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Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."

35 of 619 comments (clear)

  1. new concept by mirko · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, in his (apocryphous) diary, he mentioned being the inventor of product pre-announcement, now he's just invented the post-pre-announcement.
    Way to go, Bill :)

    --
    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  2. Via babelfish by dackroyd · · Score: 4, Funny

    WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things.

    Translation:

    We thought it was a good idea but no-one else has done an implementation that we can copy off, so we can't really figure out how to do it.

    Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?

    --
    "Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
    1. Re:Via babelfish by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 4, Funny

      Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?

      All the great features of Windows 2003 plus the addition of a NEW logo and desktop theme!!!!

    2. Re:Via babelfish by StevenHenderson · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?

      Bugs.

    3. Re:Via babelfish by inerte · · Score: 4, Funny

      hehehe, this guy's speech reminds me of this:

      A proven 32-bit cutting-edge state-of-the-art industrial-strength Y2K-compliant zero-administration plug-and-play industry-standard Java-enabled internet-ready multimedia professional personal-computer Operating System that is even newer and faster yet compatible, with a user-friendly object-oriented 3D graphical user interface, amazing inter-application communication and plug-in capability, an enhanced filesystem, full integration into Enterprise networks, an exclusive way to deploy distributed components, seamless network sharing of printers and files.

  3. Avalon's gone too by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Funny


    So that's bye bye new file system
    bye bye new GUI
    bye bye new API

    wtf is left ?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/27/microsoft_ decouples_longhorn/

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    1. Re:Avalon's gone too by Xpilot · · Score: 4, Funny


      bye bye new GUI
      bye bye new API


      Ah, the Longhorn version of American Pie. Come on, what's the next verse?

      --
      "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
    2. Re:Avalon's gone too by HoneyBunchesOfGoats · · Score: 2, Funny

      "The developer boys were thinking 'This will never fly', singing 'This will be the day Longhorn dies.'"?

    3. Re:Avalon's gone too by BJH · · Score: 5, Funny

      XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

      A long, long time ago,
      I can still remember
      How a release wouldn't take a while
      And I knew that if I had my chance
      That I'd do the upgrade dance
      And maybe I'd be happy for a while

      But XP made me shiver
      With every email it'd deliver
      A new worm for my inbox
      I couldn't take one more Win32.CTX

      I can't remember if I cried
      When I read about the delayed Longhorn
      But something touched me deep inside
      The day the upgrade cycle died

      *Chorus*
      So bye, bye my new GUI
      Pointed IE to WindowsUpdate but it was empty
      And them good old hackers were using Linux anyway
      Singing this will be the day Windows dies
      This will be the day Windows dies

    4. Re:Avalon's gone too by BJH · · Score: 5, Funny

      Did you get that new filesystem
      Do you have faith in the schedule
      If Mr Gates tells you so?
      Now, do you believe in release dates
      Will Longhorn raise your running costs
      And can it make your PC run real slow?

      Well, I know you're in love with it
      'Cause I saw you running the beta
      You sure had to spend a few bucks
      Man, I don't see any new features!

      I was a lowly Pentium user
      With a little hard drive and a tiny screen
      But I knew I was out of luck
      The day the upgrade cycle died

      I started singing

      *Chorus*
      So bye, bye my new GUI
      Pointed IE to WindowsUpdate but it was empty
      And them good old hackers were using Linux anyway
      Singing this will be the day Windows dies
      This will be the day Windows dies

      Now for ten years we've been running XP
      And losses get bigger on their balance sheet
      But that's not how it used to be
      When the Monkey Boy sang for developers
      In a suit he borrowed from a gorilla
      In a voice that went from high to low

      And while Bill Gates was looking on
      The USB driver crashed his poor PC
      The conference was adjourned
      No reviews were written

      And while Linus wrote a kernel and more
      The core team tried really hard
      And were given stock options up the wazoo
      The day the upgrade cycle died

      We were singing

      *Chorus*
      So bye, bye my new GUI
      Pointed IE to WindowsUpdate but it was empty
      And them good old hackers were using Linux anyway
      Singing this will be the day Windows dies
      This will be the day Windows dies

      XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

    5. Re:Avalon's gone too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Songs are supposed to rhyme!!!! C for effort.

  4. Re:catch-up? by Tomahawk · · Score: 2, Funny

    It already does. I've had a sidebar on my desktop for the last 5 years, thanks to gnome.

    Oh, wait, do that mean that MS are now copying Linux...?

    T.

  5. Mandatory post by Biotech9 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Introducing Microsoft Longhorn Millenium edition!

    Preorder now and recieve a copy of Duke Nukem Forever!

  6. Exactly... by Zx-man · · Score: 2, Funny
    ...should I mention that WinFS could be efficiently emulated in almost _any_ other operating system, using the disk-based file system (compare to the *nix disks-in-the-directory-tree one):
    1) Remove all the directory structures, except the one required by operating system
    2) Dump all of your data files to the root directory of the system disk
    3) Use the ``find'' function to navigate 'em!

    And voila, you've got the tech of future, today!
  7. Re:Arg, I'm blind! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    You already did once

  8. search pc by __aahlyu4518 · · Score: 4, Funny

    imagine that... treating everything as files...

    how inovative... ;-)

  9. Does this mean? by Zapdos · · Score: 2, Funny

    That Micro$oft will be making Windows XP OSR2, followed by Windows XP ME?

  10. Re:Free Ads / Free Betas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    We will not cut corners on product excellence. Our powerful vision is intact; our shipment plan changes will let customers get access to parts of the vision faster.

    Just to put an analogy to all that, I'm sure they refer to a development process that is similar to something they've done before.

    - Bob
    - Clippy
    - That stupid XP search assistant mutt

    What a vision.

    They are releasing a more useful piece of shit with every other piece of shit.

    One was braindead on arrival, one sucked, and the other sucked so hard it blew.

  11. Re:Old bugs will bug you a long time... by Deusy · · Score: 5, Funny

    "One problem with Konghorn..."



    Oh dear Lord. Don't tell me the KDE team are reimplementing Longhorn.
    --

    Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary

  12. This has really got to hurt MS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    I went to their Longhorn event in london earlier in the year and they were really pushing Avalon and WinFS, the whole event covered virtually nothing else, these were the big things that were going to make Longhorn great.

    Now their gone. All we're left with is MS first attempt at an operating system from the ground up (nothing before hasn't been based on somebody elses work). Now they could get lukcy (like they did with SQL Server 7, 6.5 and before were basically Sybase) or they could do what they've done with every other thing they've invented, bomb.

    MS is only ever successful when building on top of somebody else's work, or simply copying somebody else's ideas.

    My feeling is that come 2006 we'll either get a horribly mangled OS (Windows ME, but worse) or nothing at all. Hopefully the vendors won't stand for it, but many did with ME.

  13. Re:Is there a word... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 2, Funny

    It doesn't view my pron collection while i'm away does it?

    Didn't you ever wonder why "FindFast.exe" kept hogging your computer in spurts?

  14. Re:Old bugs will bug you a long time... by Paulrothrock · · Score: 1, Funny
    One problem with Longhorn is that they want to put security onto the Windows architecture.

    And we saw what happened with SP 2. The upgrade broke Symantec Corporate AntiVirus 9.0 because the software assumed that Windows was swiss cheese, and couldn't deal with a closed port.

    --
    I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
  15. WinFS was just too much work for them by blackhedd · · Score: 2, Funny

    Windows is close to 50 million lines of code with several enormous subsystems, including .NET and the whole GUI presentation system. To integrate those systems with WinFS involves touching almost everything, with combinatorial complexity. Even with $5 billion/year to spend on developers, it was just too much to get it done and get it stable. It's probably the biggest software integration project ever attempted, by far.
    To disagree with one earlier post, I think MS has a pretty good idea of what they were trying to do with WinFS. It was simply too much to do.

    Besides, WinFS is superfluous, since Google (and its nascent competitors) will evolve into a global implementation of the same idea. That's vastly more efficient. Hey Linux guys: make a Reiser4 plugin that accepts search-like verbs and automatically searches the Web!

  16. Free version of Monad by martinde · · Score: 4, Funny

    > However, Monad is obviously a way that Microsoft is trying to catch-up with the powerful scripting ability of *nix shells.

    I think MS just thought it would be funny to release something that would "have to be" called "Gonad" if it was copied and release in open source! (Hmmm, or maybe Gnunad?!)

  17. Oh crap... by rfunches · · Score: 0, Funny

    "The highest quality OS we have ever shipped" Like that statement makes me feel any better about Windows...

  18. The obvious reason by Mikey-San · · Score: 2, Funny

    My favourite quote, by far:

    "Well, basically, Apple isn't releasing Mac OS X 10.4 until 2005, so we've got to wait a little while longer before we can finish Longhorn."

    Oh, wait, I guess they left that out of the article.

    100% USDA-approved flamebait or your money back!

    --
    Mikey-San
    Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
  19. "So... In other words..." by the+web · · Score: 2, Funny

    "... we couldn't figure out how to do it in time."

    --
    __
    Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
  20. more translation required by twitter · · Score: 3, Funny
    "Allchin's unbiased memo" promises high quality, reliability, diagnostics, RAD and graphics tools, as well as developer excitement. That's quite a list.

    Are they going to ship a Linux distro?

    --

    Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  21. Re:Free Ads / Free Betas by cbiltcliffe · · Score: 2, Funny
    Press releases like these are free ads for Microsoft. Does anybody here not think that Microsoft knew this was going to get released:

    We will not cut corners on product excellence. Our powerful vision is intact; our shipment plan changes will let customers get access to parts of the vision faster.

    Of course they knew it would be released. What they didn't count on, though, was that nobody on /. R'sTFA, so nobody will see it anyway!! <font style='evil'>BWAHAHAHAHA!!!</font>
    --
    "City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
  22. Re:What about Meta-tags? by the_bard17 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wizard: "Do you know how old your document is?
    Me:"Five minutes."
    Wizard: "Do you know what program you use to edit it?"
    Me: "Yeah. Vim."
    Wizard: "I'm sorry. I don't recognize that program."
    Me: Reboots into my Linux system and mkreiserfs' the Windows drive.

  23. Re:Free Ads / Free Betas by Martin+Blank · · Score: 2, Funny

    My childhood says, "No gnus is good gnus with Gary Gnu."

    --
    You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
  24. Re:What about Meta-tags? by FosterKanig · · Score: 1, Funny

    It thought it was,

    "fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again"

  25. Re:Free Ads / Free Betas by Refrag · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you're like me, the Apple will quickly move from the corner of the room to the center and you'll have an old Windows box sitting in the corner with Linux on it.

    --
    I have a website. It's about Macs.
  26. The key word is RICHLY. by Medievalist · · Score: 2, Funny
    "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
    My first thought on reading this was "Huh? I use a pretty simple set of verbs to do these things; on linux, for example, I use ls, mv, cp." On other OSes I use less cryptic verbs that take longer to type. Windows, of course, has been moving away from the efficiency of verbs and often requires flailing about with a mouse (which takes even longer than typing MVS verbs, fer cryin' out loud).

    But on re-reading this phrase, I see a key word I had overlooked... it's "richly". Gates is telling the absolute truth; let me paraphrase: "Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you ... find, move around and replicate those things in a way that makes me rich !

  27. Re:What about Meta-tags? by redJag · · Score: 2, Funny

    As they say, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

    That's not the way my president said it.. *confused*