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Windows Longhorn Beta for June Release
An Anonymous Reader writes "According to CNET, the Windows Longhorn Beta 1 is supposedly set for release this June. The Register has commentary on the delays the new OS has faced." From the article: "Longhorn was originally supposed to ship in 2004. In May, this year release was pushed back to 2005. This week Longhorn's availability has been delayed even further, with Microsoft execs declining to say when exactly the operating system might ship, eWeek reports."
So what makes this June Release by one Microsoft executive more believable than other announcements?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
... to beat "Tiger" to the punch.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
What's Longhorn? Bill Gates name for his...?
If someone makes a Duke Nukem joke, I'm going to shoot myself.
Does Microsoft actually care about Mac OS X at all, whether as a competitive threat or even a comparative yardstick?
At a recent university talk, Gates claimed that the only OSes that would be around in 10 years would be Windows and Linux. Now that could simply be a snub to Jobs, or it could indicate that he doesn't even consider Mac to be on the radar anymore. With less than 2% marketshare, Mac OS X is pretty much inconsequential in both the predominantly Windows consumer market, or Windows/Linux enterprise market.
The ironic thing is, that if Mac OS X *were* to be around in 10 years, Microsoft would likely to be making far more money off it than if it disappeared. Why? The high gross margins (80+%) from Office mean that Microsoft often makes more money from a Mac bought with Office than Apple does (the gross margin on a Mac is 20+%).
With only Linux as an alternative OS, Microsoft would likely make nothing, unless Microsoft plans to start selling software for Linux...
Personally I think Microsoft does actually pay attention to Apple and uses them as a sort of free R&D lab. However, publicly, Gates seems to deny they're relevant now, and not at all in the future.
Interesting...
The article linked to, and quoted, was published in September of 2003. There is no new delay to speak of.
1. The entire OS will be accessible through a set of managed APIs. This makes coding 10 times easier and faster, and raises productivity to unprecedented levels. This also makes buffer overflows and some other security issues a thing of the past.
.Net is great, but not that great.
.NET code on your machine. Kind of like applets, but the entire webapp will be built out of them. Just think about the possibilities there.
I call bullshit. 10 times easier to develop/faster - I think not. And managed APIs whilst they may reduce the incidents of buffer overflows will not automagically solve your security problems. The fact is
2. New, resolution independent, vector based, GPU-enabled UI engine. Two years from Longhorn release people will be buying 200+ DPI displays because things look a lot better on them. What's KDE/Gnome users gonna do? That's right, try to discern tiny non-scalable icons on these displays.
And who are going to be buying these new 200+ DPI machines ? I surely doubt the ordinary user is going to find a need to view their word documents in super high quality. So do explain what is going to be the driver of these displays ?
3. Completely new UI, including some significant paradigm changes.
Completely new ? And what lose the ability of their installed base to jump right in and use the system. What about the significant investments in training done by companies ? The fact is Longhorn will be 95% identical to Windows XP simply because it has to be. If it isn't and businesses have to invest serious money in retraining staff, then why not retrain them in how to use Linux/OpenOffice ?
4. Seamless integration of client and server side (that's what XAML is all about, IMHO). Your webapps will actually run sandboxed
Whilst your thinking about the possibilities, some of us are actually implementing it. Java/Flash are already heavily used and Google is only just showing that JS/DHTML can be used to do amazing stuff. And they all work cross-platform.
The fact is developers can't target XAML so long as they have they have a significant number of end users that are running Windows 95/98/Linux/Mac/Firefox etc etc.
5. Reliable Web Services - Indigo, web services that don't suck. More importantly, web service protocol that's supported by the majority of computers in the world (when most people upgrade). And you can bet your ass they will upgrade, just like a couple of years after W95 was released almost everyone ran W95.
Web Services like CORBA is a developer's technology. Most end users won't know what web services is and why it is useful. You've been drinking the Microsoft kool-aid if you think end users are going to upgrade because of it. And Web Services works just as well on other platforms as well you know. Some even require little to no programming.
The most important thing is, all of this will be available to Windows users out of the box, without any tweaking/recompiling/downloading dependencies. That's where the real strength of this all is. Developers will be able to rely on this stuff when building next-gen apps and be reasonably sure that if a user runs Longhorn, the app will run there.
Bzzt. Except that when Longhorn comes out your going to have a even more fragmented Windows market (95/98/XP/Longhorn). Which means that as a developer you want to use the technology that will target the most number of platforms i.e. Win32. This is a huge problem for Microsoft and is why more Longhorn technologes are being backported to XP.
It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks. It's time to start copying Longhorn. Gnome devs have already realised that.
WRONG. It is time for Linux to start making itself more and more interoperable with Windows XP. To the point where businesses will sidegrad
Funtage Factor: Purple
You seem to be making several orthoganal points. Some of them I even agree with, but to tie them together I think you'll need a bit more glue.
First off the correct (IMHO) bits:
Somebody who reads 1984 and thinks that he then has something insightful to say about language or society is like somebody who reads Beat to Quarters and thinks that he then can sail a tall ship around Cape Horn.
Well, of course. I'm not sure that you're making a non-obvious point here, but ok. Of course, someone might read 1984 and then have something insightful to say about language or society... but that's no more or less likely than reading it and having something insightful to say about 20th century authors.
No, 1984 is not "one of the most important books ever written," unless you expand your list to include tens of thousands of books
Obviously you are just as correct as the grandparent who claimed the opposite. This is purely a matter of opinion, unless you're going to assign a quantitative definition to "most important books".
Too many people point to 1984 as an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism
Here you lose me. It's not that this might not be a valid statement, but you place it in the center of a response to a post which makes no such claim. Thus, this can only be catagorized as a strawman.
However, to take up the challenge, I'll argue that 1984 is not an illustration of the insidiousness of totalitarianism, but rather a illustration of the abstract nature of totalitarianism and the ability for the average member of such a society to lie to themselves about the choices they are making.
Of course, we see this sort of book all the time, just not always about politics. Books about women who persist in abusive relationships, criminals who look in the mirror and see a hero, and any number of other common themes are all expressions of this. 1984 simply happens to be one example of this sub-genre where the average reader tends to "get it".
Does 1984 beg the question of the insidiousness of totalitarianism? I don't think so. It shows us what the author thinks people are capable of, lets the readers own sense of the human condition demonstrate its truth. Most of us on reading 1984 come away a bit frightened. Not all of us realize why, but years after reading it, I realized that it was because nothing in the book was terribly difficult to imagine. People DO behave this way, and it's important for us to come to terms with that.
Now, you can say that 1984 isn't important, but here's why I think it was: it opened up a dialog that we had with each other. Many other books have been written since -- some scholarly, some novels like 1984 -- but all further exploring this theme. Certainly philosophers had beat the idea of man's inhumanity to man around for a long time, but Orwell brought a language in which to frame the discussion to the common man, and in this I think we can rightly say that he was an important and influential author.
By way of exmample, Asimov and Feynman didn't write the General and Specifc theories of relativity, but each of them produced clear, understandable and engaging information for people outside of the field that gave us the tools to intelligently disucss these complicated matters. This, in many ways, is just as important a step as introducing the concept to the scientific community.
So, I'll put 1984 somewhere on that list of yours, but I suspect that I'm placing it quite a lot higher than you are.