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Projected 'Average' Longhorn System Is A Whopper
greg_barton writes "At first I thought this was a joke, but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it: 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
When longhorn comes out in 2008.
..that'd better be one hell of a game of Solitaire.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
computers in the future will be better than the ones we have now.
on a side note, i can't wait to get one of those.
zing
They will send me one of those machines if I offer to test Longhorn for them? - Please... I promise to keep Longhorn on the machine for at least a week.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
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.
...or he'll be spinning in his grave.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
A better question to ask is, what the fuck is an operating system doing with those resources? I understand wanting those specs to run simulations, data processing, or games... but what does longhorn do that no other OS offers which requires such specs? The memory and CPU expectations are particularly egregious. I can still run NetBSD on a Sun 3/60. Yeah, maybe I can't run and ssh2d, but the core OS runs just fine. Sheesh... 2GB of RAM and a 6ghz CPU with a high end 3D graphics processor -- for the OS??? Christ, give me a PDP-11 running RT-11. Guess I'm a luddite. PIP me baby!!!
Naked Rayburn
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.
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! :)
If I said something embarrassing I would want to deny it too.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Slashdot is no better than Simone:
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
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
Right now, the average home user is probably close to a 500 mHz Celeron. The average new XP machine might within shouting distance of a 3.0 GHz P4, sure.
Thus Microsoft's estimate of the average Longhorn machine sounds plausible.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
What the artcile didn't say was that this computing power was needed primarily for a new feature of Longhorn - the Microsoft Streaming Patch System or MSPS.
If one graphs Microsoft's patch releases over time, it is clear that the time between patches approaches zero. No one likes to patch a aysstem, just to see the next day a new patch or twelve have been released over night!
So the MSPS will stream patches to all servers in a continuous feed. Of course, to install these patches takes bandwidth (1 GB Either), to download, both CPU power (dual 4GHz) and ram (2 GB) to install and a lot of room (1 TB to be exact) to store them all.
+1 Sarcastic
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
In a response to Microsofts recommendations, Windows users today recommended that "For that hardware, Longhorn better have an average uptime of 200 years, a no-virus lifetime guarantee and a paper clip with a 180 IQ AI system that can actually tell that you really want to write a letter by reading your mind and can write your 50 page report for you."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If Microsoft really thinks that this will be an average system in two years then I doubt we will ever actually see Longhorn. Microsoft will be finished by then.
The vast majority of people today are more than happy with their computer systems as they are, and a significant number of people have too much machine for what they're doing. For many years into the future you will be seeing people with P3 and P4 machines still doing then what they do now.
There's a reason why processor sales are slipping for Intel, and it has little to do with AMD: no one's upgrading because the last upgrade they did made no real improvement. How much faster can you get a program to start? How much faster can you do what you already do (excluding those who are in scientific or graphics fields).
Hardware speed and power has accelerated so quickly up until now because software development could keep up with it. Now that proprietary software has stagnated (the last two software packages released by Microsoft, Corel, Macromedia and Adobe are exactly the same with one or two completely useless features thrown in and a new splash screen and icons) there is no reason to increase the capabilities of the hardware. Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers. Same with web browsers and email clients. Even games -- game development has slowed to a crawl because it takes so long to make them now. Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic (and really, they don't need to be -- the Doom 3 demo already makes my stomach turn).
The described system will not be anywhere near "average" for the "average" computer user in two years. Bookmark this post and flame me in 2006 if I'm wrong.
-JemJim Allchin showed Longhorn playing six high-resolution videos at the same time, while playing Quake III in the background.
XP on equivalent hardware barely sputtered out four of the videos. Longhorn is definitely a media OS.
I'm looking forward to this new 3D infrastructure display technology.
Let's go smash some looms.
How can you imply that Mozilla is bloated.
It doesn't even have a built in operating system.
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
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.
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...
Didn't you hear? Longhorn is written in Java.
my dual proc G5 makes the spec.... oh wait
On the other hand, by the time longhorn comes around...
Mac OS will still be more technically advanced than Longhorn.
The new apple PCs will only run at 3ghz or so, but will continue to completely school anything from Intel/Microsoft.
The OS will still comfortably run on an 800mhz G4
Steve jobs will manage to create a pointing device with no buttons at all. Mac users will claim this to be a revolutionary feature.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Bah. And I suppose next youre going to tell me that Kevin Mitnick never hacked into a computer by whisling hayes modem codes into a prison telephone.
"640k ought to be enough for anyone" -- Bill Gates
There, feel better now?
Microsoft is deliberately making your PC obsolete. For no discernable reason.
No, there's a very good reason. If your PC is made obsolete, you'll have to buy a new one, which just happens to have MS Janus(tm) DRM built in.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I know we can expect hardware performance to improve substantially in the next three years, but COME ON! what are they trying to achieve here? What problems do I have with my computer that this solution is going to fix?
Ten years ago (pre-win95), if you asked me what my 5 major computing problems were, I'd have said:
1. Memory management - need a flat model with real 32 bit support
2. Standardized driver and hardware support, especially for printers.
3. Long File Names.
4. Standardized install/uninstall support.
5. Performance - hardware needs to be faster.
Well, a year or two years later, we've got all of them.
So, what are my top five today?
1. Spam
2. Viruses and Spyware
3. Every software vendor on the planet wants me to send them money every year even though I'm happy with what I've got. (See: license keys and forced registration/activiation.)
4. Tech IP (Patents).
5. Vendor lock-in.
ONE... **ONE** of those (#2) is a problem software can fix. and FOUR of them are *CAUSED* *INTENTIONALLY* by Microsoft and companies just like them.
I am not the only one who's soured on MS just because I'm tired of putting up with the crap. The corp world is moving, too.
I also think MS is in more trouble than they let on. They feel their grip on the monopoly rope slipping and rather than letting go and trusting that they can compete in an open world, they are forcing themselves to be the only player in a smaller and smaller box.
BTW, Knoppix 3.5(?) came out today. It now supports my NForce2 audio and net card correctly in the default configuration, and it makes NO demands of me beyond making me look at pictures of penguins.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Why 1 terabyte of hard drive space?
Then I remembered that the dafault is for the OS to handle the pagefile size.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Okay, I know I'm way off topic but I read the article in that link and I'd really like to know what the following at the bottom of the article was all about:
Other favorite feedback from this column: A woman (a Wal-Mart shopper, no doubt) emailed in outrage that I had used the word "blow job" in a public forum. "You are disgusting," she messaged. "How dare you use a word like 'blow-job' in your column, you fucking moron?"
Wow. I mean.. just... Wow.
I'm a 2000 man.
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!
... 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 ...
yes, hardware will improve, there will be faster CPUs, GPUs, faster and cheaper memory
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?
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.
It doesn't even have a built in operating system. Or a lisp interperter, or a text editor!! Its a terrible emacs clone!
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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.
Longhorn will be your media server (replacing the cable box, VCR, Tivo, and DVD player), play games via your television (replacing game consoles), interface with any networkable appliance in your home (refrigerator, heating and cooling system, alarm system) and provide a centralized control panel...
That high-end PC will sit in a closet and be accessed via 5.8ghz wi-fi through a set-top box attached to your HD capable TV, thin client portables, and touch screens on your "Longhorn Enabled" appliances.
Your Longhorn PC will be on the net and everything connected to it will be accessible (i.e. check your refrigerator inventory via a personalized web-based panel so you can prep a grocery list to pick up on the way home). Eventually, you'll walk into your house on a 48 degree (farenheit) winter day, and your home will be a sweltering 95 degrees (farenheit) inside, courtesy of the W64.HVACdemon virus, written by some pointy-headed 15 year old in Holland.
That's Bill's ultimate goal: to squeeze Microsoft "technology" into every nook and cranny of your life until everything you do has some Microsoft code enabling it or making it inaccessible unless you pay Bill. And that's why such huge specs are needed.
-- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Yes, of course, so that the viruses can run faster, corrupt a greater amount of data and spread more efficiently.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
> How does Microsoft Intend to Survive?
/. know better than anything I said in the last paragraph. We can see what Microsoft is trying to do. Hell, they've told the world! One Microsoft Way. It's not just their business address, it's their business strategy. We know that Gates and his minions, along with the ??AA and Congress, have possibly already won this. Have possibly already crippled the most important technological advance in history - the general-purpose home computer - and turned it into a content pipe to drain our wallets while only letting us run what they allow us. On the machines we buy and pay for! We see what's happening, but we're the minority. (I for one have been in the minority all my life. one light, one mind, flashing in the dark, blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts...) And when we try to tell people about this, they think we're raving paranoid lunatics.
Simple. DRM in BIOSes at the hardware level. Attacks on Linux via SCO etc at the OS level. FUD, loathing, and lock-in at the applications level. Patents, DRM, EULAs and DMCA at the legal level.
Remember the hidden APIs in Windows 3.x? They'll be at it again. Even better, Microsoft could put in "Trusted Computing safeguards" so they can Trust that only Microsoft's applications suite, IDE, etc will run. Bypass these safeguards, and it's charges under the DMCA and 20 years in max security prison as an evil godless communist hippie software pirate terrorist hacker for you, buddy!
Oh, and meanwhile they'll sue you for breaking the clause buried in the Longhorn EULA where you agree to only install Microsoft applications. Good luck in fighting off their army of rabid jackals with law degrees.
> People, Businesses, Universities, and others will not be able to afford to upgrade their systems to use Longhorn.
Can they afford not to? Since Office Longhorn will (because of Trusted Computing again) only run on Windows Longhorn, and will have incompatible file formats with any previous version, and after a certain date they'll only ship Longhorn, once you buy one new machine, you have to replace them all. (They've done it before, remember?) Intel, AMD, NVidia, and ATi, among others, will love them for forcing the installation of the latest CPUs and graphics cards even in the office. Intel and AMD, in particular, will be ecstatic to add the "features" to their CPUs that will help Microsoft to do all this.
Over the last few years, it's seemed Microsoft has this plan: Make consumers believe that lock-ups and crashes are normal consequences of owning a computer and not a result of poor OS design. Make them believe that viruses and other malware are normal consequences of surfing the internet and not a result of poor browser design. Make them believe that you really do need a 2 GHz chip to run the OS and a word processor (plus a top of the line graphics card for that paperclip). Make them believe that the only thing that can replace Windows, Office or Microsoft anything else is the next version, that nothing else is an "enterprise ready solution". In short, take credit for everything good that happens, and shift blame for everything bad onto something else.
And we here on
Maybe that's the clearest sign that Micros~1 has won.
Microsoft Windows Longhorn. Projected Release Date: 1984.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
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.
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-$1k).
Gamers who can't stand anything less than 100fps also "need" high performance machines. However, just because some small groups of people with specialized needs or wants exist doesn't mean there's going to be a huge market for giant hard drives and 6 GHz CPUs. Are so many Joe Sixpacks going to rush to BestBuy just so they can get one of these super-fast machines so they can edit their home videos faster? I really doubt it.
The upgrade cycle is slowing, and most people who want computers have them now. I think this is going to cause the drive for ever-increasing specs to slow.
Lastly, why would an OS need all this power? The OS isn't supposed to gobble up all the machine's resources, because then you can't run these power-hungry apps.
Slashdoters inability to read. Even in the description of the article it says that this is what Microsoft projects a common computer will be about the time Longhorn is released. These are NOT system requirements of Longhorn.
A common new computer when XP came out was about a 1.4GHz If I recall correctly, but the system requirements are 400MHz...
Just some food for thought.
Everybody has 3 or 4 machines already and a game box. We simply don't need a 6 ghz processor. We certainly don't need another bloated M$ product to surf the web. We (I believe) will soundly reject this upcoming drm and new word/excel format. This cycle needs to stop, and will.
These companies make this stuff because that's what they do. The ultimate proof will be when the consumers actually buy this stuff or not. There have been many "great ideas" that the unwashed masses have already rejected. Anybody remember "PUSH"?
Microsoft also backtracked this year on their intention to end support for win98. Guess they checked and found that 28% of the web was still using win98... probably with no intention to upgrade. Our dollars will decide where the computer industry goes. There is no new Internet to drive sales so I can't really see it getting stronger. BTW, here in Canada, an AMD 2400+ with most goodies is about $475 American.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
No, we don't. Not all of us, anyway.
Sure, it's nice to drag the bottom end along to a higher standard... but the thing you overlook is that, many times, even the top end doesn't need that standard.
In my shop, I've got 50 odd machines, and 43 of them are toasters. The users use exactly 3 applications - internal email (no internet); a custom app that lets them answer the phone and transcribe info from a caller; and a custom app that lets them manage the results of that call. And, oh yeah... 3 of that 43 will occasionally make a spreadsheet, consisting entirely of static cells.
That's it. That's all they do, and that's all they WILL do. We don't want added complexity - literally, people can die if our stuff screws up. And quite frankly, a 486 is overkill for this.
Instead, I'm being force-fed a piece of crap that's so complex, noone can manage it. The first 12 hours of box's life will be me, uninstalling AOL, MSN, OE, Media Player, and all the other crap that is nothing more than an exploit vector if I'm lucky. How I spent my past week? $35k for a rack mounted box, no keyboard or video... and it has Solitare on it. It has IE on it. It has a cute little wizard that'll help me setup MSN as my dialup ISP. This, in a quad-homed box that'll have 3 fractional DS3s on it. Yep, the inclusion of NetMeeting on this thing really made my day, and thank god OE keeps getting reinstalled every time I patch.
So... no, sir... the potential "new development" argument doesn't fly. It is rarely appropriate, and it is pretty much responsible for the bulk of the MS exploits running around today. Unknown, unneeded, and therefore unmanaged features that are not needed by that specific install. Look at the exploits running around, look at who keeps "catching" them and why... it's all caused by these "new developments" being force-fed in an environment where these developments are *not* appropriate, and in fact not needed. I had to patch against a MIDI file exploit, on a rack mounted box with no sound card. Huh??!! Then consider that I had to patch my neighbor's box against Sasser... a box that has only a single NIC connected to a cable modem. No file sharing, etc, is needed by that user... and the user doesn't want it. Yet, we still have to manage it, even though it has no business existing in that install. You'll find that the bulk of the Sasser victims are a similar case, and this case is caused by unwanted, unknown, and therefore unmanaged features.
Consider how irrelevent most firewalls would be if this were NOT the case.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Well, to be fair, emacs doesn't have a text editor either.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.