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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.
Heh, personally I couldnt care if MS releases longhorn in 2007, I would like to see a windows version that isnt half assed up. Id like to (for once) not worry so much about security too much. Id be willing to wait a few months/a year or two for MS to really make LH as good as they can.
- Teja
Basically it's the same shitpile of Perl that has runned this website for years is showing it's age (and suckitude). I hear by the year 2009 Slashcode may actually start generating compliant HTML!
But this part made me go whaaaa?:
Oh, no, thank you very much. First, I don't want those system resources wasted trying to figure out what the icon should look like every time I update or save the file, let along when I move stuff into and out of the folder. Individual icons for items? Sure! But why are we wasting all the extra time that could be used making the OS faster.
And I loved this part:
Oh, for joy. It's not enough just to find what I want, but I need to sort it by things like "date" and "creator" and "file type". Oh, wait - Spotlight will do that too!
The whole presentation sounds a lot like "Hm - another product is coming out now, we need to have a good reason for people to delay. Institute standard plan #2: Convince people that our stuff will be better 'When it's done', so don't buy that other stuff now!"
The question is, with Longhorn at least a year out, will it work any better this time?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
We'll see OSX on an intel platform by then... but then again, prolly not. Been discussed before, but wouldn't it sweet to see side-by-side comparisons, on the same hardware, etc, of MacOS and Windows?
"document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself"
Wang was doing this circa 1991 on AT-class hardware.
I didn't think it was all that cool at the time and I don't think it's a particularly good idea now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually, its a quite speedy thing to do. the KDE project on linux has been doing this for quite some time now, and I've found the Explorer in WinXP actually lists files SLOWER than konqueror, even though it doesn't do previews of any files. Also, Konqueror displays the filetype icon first, then replaces said icons withe previews as it loads them. And, thanks to the thread scheduling and priority handling in Linux and other POSIX-compliant OS's, the thread that processes the threads is put on hold when another program/process needs the power its using.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
That particular feature seemed like a stupid idea, to me. Why would I want to see the first page of any Word document in a 128x128 pixel frame? All that tells me is that it's a document containing text of some sort, not necessarily that it's a Word document. It doesn't make identifying the document easier and it blurs distinctions among other similar types. What's so great about it again?
I mean who needs these features in a typical office enviroment not to mention mom and pop user. The only real power users out there today are the Gamers and they aren't going to be happy to give up cycles just to have some cool 3D in their OS.
Could it be that MS has finally pushed to far and bet too much?
Are we going to be FORCED to use this OS by some self serving argument that it will "MAKE AMERICA SAFER, and whiten teeth"tm ?
You may feel I'm being a bit anti Microsoft here but they really have gambled a bit, as have the hardware companies or are they looking for this to create more demand (quick answer OF COURSE), and they are going to create an OS that 99% of us do not need.
What I want is an OS thats fast and doesn't get in the way of me working with graphics, fiddlin with creating movies, playing music or blowing things up in Unreal. Longhorn?, don't thinks so, not from what I've been reading.
Its like the OS IS the experience and everything your doing and that high powered machine you bought to do it on be dambed cause we know you want your 3D interface!!
Microsoft needs to hire about 200 Russian coders, stick em on an island with nothing but PII 450's and 20GB of total hard drive space and tell them they get paid when Longhorn runs on their machines!!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Believe it or not, people educated about the alternatives *still* use XP.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Some links for the interested:
Introducing Longhorn.
Redmond, start your photocopiers.
This should keep Redmond busy.
Redmond, we have a problem.
Not only was it cute, it was a big "We'll always be one step ahead" from Apple.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Believe it or not, people educated about the alternatives *still* use XP.
My commments were not intended to be exclusive, but there is a body of evidence in the form of user polls that indicates that Microsoft users are largely unaware of any alternatives to IE. Given that users will not explore alternatives beyond a simple browser, it makes my case a bit more strong that they will also not investigate alternative OSs.
Simply put, most folks will not venture out beyond the OS that came pre-installed in their first computer. That leads into a discussion on predatory pricing and strong-arm monopolistic practices by Microsoft.
Care to argue against court transcripts?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Did you see the /. post from an Apple dev a few days ago, saying that putting the windowing interface in 64 bit actually slows it down due to longer pointers, and doesn't have any benefit? The claim was that, if they created 64 bit versions of the interface code, they would then have had to tell their developers not to use them. In the meantime, all of the proc-intensive tasks that would benefit from 64 bit are already using it, and the proc is designed such that using whichever is appropriate doesn't impose a performance penalty ...
I guess my real question is, do you know something I don't (most people do), or are you just "hoping Tiger is finally a fully 64 bit version" because 64 is twice as much?
First, even without a default shell, you can use either a hacked uxtheme.dll (free) or StyleXP (not so free) to replace the theme. Head over to customize.org to witness what you can *really* do with XP.
Second, explorer.exe isn't bad, but litestep is even better - makes it a lot more fun to use. google "litestep xp" to see what I mean.
Third, I don't personally enjoy using the start bar, so I use a freeware program I found someplace on the net to hide it (still accessable with the Windows button) and use a dock like yzdock. YzDock is free, quick, and fairly bug-free, but is no longer in development (as it was shut down by Apple). So much more convenient to group togther ten or so commonly-used programs, a restart/shutdown button, clock, mail checker, and weather report into an aesthetically-pleasing package. The result? No icons on desktop. Interesting theme that replaces the Tonka Truck default. Using Litestep makes your comp that much faster. Add in the other advantages of XP (more games, apps, cheaper hardware over Apple, wider peripheral support than Linux) and in my opinion you've got a winner.
The problem is that you have to pay for XP, which makes it more expensive than Linux, but it ultimately costs less than a comparable OS X box (hardware is cheaper, software is roughly the same). It also takes some time to set this up, but once you've done it a few times, it takes probably 10-15 minutes after a fresh install.
So no, this post and the parent is *not* a troll - I'm simply expressing an opinion. Microsoft has monopolistic tendencies, yes, but in terms of ease of use, I think that they release pretty good products. Viruses and malware? Comes with being the most popular OS - if everybody had Macs, the situation would be reversed.
Anyway, that's the joy of being in a free market; I get to pick the OS that I want to use, and others can use Linux or OS X if they feel that those products are better.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
If you like Cygwin -- you may also enjoy Microsoft Windows Services for Unix. In my opinion, it's much closer to Unix than Cygwin. It uses BSD code and some GPL (it includes GCC and friends.) It's not as usable as a default install of Cygwin is, but there's some precompiled software availbale for it. Programs in/compiled with SFU run in an actual kernel-level POSIX subsystem called Interix, instead of Cygwin's Unix-like layer that runs under Win32. Unix permissions are emulated (I believe) and programs don't have .exe on the end. GCC is supported, and in general (as someone who is used to using BSD/Linux) is much cleaner and nicer than Cygwin.
I'd guess that more programs would compile unmodified in SFU compared to Cygwin (assuming you're using GCC), but I have no evidence/experience to back this up.Since you brought it up...
"Reader" is pluralised by adding an "s" to the end. This is standard English convention, and has been for hundreds of years.
Apostrophes are NEVER ever used to denote plurals!
Now to address your real point: why do you think I put "leading brand" in quotes? The "leading brand" in commercials is almost never really the brand with the most market share. It's simply one or more high-profile competitors. Geesh. Lighten up a notch or two, and enjoy your weekly dose of Thurrott. Slashdot is obviously too sophisticated for you.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I think you're partially misidentifying the problem, or at least leaving off one gigantic source of confusion. The AMD64 instruction set, from what I've heard, runs about 30% faster than the same code compiled in 32-bit mode, and the latter probably has better optimizations, too. (It takes years for compilers to fully optimize for an architecture; I believe 5 years was an old rule of thumb but I think the lead time has been building since multi-pipelining procs came out.)
But that's not because the processor is 64-bit, it's despite it. The real cause is that the AMD64 has more registers available, so anything not written in assembler directly can benefit, a lot.
I think this leads to a lot of confusion. The fact is, given an operation that fits in X bits, the fastest possible processor for that operation will be one that runs with X bits natively; going higher will incur penalties of size, power, and speed (caused by the greater size and other issues that come up), going lower will incur massive penalties as the operations rapidly become much more complex. (A 64-bit proc can't do anything a 32-bit proc can't in the math department, but it'll run 64-bit math a lot faster; look at the algorithm just to multiply two 64-bin nums on a 32-bit machine.)
The reason it seems otherwise to anybody is that with x86, we've never had "the fastest possible processor". See: Pareto optimality (although that does not draw the larger conclusions that logic directly leads to in a number of fields).
Security enchancements can only mean one thing:
... (Can't see ActiveX support beign removed, either)
I thought you were gonna say "because it just couldn't be worse than before, no matter how hard they try".
My guess is:
-LH will still ship with IE which will have a LOT of holes and more will be found over time. "Their" antispyware may not be too bad, but it's like fixing a flat tire everyday... Why not make IE secure instead?
-(Home) Users will still run as admin for everyday stuff. You know what follows... Mind you, even if they "fixed" that, the users wouldd quickly learn to make themselves admin again (not knowing what it is or means, why, the consequences, risks or anything) just so their software runs. Too much soft requires users to be admin for trivial stuff.
It won't educate users about risks either, and hey'll keep doing the same old stuff.
This list could go on and on...
And they say it's going to be more secure, when they really have fixed none of the main problems. Ok, it may be more secrure, but that doesn't mean as secure as you would hope, or as secure as OS X... I still see tons of XP SP2 PCs with tons of viruses and spyware.
(And that's coming from someone who mostly uses Windows)
///<sig
There's a reason why I can still use a 6 year old mac with the current OS. I got to 10.3 on a DV iMac (350Mhz, 192 MB ram) which I purchased when 10.0 came out. The experience wasn't all that great, so I shifted to Ubuntu. Linux runs great on an older iMac - the newer versions of OSX do not.
The debate between what is journalism and what is blogging will go on for a long long time. As a journalist, and I have a journalism background, there are basically two kinds of news, hard news and op/ed. With hard news it is important for the journalist to remove him or her self in every way from the story. It's important to avoid personal bias (although some might suggest that in the end this can never truly be perfected). I've written thousands of words of hard news in the past. It is something that is really important and hard news absolutely should be guarded and protected even among bloggers.
Certainly the types of comments that I blogged about the dinner were not hard news, nor did I hold my article out to be hard news. If you wanted hard news, CNET reported on a similar demo with Allchin the day before. I even linked to it in my article.
In terms of op/ed, my blog post is still nothing that even remotely resembled op/ed.
Hunter Thompson broke the mold of journalism when back in the 60s he began to place himself in his stories. He wrote fantastic tales of drug induced frenzies, the Hells Angels, presidential politics and whatever else was on his mind while simultaneously placing every kind of bias and opinion imaginable in his writing.
When people read Thompson did they realize that his biases were in his stories? Of course. Does that mean that Thompson should not have been allowed to print his work? Of course not. In fact, some could argue that much of what Hunter wrote was oftentimes far more pertinent, relevant and important than either hard news or op/ed.
Shortly before his death, Thompson wrote, "Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed."
Was this hard news? No. Op/ed? Not even that. Was this completely biased personal opinion? Whatever it was, Thompson felt that he had something important to say.
Although many at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal might argue that news ought to be either hard news or op/ed and clearly labeled as such, I would suspect that many of these same individuals just might look at the work that Thompson did and somehow be ok with it - and even admire it - even as it clearly was a bastardization of perhaps everything that they were ever taught in journalism school from day one.
And in many ways blogging today is something similar. While the debate rages over whether bloggers are journalists and professionals fret over the lack of even the most basic standards that many bloggers do not appear to posses, bloggers are coming back with perhaps the same type of response Thompson may have given more than a few editors. Only this time the blogger is the one with the control.
While I do not hold myself out to be anywhere near the caliber of Thompson, one of my great all time heroes, I do feel that there is room in the world of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the news itself.
Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a reality.
Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs. The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal level.
Could Apple or Linux provide me a similar e