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Longhorn Preview
prostoalex writes "News.com has up a preview of Microsoft's current build of Longhorn operating system, from Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president. The timing is not coincidental with Apple's Tiger release, as Allchin pointed out some advantages that Microsoft had over Apple's OS: 'High on the list of features are security enhancements, improved desktop searching and organizing, and better methods for laptops to roam from one network to another.'" Update: 04/15 21:24 GMT by Z : Thomashawk wrote in to provide links to less formal looks at the Allchin preview, one at his site, and one at Evan William's site.
has info as well
I sure hope that users have fast CPU's and a butt-load of memory. With the new icon "feature" that gives a mini preview of each document in a folder, I can only imagine how long simple navigation will take. And I thought viewing My Pictures in thumbnail mode was slow.
I think they mean -1 + 1 = 0 .
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
New ground?! This feature has been around in KDE* (and in Gnome* can't remember though) for at least the past year that I've been using it. I give them a little credit for the folders part but give me a break! It really seems like M$ has been doing a lot of ground breaking work by looking and implementing what the competition has had for a long time now and then claiming that they are being innovative.
* on SuSE 9.1 and 9.2
What is the number one reason people stay away from Mac? I submit that it is price. Not price of the OS Tiger, but price of "The Comptuer" you have to buy. Imagine the ability to have something as solid, feature rich, and protected as Tiger, that you can run on a relatively powerful system you made from parts you bought off of newegg for $600. Personally, I believe that's worth waiting for.
The Mac Mini starts at $500 and it's a bit nicer than a home-brew $600 system would be, since it's very small, cool and quiet.
I do take your point that the $600 homebrew PC you mention would likely have a bit more oomph in the CPU and graphics card, however you should also bear in mind that Mac OS X is really quite efficient at many things, for example Apple really gets the most performance possible out of its carefully chosen components, so things like video editing are surprisingly good on "weak" PowerPC G4 cpus. I have done about 10 DVD projects on my powerbook which has significantly less raw compute and pixel-pushing power than a Mac Mini.
Depending on your actual needs, the Mac Mini could really meet your needs and budget well (I would recommend simply giving one a try in a shop, ideally running the applications you would want touse).
The one reason that Mac prospers is that they actually do have a port of Microsoft Office...
For the sake of accuracy, it should be pointed out that Office for Windows is the ported version -- Office originated on the Mac and the Mac version still has some features the Windows version doesn't.
It's the Type-R obsession back to harass us all again. People, apparently including the parent to your post, have this silly notion that everything has to be "fully 64-bit" even when it serves no damn purpose (and even when it slows things down!).
64-bit is not a panacea. 64-bit is useful where it is useful, but that's not everywhere. Just like you don't ride around in a U-Haul truck around 365 days a year because it has a lot of room, you don't need 64-bit support in, say, TextEdit or the window manager.
What are you going to do with 64-bit addressing in a simple text editor or the window manager? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I drive a Jeep. It's got four wheel drive. I'm not going around complaining about how all the roads immediately around me are paved -- they don't diminish my ability to use my four-wheel drive when appropriate. So it is with 64-bit processors. Not everything needs to be optimized for them. Some applications won't see any benefit, and some may even see a performance decrease (kind of like how tooling around town in 4Lo just because you can will leave you without a drivetrain).
Do anyone really want a 64-bit version of TextEdit just so you can say your OS is completely 64-bit optimized? Give me a break.
I also saw Allchin's roadshow. The icons scale on the fly, like desktop icons in Mac OS X. You can work a slider to bump them up to a fairly large size.
Breakfast served all day!
> Not only that but does this only work with word?
Heh. This is Windows' shell feature since Windows 2000-- I have _no_ idea why this is being touted as a Longhorn feature. Install Adobe Acrobat 7 and view a PDF in Thumbnail view, you'll see what I mean. Or on XP, view bitmaps/movie files.
The way it works is that apps can register a Preview Renderer to the shell. The entire app needn't (and should not be, in fact) loaded.
Go somewhere random
Oh, it's far worse than that. Microsoft's #1 selling point for Longhorn is security. "Buy this product because it's more secure than the product we sold you last year." They've been doing that for a while now. They're getting good at it. Ship a product that's known to be flawed, then charge for a product that's known to be flawed slightly less, and advertise it as a big improvement.
Microsoft ought to change their slogan to "We're doing the best we can." Nobody would believe them, but it would at least be slightly closer to the truth.
So it can't just install itself from a user visiting a site, or clicking "OK." They would need to visit the site, have the pop up come up, then type in their password when it says "ADCrazy is trying to install BlahBlahBlah. Type in your Administrator password to continue."
Secondly, it can't hide in a registry and alter how your other apps work. Sure it can play with some plist files to make some changes, but OS X makes it quite hard for a program to run in such a way as to make it completely invisible to the user and hard to quit.
I'm not the grandparent and I'm not going to link them as it's not really worth either of our time, but there are distinct reasons why being "the biggest" doesn't make you the most vulnerable. Apache and IIS have rather equivalent marketshare, so to speak, yet IIS servers are the ones with bugs, problems, and security flaws.
Finally, outside of web-based trojans, OS X doesn't have the low-level integration of Safari and Mail, meaning that a virus written for those applications don't have nearly full-access to a system with permission to change other files/programs on the computer.
I will say this, though -- Longhorn and, to some degree SP2, will probably be all the evidence you need against this FUD of "the biggest programs have the biggest problems." I fully expect Longhorn to be relatively free from many of the malware problems that plague past Windows OS's, and it will very likely be on an exceedingly large number of computers. What will the argument be then, when one of the OS's with the largest marketshares proves the statement incorrect?