouldn't the other end have to move immediately? Would this not provide a means of FTL communication?

Well it would if there were such things as perfectly rigid bodies. In practice the effect of hitting one end of the stick propagates along it at the speed of sound in the material which depends on its elasticity and density. Relativity places an absolute limit on material rigidity so that the speed of sound in the material will not be greater than c."

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

The estimates are OK

[stecoop]

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.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Cali Thalen]

The article and the quote both say 'dual core processor' - not dual processors. Forgive me for not knowing off the top of my head, but I am assuming that they don't mean one of those hyperthreading things though, so...multi-processor chips maybe?

Re:The estimates are OK

[shaka999]

I think they mentioned a dual-core processor, not a dual processor. Thats a big difference. Intel's Hyperthreading is a step towards a dual-core and we have it today. With the work I've seen from Sun and IBM on dual core processors I'd expect we see this sooner than later.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Naked Rayburn]

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

Re:The estimates are OK

[Hollinger]

It's possible. IBM has been doing it for some time with the Power4+ chip, as seen here. It's a form of Multi-Chip Module. You can see a picture of one here.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Fuzzle]

Let's go smash some looms.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Naked Rayburn]

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

Re:The estimates are OK

[pantherace]

Yes, like the power4, and the ultrasparc IV (& another ultrasparc that's 2 US2 cores) These chips have are supposed to have 2 processor cores on a single die.

Right now, that would help AMD a heck of a whole lot more than Intel, because 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. Thus why people either cluster Itaniums (with usually a max of 2 processors per node) or have very custom chipsets that emulate what the Opteron does (SGI, and an HP chipset))

Think of it as on chip SMP which is not some virtualization construct as Hyperthreading is.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you hear? Longhorn is written in Java.

Re:The estimates are OK

[red floyd]

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.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Carnildo]

The problem I see is heat. Intel's latest chip design, the Prescott, puts out ~80 watts of heat at 3.4GHz. A dual-core, 4GHz version would put out around 150 watts. No air cooling system in the world can handle that sort of heat density.

Now, look at graphics cards. Triple the video power, and you can expect to double the heat output -- if the process shrink to 90nm reduces the power output. If, instead, they run into the problem Intel did, the heat output will increase five-fold. There's enough headroom on GPU cooling that you can still air-cool, but these really will be the "vacuum cleaners" that recent nVidia cards were accused of being.

GigE and terabyte storage are reasonable expectations.

Re:The estimates are OK

[squiggleslash]

Didn't you hear? Longhorn is written in Java.

The AC unwittingly maketh an insightful joke: Isn't Longhorn supposed to be built on .NET, VMs and all?

That's what I've been reading anyway. This is partly why it keeps being delayed, .NET isn't exactly mature and even if it was, there's a lot of old code that's being rewritten for this.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Surlyboi]

Two words.

Clippy's back.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Too Much Noise]

How is this insightful? this is for the freakin' OS, not for gaming or anything!!! Remember, the average consumer does little more than web+mail+maybe movies/music. 3x faster video cards indeed!

yes, hardware will improve, there will be faster CPUs, GPUs, faster and cheaper memory ... but these requirements for the OS are ridiculous. Besides, this is not going to be the average system very soon, as the 'average system' is still sold to businesses - and good luck trying to convince those they have to shell out so much money for useless hardware (3d? loads of ram for the secretary's freecell?) just to upgrade the OS! Heck, good luch trying to get a system to this spec from Dell for less than $1000! And if Dell won't sell it ...

Also, if this spec turns out true, there will be a lot of noise from all the people who bought the last MS license plan - and it won't be cheering, either!

The only good news is MS will lose a lot of corporate/gov customers with this spec. Maybe Longhorn is not such a threat to opensource as previously thought?

Re:The estimates are OK

[sydb]

Read the effing article, they're finally taking out Notepad and forcing you to use Wordpad, aka write.exe. That's why the specs are so high. Nobody else here seems to have noticed. Write is a pretty CPU intensive piece of software.

Re:The estimates are OK

[drinkypoo]

"We will have a multi-core product."

I also read somewhere that the multi-core opteron will be pin compatible with existing opteron processors, so you will be able to drop them into place on existing boards due to the miracle of hypertransport (the REAL HT)

Re:The estimates are OK

[AltaMannen]

I don't think the estimates are the minimum spec to run the OS, the spec is to run the applications that MS expects will exist by the release of the OS.

Re:The estimates are OK

[jackbox]

Which is why Longhorn PCs will also double as the Easy-Bake Ovens (TM) of the 21st Century. Educational fun for the whole family!

Yes... I'm patenting this idea. (Does anyone know a good patent lawyer? TIA.)

Re:The estimates are OK

[SEE]

Yeah, but that just means either Intel will have to get off its ass and fix its problems, or everybody will be using AMD chips (or, perhaps, PowerPCs) to run Longhorn.

Re:The estimates are OK

[bwy]

No foolin. These systems are gonna run hot.

Now, consider that a EPIA 5000 Mini ITX board runs so cool, that it doesn't need a fan. Sure, its a "slow" box (500-600mhz), but bear with me for a sec. Now consider what the average user does with their PC. I just don't get what the average consumer is going to need to do with this horsepower. I've been saying that for years though. Most non-techies I know send mail, browse the web, write letters. Any of those $200 PCs at Wal*Mart can do this.

I see a lot of stuff all the time, Moore's law and what not. But has anybody ever studied WHERE consumer PC's are going and WHY? Won't they reach a point where they are "good enough"? Like a small Briggs and Stratton engine for a mower. Sure, they change a little over the years, but not a whole lot. Because they work and server their purpose.

Now, faster computers obviously have tremendous, unimaginable uses outside the consumer market. But my point is at some point the consumer won't need the same type of hardware that a scientist is using to sequence DNA or an IT shop is using to run web sites, process transactions, etc.

Re:The estimates are OK

[bender647]

Frequency itself is only one contributor to power. They will likely continue scaling processor voltage down too (power goes with square of voltage). Wider parallel busses at lower freq? My imagination is limited, but these are just engineering problems that will be solved as always.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Too Much Noise]

well, no - I was too young to care in '80 :-)

Seriously, the point is more like: what does this new OS offer me that has this spec as a must, a.k.a. I can't get it with a different OS for a significantly lower spec? Software has been stagnating lately - and it's not even using the full power of the current average hardware. It's not like you're currently constrained to fit everything in 64k of memory and use CP/M off a floppy. The horsepower is there, only mostly idle.

Besides, with current technology this spec is hilarious - water cooling systems will have a hard time keeping the whole thing radiating below the visible spectrum, unless it's idle. And summers would be very hot this way in 100+ offices. I'm not saying a future computer exceeding those specs is impossible - far from it. But it will require a qualitative change in technology and that isn't likely to happen before Longhorn.

Re:The estimates are OK

[FrYGuY101]

This isn't the minimum specs. It's not recommended specs. This is the 'projected average', meaning what Microsoft predicts the average user will have. Digital Music, Images, Videos, et al are all becoming more and more popular. Programs are getting 'heavier' and more bloated, Games are getting more and more intensive, et cetera.

In three years (2007), I can easily see this as a high-end machine. If that's when Longhorn launches, those machines will be bundled with Longhorn. Most copies of Windows, remember, are bundled with new computers. If it's 2008, I can see this as an AVERAGE computer at launch. It's simply the bastard version of Moore's Law (Actual Moore's Law deals with transistor density... Bastard Moore's law is the 'double in speed' one) in action.

If these were the minimum specs, I could see being outraged, but this is just an attempt by Microsoft to gauge the average computer it's going to ship with...

Re:The estimates are OK

[arkane1234]

Let me put an ignition kill-switch on your vehicle. It'll make me feel much safer as you could use your car to take my property with it.

It's my property, and why shouldn't I have the ability to protect it? After all, you're driving something that is designed to have stuff in it. Next thing you know, you'll have my stuff in it. I'm only looking out for my property rights.

Re:The estimates are OK

[gnuman99]

Don't worry - it will feel like a 486.

I am not trying to troll here, but when someone says a recommended system, then they mean it will run semi-fast. That usually means a 486 with Windows 3.1 type of fast.

I must say, that if MS rolls out their search engine on this machine with this software (the specs are probably not right), then they will need like a million servers for the search engine. Google will just need like 1000 with these specs!

Re:The estimates are OK

[Rakarra]

I forgot, copyright holders shouldn't have the ability to control anything they make, so DRM is automatically bad.

That's right, copyright holders shouldn't have the ability to control what I do with their works post-sale. I have no issues with busting people for download copywritten songs, movies, whatever. I specifically don't want the media companies deciding under what circumstances I watch the media I have bought. A number of the open source projects I use every day (like mplayer, xine, mythtv) would be severely crippled or simply impossible with strong hardware/software DRM. That's why I oppose it.

Why is this is a big deal?

[SpyHunter99]

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....

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Jaywalk]

By the time Longhorn comes out I would imagine that it is a pretty normal requirment.

The reason it's a big deal is that it keeps the "normal" price for a computer unnecessarily high. If the average user can get everything done he needs with a quarter of that computing power, why should he buy an OS that requires him to buy the mega-computer? Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Elwood P Dowd]

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....

Your respondents completely miss the point, even if you misspoke. They're not talking about the average computer, they're talking about the average computer that will run Longhorn.

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.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[An Onerous Coward]

My 1.2 GHz Duron w/ 256MB RAM still kicks the crap out of all my non-techie friends' systems, and I'm not feeling any compelling need to upgrade either. Right now, any game that doesn't run on a P3-800 with a ho-hum graphics card is automatically relegated to a niche market.

If these specs are for real, I consider Microsoft's view of a "normal system" to be wildly optimistic.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Romeozulu]

What? I'm not even running 3.0 HT and I'm not average (hey, I'm posting on /. that = not average)

Oh great, you just assigned posting on /. to be not average, when you meant to compare them.

Please run lint on your posts from now on.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Hatta]

The upside is that all those people buying ubercomputers just cause MS tells them to brings the price of powerful hardware down, so that those of us running non-bloaty operating systems get better performance for cheaper. It's not like this is going to stop poor people from buying computers, hell there will be plenty of powerful used computers hitting the market. I'm sure the figures aren't just for the operating system alone either. They're factoring in the apps of tomorrow too. All in all, I don't see how this is a big deal.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[lokedhs]

You mustn't know a lot of Flight Simmers then? These things draw enormous amounts of power from the machines, and not even the highest end machines today can run IL-2 Sturmovik with full graphics in the most complex missions yet. Also, most non-trivial missions in Lock on requires lots of GHz, not to mention a good graphics card.

It all depends on what you use your machine for. Flight sims require a major part of the available CPU to deal with the AI, something not really needed for most other types of games.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[nessus42]

Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?>

Well, that's just un-American! Corporate Uncle Sam needs you to spend all your savings and fuel the economic gears that have made our nation the greatest the world has ever seen. God bless.

|>oug

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[AvantLegion]

Keep in mind that the average home users is close to (if not above) 3.0 HT procs today....

You have a very skewed concept of "average", good sir. Too much time on Slashdot. That might be the average system being SOLD today, as in right this second, but that's far from the average system in peoples' homes. "Average" users don't buy a new system every year, and 3.0 GHz wasn't the average when they bought systems 2, 3, 4 years ago.

Nor is there an application today that the "average user" requires that needs 3.0 GHz. The "average user" may be playing with digital photos more, but they don't require maximum Photoshop performance. Slicing their picture cropping time from 4 seconds to 2 seconds isn't worth hundreds or even a couple thousand dollars to Joe Average In Less Than Optimum Economical Times.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Carnildo]

True. Gaming is the only thing driving CPU speeds these days. For everything else, computers are fast enough.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[noda132]

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....

I hope these specs are true. That would almost certainly spell certain doom for Microsoft.

Imagine you're a CEO of a medium/large business and your IT manager tells you that you need another 1000 machines. Will you buy: (a) 1000 machines at $1500 each, plus $100 for Longhorn (plus software assurance); or: (b) 1000 machines at $300 each, plus $80 for Red Hat Desktop?

Would you pay $1.6 million or $380 thousand? Especially after your IT manager tells you some horror stories with Microsoft support. And Microsoft has an absolutely pitiful track record with new software releases....

Requirements like that would pretty much guarantee that the business world unanimously chooses Linux.

And who (besides perhaps gamers, a large portion of whom would be pirating Longhorn) would use Longhorn at home if they use Linux at work and it's free? In two years its barriers to entry will be pretty much gone.

Microsoft may be selling a great product and platform, but there is no market for it.

Thus, taking into account the fact that Microsoft is not stupid, I call bullshit on this story.

Re:Why is this is a big deal?

[Ugmo]

Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?

If the cost of the hardware came down too much, you might notice that you are paying a huge chunk of the price to Microsoft. Keep the cost of the hardware high and Microsoft's cut gets lost in the static.

DRM Overhead

[SWroclawski]

It takes a lot of resouces to keep people shackled.

Re:DRM Overhead

[Soko]

Which is somewhat ironic given the headline Projected 'Average' Longhorn System Is A Whopper

"Have it YOUR way" indeed.

Soko

Damn...

[Molt]

..that'd better be one hell of a game of Solitaire.

Re:Damn...

[sTalking_Goat]

..that'd better be one hell of a game of Solitaire.

I hear the Ace of Spades uses 16x anti-aliasing, bump mapping and has 64 million polygon count....

news flash:

[ice-nine]

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.

Problems ?

[Space cowboy]

When you're a subscriber, you get the story early, and you also get the line:

See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor.

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

Re:Problems ?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If XP is any indication- you'll need 1TB of storage because the system itself + virutal memory will take up 500GB.

Re:Problems ?

[sTalking_Goat]

but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?

forevery bit of data. you need a four bit EULA.

think about it.

Do you think...

[Kjuib]

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.

Wow!

[SCSi]

Now IE will run as fast as its linux-based counterparts!
*ducks*

Re:Wow!

[Paladine97]

I'm afraid I have to agree with this post. I dual-boot and IE beats the crap out of firefox on my machine.

Konqueror seems much faster though, on par with IE.

not confirmed

[untermensch]

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.

How does Microsoft Intend to Survive ?

[Dozix007]

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.

Re:How does Microsoft Intend to Survive ?

[SomeGuyFromCA]

> How does Microsoft Intend to Survive?

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 /. 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.

Maybe that's the clearest sign that Micros~1 has won.

Microsoft Windows Longhorn. Projected Release Date: 1984.

Re:How does Microsoft Intend to Survive ?

[phiwum]

> How does Microsoft Intend to Survive?

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.


This isn't insightful. This is paranoid ranting with no connection to reality.

Microsoft is a monopoly and aims to continue as a monopoly. On this we agree. But there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the court or legislature (no matter how corrupted by money) would allow a monopoly to enforce that computers run only Microsoft software by means of an EULA, the DMCA or shotguns loaded with salt peter. And not even Microsoft is so ignorant and arrogant enough to try.

Microsoft's real life abuses are egregious enough to piss off most folk if we just point them out. We don't have to invent fantasies about the machinations of Evil Bill and his minions.

It's a Wopper?

[Guildencrantz]

Wow, with that kind of processing power you can play a heck of a lot of games of Global Thermonuclear War!

~~Guildencrantz

Moore better not die...

[TastyWords]

...or he'll be spinning in his grave.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[the_mad_poster]

That's why the smarter people use Firefox.

With Moore's Law

[Lord Kano]

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

Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[bonch]

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.

Floppy drive

[antic]

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.

If So, Microsoft Is Screwing Itself

[WombatControl]

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.

Every thime they announce a new operating system..

[cute-boy]

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

My god

[rune2]

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).

Re:Beowulf Cluster?

[whiteranger99x]

Imagine what? I'd imagine with Longhorn installed on those, it would about the equivalent of 2 486's running windows 95 :P

Free internet

[ttys00]

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! :)

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[Trejkaz]

If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.

Yup, this just more Timothy FUD

[malakai]

You are correct this article is pure speculation. People complain about FUD coming from MS, yet post like this are the worse kind of FUD. And this is slashdot perpetuated FUD.

Slashdot is no better than Simone:

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

MS is being realistic

[dokebi]

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.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[QuasiRob]

I dont believe the original poster attributed the quote to Bill Gates, so you can hardly shoot him down on that point.

lifecycle

[sir_cello]

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 /. masses.

This is to process MSPS

[amichalo]

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

Re:This is to process MSPS

[Gumby]

17:18:28 < james/Gaim> not to mention the advanced continuous reboot system (ACRS) which will be needed
17:18:45 < james/Gaim> to re-initialize after patches
17:18:47 < gumby> rofl - can I post that to /.?
17:18:54 < james/Gaim> be my guest

Spare a thought for the testers

[Michael Woodhams]

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.

Re:Absurd

[theefer]

There is no "new filesystem". WinFS is an abstraction layer on top of NTFS that will handle some directories like My Documents. It is not a full-fledged filesystem (the FS in WinFS does not stand for "filesystem" but "future storage" IIRC. Yes, this is stupid, and probably a late quickfix, as required by the company customs). And it will not be used for the whole disk, only for user files (multimedia, etc).

I just can't wait to see that ugly mess, supposedly innovative (there have been many smart filesystems before, like BeFS and soon reiser4, implemented in a much lower layer (i.e. more efficient)).

Too bad the fun is not gonna begin before 2006.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[vrTeach]

I don't know, I just hate this inflation and engineered obsolecesence (err... obsolescence... thank goodness for google). One of my fears is that Linux distributions will also follow this way of thinking. 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.

On the other hand, I'd be perfectly happy to have the cast-off of some upgrader for this system.

News update...

[t_allardyce]

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."

Re:News update...

[whiteranger99x]

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

That would be pretty cool...

"I see that you're thinking about writing a letter..let's start:

'Dear Mom, How are you, Its been a while since...'

EWWW you perv!!! I know you really want to look at pr0N, but save the dirty thoughts for later! Oh, where were we? Oh yeah.

'...it's been a while since I've written a letter to you, hope you're well.
Love, Son.' ...You fucking weirdo!"

Or maybe it isn't ready for prime time...

The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[ValourX]

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.

-Jem

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[burns210]

I agree...

In all honesty, if windows 98 could now(maybe with the latest unofficial SP) be shipped in a secure way, that played modern games somewhat well, it would likely never need to be replaced...

I mean, security aside, the ONLY reason people upgraded their home machines from 98se was newer machines, promises of better security(that XP did bring, not ME though), etc.

98se with stability improvements and bugfixes(both huge tasks, but a third edition could have been it) could have been the last OS home machines needed.

Heck, 2000 was, in most ways, the last OS business es needed.

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[Spacejock]

I'm a software developer and part-time gamer, I've been using a 2.26 ghz pentium 4 machine for 2 years and I still can't justify an upgrade the way I used to. Once upon a time I could justify the expense and inconvenience by telling myself I would be cutting compile times by half. Now that a full compile of my biggest app takes 12 seconds or so, what's the point?

GTA Vice City is perfectly playable at 1024 x 768 and looks fantastic on my Geforce 4200 Ti. I have a gig of ram, 3 internal 80gb hard drives and 2 external 120s, plus a DVD burner for backups. I know that fiddling with my hardware will lock XP so that I have to go begging to Microsoft cap in hand for a 40-digit code, so I say bugger them all. (I also boot Gentoo linux, and use it on the weekends for web, DVD, TV viewing, etc)

I consider myself a hardware junkie, I've spent tens of thousands on computer gear over the past 20 years, but I'm out of the upgrade loop now. Perhaps when the Athlon 64 pin config has standardised a little and PCI express is widespread, well perhaps then I'll look at things. So far my upgrade frenzy has resulted in computers for my wife and both kids (built from spare parts), they're using 1ghz and 500mhz machines and really don't need an upgrade either.

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[ValourX]

Heck, just look at how many people are still using Windows 98!

22% of the people using Google are on Win98.

And that was... 6 years ago?

-Jem

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[snp-7-3]

Good points, but... there will always be groups of users that want/need/demand faster and faster performance -- this ulitmately drives the never ending Ghz wars. To say "games can't get much more realistic (and don't really need to)", isn't really fair. For the hardcore gamer, games can't be realistic enough - they'll always be willing to buy the latest hw - so they can run their directx12 games at 2048x1536 with 32xAA and all the eye-candy and get 250fps; similar to the group of users who edit massive digital images and video -- one of them posted earlier, "you can never *never* have too much ram/cpu..." Average users don't need the latest and greatest; the groups I speak of will never settle for average systems. snp

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[Kris_J]

I'm out of the upgrade loop now.

You'll get sucked back in. Some app you find will benefit dramatically from a big upgrade and you'll be whacking in new CPUs and extra RAM like the old days.

For me, it was BeTwin. With BeTwin you can split one Windows PC into multiple workstations. Very sociable for small LAN parties. So all of a sudden your hardware needs to run two copies of your favourite LAN game smoothly. Fortunately I only needed to keep Diablo II running smoothly, but it was still A$500 in upgrades, including a CPU that's the maximum the motherboard can cope with.

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[Ya Bolshoi!]

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).

Ummm, no. When a game on the scale of Vice City can run and look like the D3 screenshots, then maybe you'd have a point. But my understanding is that the D3 can only have a handful of baddies on the screen before it gets unplayable. And even then, that looks nothing like real life. Obviously games will need to look different than real-life--who wants to shoot (seemingly) real people? But regardless, games still have a long way to go until it reaches the point where the graphics are 100% mature.

Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers.

Fair enough: I certainly don't need dual processors to write a letter to my grandma. But more computational power will open up more possibilities: voice-to-text that doesn't suck; real-time (as in >24 Hz) internet video chat; advanced data-mining; etc. I mean, if we're shooting for pure bare-bones functionality, bust our your 486s, cuz that worked fine for me.

It is a good point that there is a lag in software catching up to hardware, but it will catch up. For the past year, my 9700 Pro has basically been able to handle with ease any and all games thrown at it. But soon, with HL2, D3, and so on, it's really gonna start to chug. Another example: think of how long it takes to transfer files from a floppy to your HDD. Now think of how long it takes to rip a CD. Wouldn't you be willing to pay a pretty penny to make those two times equivalent?

Tech demo at recent WinHEC

[bonch]

Jim 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.

Re:Tech demo at recent WinHEC

[ottffssent]

I saw that (sans Q3) on a Bebox more years ago than I can count.

As a demo, I find "we can play 6 videos at once" decidedly unimpressive.

Particularly since it's a hideously cooked demo.

What about my old box?

[Gilesx]

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?

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you imply that Mozilla is bloated.
It doesn't even have a built in operating system.

CPU clock speed growth seems to be slowing

[jayveekay]

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...

Re:CPU clock speed growth seems to be slowing

[quantum bit]

What's even worse is that Intel's chips are getting more inefficient with every generation. If they made P3s and P4s at the same clock speed, the P3 would blow the P4 away. Some of the higher-end P3s were faster then the first P4s which had a higher clock speed. Itanium is even worse. It has an insanely long pipeline and a mis-predicted branch can cause it to waste hundreds of clock cycles on a single instruction ...

Why do you think a 1.4Ghz Opteron beats a 2.8Ghz P4 in many benchmarks?

Re:CPU clock speed growth seems to be slowing

[diamondsw]

Is that math really that bad, or am I sleepy? It should read:

1995: 133 Mhz
1998: 400 Mhz (200% faster)
2000: 1500 Mhz (233% faster)
2002: 2800 Mhz (90% faster)
2004: 3400 Mhz (20% faster)

Also, you're not top of the line with 3.4Ghz. With 4Ghz the numbers are better, but yeah, Motorola's not the only company with some Moore's Law problems.

Windows size?

[Nexum]

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.

Re:Windows size?

[RedWizzard]

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)

Can you provide references that these are accurate average installation sizes? I'm running XP here and the Windows folder is 1.5GB, which happens to be the Microsoft suggested system requirement. And where are WinNT and 2000? XP didn't follow 98 so the alleged 5x increase between them doesn't mean anything.

According to microsoft.com (KB 304297) the requirements I've found are:
Win95: 50MB
Win98SE: 195MB
WinME: 320MB

WinNT Workstation: 110MB
Win2K Workstation: 650MB
WinXP Pro: 1.5GB

Clearly there is an upward trend but your 4-500% increase is bullshit.

Two points

[Cereal Box]

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...

Re:Two points

[Billly Gates]

You can fit a 2,000 page autobiography for ever man women and child who ever lived on a single terribyte disk.

Now tell how a simple os whose job is only to act as a layer between apps and the hardware fit in?

What the hell is in there? Seriously?

Re:Two points

[The Master Control P]

Hold on a minute... When I took up 1.2 gB installing Linux, it also came with almost every program I would ever use, along with remote desktop, several servers, and more (As in, "several thousand dollars worth of commercial software and a hundred reboots in Windows terms"). Windows, when installed, comes with... Windows, WMP, and IE. Out of the box, it can't connect to the internet, read a PDF, read an Office document, or do almost anything *useful* until you've gone through installation hell.

You're comparing apples to zebras. The 1 gB linux install is an operating system plus a thousand applications. The 1 gB Windows install is an operating system with a handful of bundled applications.
-----

Re:Two points

[John Starks]

You're right. But to be fair, you must note that Windows can indeed connect to the Internet right out of the box (well, assuming you have drivers for your NIC, but same goes for Linux).

Re:Two points

[dr.badass]

I seem to remeber it being 2006 for a release, 2007 at latest.

The reason for the hyperbole is that the *original* announced release date was 2004. Then it became 2005...then 2006...then 2007 was "possible". While I'm sure they're working very hard on very new stuff (unlike XP), it doesn't change the fact that they announced wayyyyyyy early, a classic Microsoft tactic. After all, why switch away from a MS platform when they'll have New And Better features Real Soon Now?

Contrast with Linux distros with a 6-12 month cycle and few "really new" features, or Apple with a 9-18 month cycle and announcements only 3-6 months in advance.

Microsoft can say, basically, "In 2-3 years, we will be better than everything that's out now." And they're probably right. It's a kind of monopolistic complacency. They don't have to compete for marketshare, but they have to retain mindshare. I won't say that Linux distros or Apple can't compete on that level, but they certainly aren't.

Apple's way of keeping things secret until they're available is a great way to create rumor and spectacle and popularity among users, but it doesn't serve to make their platform attractive for long-term development.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll need powerful computers to
work with Palladium...

1TB hard drives will get filled

[MonkeyCookie]

...but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?

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.

Looks like...

[heyitsme]

my dual proc G5 makes the spec.... oh wait

That's nice

[AdamHaun]

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.

Mac on the other hand...

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:Mac on the other hand...

[cuijian]

Mac OS X runs comfortably on a 600Mhz G3 laptop. Unlike other OS releases, Mac OS X has actually been getting faster with each release.

Re:Mac on the other hand...

[thunderbird46]

Haven't you ever used an Apple Pro mouse? No discernable button -- the entire shell moves :)

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[pavon]

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.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay. Then cite it.

Well, ok:

"640k ought to be enough for anyone" -- Bill Gates

There, feel better now?

What are they skomin' out there in Redmond?

[Asprin]

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.

...just something to think about.

undisclosed specs

[Fuzzums]

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 ;)

Re:undisclosed specs

[sharkey]

And a holo-deck. Those terabytes are needed to store all the data required to render 7 of 9 perfectly down to the last pink detail.

... and now the specs for the server please

[VitaminB52]

The article only specifies the specs for the Longhorn client machines.
Makes me wonder about the specs for the Longhorn servers.....

At first I thought ....

[Snoopy77]

Why 1 terabyte of hard drive space?

Then I remembered that the dafault is for the OS to handle the pagefile size.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[l1_wulf]

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?

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[eples]

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.

Re:WinHEC

[Wudbaer]

And they were demoing it on the great new 6 Ghz four-core Athlon 128 with the new WD 1 TB disk drive. Yeah right. And I just saw Tux gliding past my window.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[badasscat]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[j-pimp]

It doesn't even have a built in operating system. Or a lisp interperter, or a text editor!! Its a terrible emacs clone!

The real reason to require lots of hardware.

[DDumitru]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Grand]

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.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[the_mad_poster]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction, NORAD computer :)

Additional recommendations

[blair1q]

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.

Re:Recommended Requirements...

[rempelos]

Well, they don't test it. When they release the product to the market they let the people test it and then (about a year later) the provide the 1st Service Pack.

So, longhorn is to be released at 2006, with at least one year of delay and another one until the first SP, we're talking about 2008. By that time these hardware requirements will propably be obsolete.

Re:Every thime they announce a new operating syste

[Brandybuck]

Remember when OS/2 Warp 4.0 came out? It had fewer requirements than the 3.0 version! Without sacrificing any features or performance!

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Avihson]

" 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.

MS building OS to avoid competition and lawyers

[Curly-Locks]

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.

Longhorn: Everything to Everyone

[gbulmash]

Those specs will still be for your more expensive PCs (i.e. $1500+ in 2004 dollars), but it seems Bill is pursuing his vision of making Windows be everything to everyone. For any of you classic SNL fans... Longhorn is supposed to be a floor wax AND a dessert topping.

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

right... wheres my usb toaster?

[Man in Spandex]

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!

Re:right... wheres my usb toaster?

[edwinolson]

Consider an HDTV feed:

~20megabits/second would fill a 1TB disk in under a week (4.6 days).

If computers become media centers, then 1 TB media center would be fairly stifling (compared to my 300 hour Tivo).

Gigabit ethernet is similarly explained. If you want a couple video feeds to coexist, 100mbit won't cut it.

Multiple cpus is a no brainer. CPUs are running out of steam; the road to better performance is multiple cpus. It's inevitable, and 5GHz is really a very modest increase in clockspeed over today.

Save your post and reread it in 4 years and feel a bit embarassed!

640K won't be enough for Blaster2008

[sfled]

...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

Yes, of course, so that the viruses can run faster, corrupt a greater amount of data and spread more efficiently.

Two words:

[Atario]

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.)

Re:Two words:

[Zutroi_Zatatakowsky]

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.


And video editors use what? MacOS. Or maybe Linux, like IL&M. But who's going to buy a super-powerful computer to run Longhorn, dammit, to do video editing? In 2006 (more like 2008), I expect Macs to be even more better at video stuff.

Re:Two words:

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:Two words:

[dublin]

But none of these people are home users confined to a $2000 budget for a computer (or better yet, sub-$1k).

For the past several technology cycles, I've adhered to a policy of not letting *anything* drive me to spend more than $400-$800 on any new computer. I have no regrets whatever. This seems to be the sweet spot for my uses, which are notably more rigorous than the average office worker, but not so cutting edge that I'm paying through the nose for a bunch of unreliable bleeding edge fluff. (The stability benefit of riding back a bit on the wave is an often overlooked bennie to this option.)

I'm sure lots of PC snobs will be happy to let us all know how they *require* a Longhorn-spec system, but realistically, I haven't been able to tell any diference in CPU speeds since about 500-600 MHz (especially if you go with the lighter XP Home, which doesn't have all the heavyweight crap that has no value anyway if you use samba rather than MS servers.) XP is memory hungry, though: 256 MB is pretty much a bottom end minimum due to its wasteful ways, and more sure helps. (Being a user of the equally bloated Mozilla doesn't help this any...)

The power available/power used curve is just *way* out of hand now, though: even with my "cheapo" systems, I have more cycles, RAM, and disk sitting in my office than my first employer (a very large aerospace subcrontractor) had across the entire company when I graduated in 1985. Listen, people: that means it's really possible to run an entire multi-billion dollar business (including serious apps such as database/ERP and 3D CAD/CAM systems) off a few sub-kilobuck PCs. For those of you too young to remember, there's really not much that gets done in Excel that couldn't have been done in Lotus 1-2-3 back then. We're burning all these cycles on the user interface, and it's not even a particularly good one! To put this in perspective, I called a hardware vendor today to try to order the really slick little 1 GHz laptop they introduced a few months ago. "Bangalore Bob" was all to happy to tell me that, "Oh, no, a 1GHz CPU is much too slow for real working. We cannot be selling them anymore..." Maybe I'm just getting to be a curmudgeon, but I think that instead, things really *have* gone off in the weeds, and the industry is desperately trying every trick they have to convince us that every single desktop needs systems more powerful in every way than the fastest high-end workstations or even mainframes of just a few years ago. I call, "B.S.!"

In response to MS's claim

[Unregistered]

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.

Better safe than sorry - IBM OS2

[Curly-Locks]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[krisp]

No, those specs are fine. Microsoft is about to announce that Longhorn will debut in 2007

If that's just the OS...

[brosmike]

[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? :)

JonKatz

[Ieshan]

Not to burst your bubble, but the article was written by JonKatz.

Since when has that man ever been bringer of exacting knowledge?

Re:JonKatz

[sg_oneill]

Wheres jon katz you ask?

He went away after being constantly harassed and flamed by some of the adult children trolls who from time to time inhabit this place.

I thought katz was a fine writer, but clearly some folks didnt care what he had to say, only that they where offended he said it eloquently.

Re:JonKatz

[nomadic]

I thought katz was a fine writer, but clearly some folks didnt care what he had to say, only that they where offended he said it eloquently.

I thought Jon Katz was a fine writer in print, but the problem is he just stopped following any sort of journalistic standards when he started to write for slashdot.

Re:JonKatz

[sg_oneill]

I disagree. (And I'll up an ante on this one, I've spent 8 years at uni doing journalism at an academic level ;)

Katz is a feature writer as oposed to standard journalist. Theres not really the same sort of expectations working there. Truth's a little more subjective, the opinion is eleveated, and flowery language is an asset.

Sure he wasnt always writing he-said she-said reverse pyramid journo-drone, but he had something to say.

I have a suspicion that he touched too sore a nerdy nerve on his hellmouth series, and eventually became the target of the verry bullying he was trying to fight against.

huh?

[Knights who say 'INT]

from Microsoft Watch confirms it:

But WHO WOULD BUY A WRISTWATCH FROM MICROSOFT, for Mingus' sake?

Lets talk about the meaning of AVERAGE

[SatanicPuppy]

What you're saying is that the average computer owned by the average person is going to have those stats in 2 years.

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 /.'er here, we're talking about everyday non-tech-obsessed people.

Microsoft didn't tie IE to the "kernel"

[bonch]

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.

Re:Microsoft didn't tie IE to the "kernel"

[bonius_rex]

Actually, it's the static HTML part of IIS 6 that they put in the kernel.

Overlooked

[t'mbert]

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?

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[lobotomy]

He said cite it -- not recite it.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reminded of the famous quote:

"Windows and the Mac OS have advocates. Linux has apologists."

next-gen hardware with DRM "features"

[MMHere]

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.

What I want.

[teamhasnoi]

I want to not have to ever see an hourglass, spinning beachball, or any blue bar of waiting. I want instant reaction to anything I do.

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.

Re:What I want.

[trouser]

It takes 20 minutes to copy a 14 Mb file on OS X because Finder is crap. I just copied a file from one Mac to another, both running OS X, using scp in a console. 13Mb in 6 seconds at an average of 2.1MB/s. That's a bit more like it.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Daetrin]

I've got 30 tabs open in Netscape right now. I'd have more, but once i hit about 30 tabs the vertical scroll bar goes off the right edge of the screen, so i delete older tabs to make room for new ones.

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.

More Juice for the OS

[paulkoan]

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

Windows will always boot slow

[imnoteddy]

Back around 1990 I went to a party given by this computer guy who had just bought a 58 inch (or so) projection TV and had rented the movie "Aliens" to show off his new toy. Most of the guests were computer people. After we got appropriately wasted we gathered in his living room and started watching it.

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!"

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[JelloGnome]

Of course we need 2 gigs of RAM! How else could we run the new and improved animated Paperclip?

This story is a "whopper"

[HenryKoren]

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.

Not affordable for businesses

[phorm]

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.

Re:Not affordable for businesses

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I put Windows Server 2003 on a PII 233. It ran fine.

You can run XP on a slow CPU. Performance is much more dependant on:

- Non crappy graphics (with a good driver)
- Enough memory (at least 256M)

The grandparent is not flamebait. It is a valid comment. I ran Whistler (XP Beta) on my Celeron 233 with 192M of memory for years.

I ran Windows 98 on a Pentium 75 system with 32M of memory. It ran OK (not great, but it was usable).

Remember, XP runs like crap if:

- You don't have enough memory
- Your graphics card/drivers are crap

That's why you should always get a system with an ATI/NVIDIA graphics card (chip). It is unbelieveable how much faster the 4MB ATI Rage in my notebook is than the "Intel Integrated" graphics in my friend's (much newer) notebook (note, this is for 2D, not 3D - the Rage sucks in 3D, not that the Intel doesn't).

Re:doesn't matter whether he said it...

[HiThere]

Actually, I'm fairly certain that he did say it. I know it was reported in the popular press of the time, AND considered a reasonable statement by most people, including most technical people.

Please remember that 640KB of RAM was more than the typical IBM 360 (370?) of the time had. And that the Apple ][, which IBM was attempting to replace, only went up to 64KB (and that required using bank switching).

Still, I'm not surprised that he denies it now. Now it sounds silly. As silly as the IBM chairman's forecast that there might be a market for (I want to say 5, but all I really remember for certain is that it was less than 20) computers in the country. Of course, he said it back in the 1940's, and he didn't want to consider any competitors. (At the time that he said it there were already more than 20 computers active...mostly, admitedly, in university EE departments.)

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[JM Apocalypse]

I am posting with Safari which has about five windows open, each with about 20 tabs.

Beat that!

(My browser is bigger .. err ... better than yours)

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[tbjw]

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.

"Forced" Hardware upgrade?

[MP3Chuck]

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?

MS is a bit conservative about this...

[dadman]

who would want a machine merely running on 2 x 6GHz CPUs with only a TB of storage by the year of 2007?
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?

Hope specs are that high...

[CalsailX]

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.

Wow...

[Bensmum]

You call that making perfect sense? Was it even english?

Re:Two words: video editing

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[duckle]

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.

Market cycles

[scum-e-bag]

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...

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Pete LaGrange]

Which means it should be on the shelves by December 2009

Western Theme

[ChronoWiz]

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.

Not Trolling, jes askin' Why All this Power?

[Simonetta]

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

well, you know....

[nabil_IQ]

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.

Video Editing

[pastafazou]

Wait 'til you have kids. Then you'll be right into the home video and video editing.

Re:Video Editing

[Snowdog668]

In my case I live in the Chicago area, my in-laws live in Las Vegas and are on a fixed income (retired). My wife and I are expecting our first baby in a couple of months. I'm planning on doing quite a bit of taping. I'll then be editing out the boring stuff, dumping the good stuff to DVD and ship that to the in-laws. Yes, my wife and I will remember stuff but this gives her parents a chance to see the baby's important (and not so important) events that they can't always be here for.

What amazes me most is

[Boarder2]

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.

Re:Every thime they announce a new operating syste

[drsmithy]

Remember when OS/2 Warp 4.0 came out?

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.

Re:Not Trolling, jes askin' Why All this Power?

[BrynM]

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 would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?

With the way heat and current CPUs relate to eachother, a 6GHZ CPU is a room heater. At least we can use it to cook the spaghetti before we strain it through the Gigs of RAM and that TB hard disk ;)

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.

The beginning of the end?

[mrbcs]

I sell computers. My business has dropped 80% this year from last year.(Yes I'm exploring other options). Most of my customers have pII's to surf the web or write letters.

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.

Actually, thats not quite right....

[Rooked_One]

moore's law states the number of transistors will double... not the Mhz.

I hate to nit pick but... um... ya

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[RoundSparrow]

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.


I don't disagree with your point, I'm just feeding...

Most of us means /. users, and we aren't the normal buch (in terms of quantity) :)

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.....

[Cable_Monkey]

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?

I fall in the lazier category because I do not write programs for people other than myself (normally anyway). ....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.

If you think I'm wrong, then please...flame away, for this is just my opinion.

Re:Oh shit, oh shit...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

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.

Speed is not simply a function of MHz!!!

[Starrider]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[FooAtWFU]

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... :)

AFAIK

[melted]

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.

Wonder what they are developing it on...?

[roberri]

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

Maybe that's why it's taking so long to release Longhorn.... they're still trying to compile it!

Ultra 160 SCSI

[hellraizr]

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.

What do you install from?

[rastos1]

What I'd like to know is: what media do you install from? 40 DVDs? (Oh the memories of installing from 40 floppies)

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?

Thats for IIS, not IE.

[jon_c]

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

Re:Not Trolling, jes askin' Why All this Power?

[buckhead_buddy]

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.

surely not a whopper

[smithysrise]

rather, a WOPR

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[buckhead_buddy]

Contrary to what others may think, there are plenty of sentences where the terms "Clippy" and "Trusted Computing" can be combined and not sound inappropriate.

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.

Hardware vendors need that, that's why

[Jump]

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[kahei]

Well, to be fair, emacs doesn't have a text editor either.

OS X...

[suntory]

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...

What dose it need it for?

[Felinoid]

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)

Longhorn on G5??

[ElGanzoLoco]

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*

OK, Fine: He Just Built It That Way

[Brown Line]

Fine. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't. Big deal. The fact is that that's how he built MS-DOS. All of us who had to struggle with extended and expanded memory - not to mention those bloody memory models (tiny, small, compact, medium, large, huge) that MS-DOS's 16-bit architecture kept alive for ten long years after Intel released its 32-bit processor - we paid the price for Gates' short-sightedness.

But that's how it is with a monopoly: one man screws up, and everybody suffers.

Re:Not Trolling, jes askin' Why All this Power?

[TheRaven64]

Two simple buzzwords:

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.

well, duh...

[nappingcracker]

how else will skynet have enough juice to defend the country?

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Cameroon]

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)?

It sounds a bit outrageous today

[MagicBox]

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?

I remember as a reporter

[ubrgeek]

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 ;)

He wasn't talking about memory!

[gosand]

"640k ought to be enough for anyone" -- Bill Gates

He wasn't talking about memory, he was talking about dollars earned per minute. And he didn't mean anyone, he meant himself.

Let's look at these one at a time

[Junks Jerzey]

a dual-core CPU

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 .net being CPU indepdendent...nah.

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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[afidel]

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.

Awesome Power! But....

[bfg9000]

.... 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.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[groot]

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.

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

Pipelining negates the problem with c

[JCholewa]

> The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:

> 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. :-P

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

No F... way they will

[trezor]

• If the accounting department budgets for these massive upgrades

They won't. They'll say "Fuck it. What we got works".

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[Anonymous Coward]

See here for Gates' own response, including his own call for a citation that he knows doesn't exist

Check here:
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/newlywed.h tm
for details on the "Up the butt, Bob" story.

"What was the strangest place you've ever made whoopee?" was one of host Bob Eubanks' favorite questions, almost always prompting at least one (unintentionally) hilarious response. Over the years this question has featured in one of the most hotly-debated items in urban legendry: whether a contestant responded to this question with the answer, "That'd be up the butt, Bob." Legions of television viewers have sworn they saw this event, and opposing legions of pundits have insisted that the whole thing was merely a joke and no such exchange ever took place on a broadcast Newlywed Game episode. Among this latter group is host Bob Eubanks himself, who has repeatedly denied that any such occurrence took place on his show (and has offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can prove it did):

Recently a Newlywed Game clip (from a Game Show Network rebroadcast of the show) has come to light ...the wives were brought in to provide their answers ...here is what transpired:

Bob: Here's the last of our five-point questions. Girls, tell me where, specifically, is the weeeeeiirdest place that you personally, girls, have ever gotten the urge the make whoopee. The weirdest place. Olga?
Olga: Umm . . . (audience laughter) ...
Olga: Is it in the ass? [Last three words bleeped]

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.

Re:doesn't matter whether he said it...

[silicon not in the v]

I don't see why this has become so famous if one thinks about it as a quote for the time. He did not say it should always be enough for everyone. In this current state of personal computing, someone could say, "A 3GHz processor ought to be enough for anyone." That means that a processor like that should handle whatever people need to do right now. In the future it's obvious that'll change, but why is that such a big deal?

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[silicon not in the v]

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.

Obligatory dribbel

[trezor]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of Longhorn PCs...

Anyone else suspectable to the idea that clustering such bloat might slow down time?