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Longhorn Beta is Disappointing
bonch writes "Well, Longhorn beta 5048 was released a day before the start of WinHEC 2005, suggestive of the fact that it is not terribly impressive. Paul Thurrott (a Windows writer whose previously reported review of Mac OS X Tiger was updated after user feedback) confirmed this today in day two of his blog from WinHEC. Microsoft needed something big to kill the hype of competitors, but screenshots show minor visual updates from the last beta, and to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'"
What? How many killed and injured? An unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened in Japan. I think that's a bit colored anyway from someone who hates mornings and is undoubtably in a less than spritely mood.
I thought the bit about "Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM" being good (This is good news for today's PC users, some of whom are concerned that they won't have the PC muscle needed to run the next Windows.) rather disturbing. Sounds like the thing is going to be an absolute pig, like XP and 95 before it. (Remember when they said you could run 95 in 8MB? We found you realistically needed 24MB) Even though RAM is cheap, I'm not fond of loading 1GB into a box and then seeing about 1/3 of it taken up by stuff 'I may need and would be really neat if already loaded in memory so IE and other apps would appear to load quickly.' A bit like asking if someone has a pen knife and they hand you one of those swiss army knives with the works, when all you need is just a small sharp blade for 5 seconds (you spend 30 seconds trying to find the actal knife blade in the Victorinox monster.) A PC is a hole in your desktop into which you continually shovel money. With Longhorn you'd better get a bigger shovel
Lovely screen shots. What about the operating system are they supposed to convey, other than it looks more annoying than even XP (I don't do icons in Explorer windows, I do Details.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well it's still in beta, and a long way to release so a lot can change.
Wow, a pre-beta release that isn't feature complete has 'the makings a train wreck'.
Give me a break, it's not even considered beta 1.
It's like complaining about interior design of an unbuilt house.
'OMG, I didn't want open walls and exposed wires! I wanted green wallpaper.'
backend first, frontend last - I wouldn't worry, they have a year or more.
I've played with the 3DWM, it's fun.
He's complaining that the screenshots aren't very different? I thought the point of Longhorn was primarily the changes within the OS internals.
I could pop a Ferrari engine into a Pinto, and this guy would complain about the air freshener hanging from the mirror.
--
get a free laptop
It was made very clear that the build for WinHec was soley provided as a platform to test driver compatability. MS still has a couple of months until it releases Beta 1.
Please hold your flame till then.
A speech...
As long as they don't totally fvck up what they already have, I can't see a train wreck.
Windows ME. Now that was a train wreck.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I actually like the new look. It is 20 times better than the default XP theme. I have to switch every XP work machine to "Classic" because I hate the "Fisher-Price" coloring scheme of XP. Computers should look professional and not like "My First Computer".
We go through this same thing every year before Microsoft releases their next OS. Everyone gets all gloomy and doomy about how it's going to take too long, and all the features that get trimmed (cairo/winfs again), and the 632235 bugs still outstanding. A year from now all this will vanish and the hype will be unbearable. The press will be going nuts over the coming computer rapture. And then the same thing will happen as always when the OS is released. A few people will buy it and upgrade their computers. Most everyone else will simply get it from their OEMS when they buy a new computer, whether they want it or not.
For once, I think Microsoft did things right by focusing on usability and not on pretty graphics to make geeks go "weeeeeee". Why is it that they can do no right? If it's too pretty, geeks complain. If it's not pretty enough, geeks complain. I would much prefer to have a solid bakend in alpha, and worry about the pretty stuff later. Do you pick the color of paint before the foundation of your house has been laid? If so, you might just have your priorityies misaligned.
Furthermore, if you watch videos of the beta (which aare actuall of build 5060, no 5048), you will see Longhorn with the new effects enbaled, which is not the case by default on installation. I think it looks damn sexy and will give Mac OS X users a run for thier money.
Do your homework before you post.
What's so exciting about an OS? Isn't it the apps that we really care about? As long as the OS is secure, doesn't crash, and runs what I want it to run well on the hardware I choose to run it on, isn't that what counts?
(And tack on "and is open source" as well for the perhaps 3% of the world who really understands why that matters...?)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Microsoft is one of the most profitable software companies of the world (the most?). Despite of having basically an ilimted amount of money to invest in technology, they've had to remove half of the features of longhorn (the latest one was a href="http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=10 422">NGSCB).
And even doing that, they've delayed it several times. They can hire the engineers they want, they can waste the money they want. Still, they aren't doing anything useful. The problem is, as always, the not-engineer people, who don't have idea of were Microsoft is going. The golden days of getting revenues by changing the document format in Office are gone. The days where being compatible was everything and people loved it are partially gone because internet allows to update things
And because they don't have an idea of where microsoft is going, they invest in nearly every market they can: Servers, games, xbox, search engine, keyboards, mouses, data bases, programming languages. Microsoft is trying to fight with all the industry, and they can't win.
yes.
looks at apple. (see's the sexiness that is osx)
looks at linux. (see's the shear glee of wobbly windows, and enlightenment)
looks at 2k. (see's something that looks worse than os7, never mind x, and looks shlocky compared to any linux wm short of kde1)
looks at xp and goes blind.
Damn the man!
Is it just me, or the folder from Start button giving me the middle finger?
Is to cram DRM down everybody's throat.
DRM in the form of better license enforcement from MS.
DRM in the form of WMP 11 which will attempt to lock away any trace of our ability to copy music and video to our PC and use it at will.
DRM in the form of "trusted" computing which, not ironically, is exactly untrusted computing, since it turns your PC into a spy and snitch for MS.
I'm not even a Mac fan, but my next PC will be a Mac. This is all too much. I guess its par for the course for "World Intellectual Property Day". A day set to remind us that "All your base are belong to us".
MS has been working on Longhorn even longer than they worked on Windows 95. So its appropriate to comment on the state of the beta after billions of dollars of work over a long period of time.
After 4 years, if this is all they can show, then I'm buying stock in Apple, because if MS attempts to "lock down" digital "rights", then people will be sprinting towards the Mac platform just as fast as they can to get away from this abortion of an OS.
The slogan is very subject and so incomplete.
John Smith calls Longhorn disappointing would have been better.
Essentially slashdot turned a story that should have been called "New longhorn build/screenshots" into major flaimbait.
I seriously think that Slashdot should allow their subscribers to "vote" on the new stories that most people don't see...or a subset..if to many people think it is bad it gets red flagged for Taco to stare at or something.
Does anybody else immediately write another IT person off as a bumbling, stupid idiot if he runs the default Luna theme on his desktop? I honestly don't see how anybody can do any serious work with that theme on.
This sounds pretty honest from an aledged Microsoft-shill.
There's Slashbot thinking for you.
honest=agrees with me and lying = disagrees with me
I haven't been able to look at the screenshots as the site appears to be slashdoted, but I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP. My major complaint with XP isn't really the look though, it is the incredible amount of screen space it wastes in favor of eye candy. The first thing I do with an XP machine is set it back to Win95 mode and pick the classic skin for media player (which is truly an abomination with the default skin). Of course, these days I hardly run Windows at all since Fedora Core 3 does everything that I need a computer to do, and does it better and for less money than any version of Windows. I doubt Longhorn will be a train wreck as there are millions of people that will upgrade no matter how good or bad it is, and Microsoft will spend billions persuading them it is the best thing to do. It is amazing that people never catch on to the old wine in a new bottle trick. Of course, in the case of Windows, we aren't just talking about any old wine, we talking about vintage 30 year old Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
By, oh, ignoring the theme and focusing on the work?
If you judge someone by their theme, then you really shouldn't be in IT.
This is exactly the lack of focus on essential detail that will make LH a sad, second-level retread of W2K for users. Yeah, it's got an improved driver and development model. Yeah, web services are integrated throughout. It drives like a tank.
UI is artless and amature. Better work is seen on DeviantArt.com
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"and will give Mac OS X users a run for thier money."
Closer to "will give Mac OS X users the runs.
No seriously, why do you think "effects" are what will be make or break? They've still got the core wrong. Architecturally, Windows XP started MS down a path that they should abandon, but they won't. So they add "effects" call it longhorn, and it won't be a trainwreck, its going to be more like the Graf Zeppelin.
You don't get why OS X.4 is good, so you think its because it looks sexy. No sonny boy. Its sexy because its good under the covers. Apple go it right.
I agree, I don't like the look of XP, that is why when I use a XP machine I change the look back to windows classic. One I do that, it looks and feels exactly like my windows 2000 machine.
And what do those screenshots tell us anyways? I did not see anything new, something to make me excited about the new windows.
Maybe Microsoft is stuck in their 1998 way of thinking, when the new "version" of windows had people lining up outside of CompUSA at 5am to get a good space in line to be the first to own the new version. That will not happen again. Windows 2000 can do just about anything a user wants, it can play DVD movies, surf the web, play games. Why do we need a new version of Windows?
I would like to see Micrsoft do 2 things they won't. 1) I want greater control of my PC, but with the push for more DRM, I will get less control of my machine. And related to #1, I want to have tools work my way, I want to opt-in rather than opt-out, I want most services turned off unless I turn them on. 2) I would like Windows to come with some more software than just solitare. I'd love to see Windows come loaded with OpenOffice and Mozilla, and a ton of Open Source software. It would be a great sign of stregnth, to give away those products and then tell people "You have Open Office which is good, but for something really great come and buy Office".
I doubt Windows will do any of those things.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
grandma's gonna have a hard time figuring out what the "Shu..." button does on her large-text setup
It starts a game of shuffleboard, of course.
What I'd like to know is, have they done anything to make the actual shutdown dialog more useful? The button icons completely fail to depict what they're supposed to be. I had to use a Spanish computer one time and couldn't figure out how to turn it off. I'd never used Windows XP before, and those buttons are absolutely meaningless without the text underneath them.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
I do not really see a point in pseudo-improving the visuals in Longhorn. Being almost addicted to Linux where the system core and graphicsal environments are totaly separated - new widgets or whistles in Windows do not impress me at all. In Linux I can freely choose between Gnome, KDE and several others and a lot of custom themes for each. So an extra toolbar in Longhorn or an extra bar with "Administrator" written on it - what kind of joke is this?
IMHO it is a VERY unreasonable to bind visuals to the system core. If gui goes down - the whole system does. Integration gives you (naively thinking) positive values, but what you can see in Linux or MacOsX is the counterexample.
Ok - so Microsoft is promoting the new os with a few whistles added, perhaps drm integrated and will require you to buy a 3GHz processor to preserve the same quality and conveniance you had on a 166MHz running Windows 98.
IMHO _IF_ MacOsX would be available for x86 along with all the drivers and software Windows has now - Windows would go down.
I am also affraid the guys from Microsoft are permanently making some ideological/design mistake when developing next Windows edition. Look at Apple: they decided to go Unix and... MacOsX is one of the most stable and secure systems available. Microsoft keeps upgrading DOS 6.22 and patching security holes. The result is just... funny and sad. Funny when you just look at their attempt to fool people and force them to buy their shitty products and sad because... they succeed. And people WILL but Longhorn.
michal
Because at some point Microsoft will force the upgrade by sabotaging existing Win2k installs. No more service packs, patches or support. Doubtless WMP-Longhorn will get some delightful codecs that will not work on Win2k.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Looks exactly like XP using an OS X theme...but remember kids, It Just Works!(tm)
Although I'm glad they've decided to use technology created in the late 60s (which SCO owns and Al Gore invented) as well as a lovely new password scheme guaranteed to create jobs in the IT support workforce from all the clueless office lemmings. Not to mention how IE7 won't be exclusive to Longhorn nor will WinFS be included.
So like I said...we're paying $299 for XP with an OS X theme.
They have been working on this thing for four or five years now. It's not like they started yesterday and have another five years to go.
Just exactly how much work do you think they are planning to do in the next two months to take it to beta and final production anyway?
evil is as evil does
I'm glad somebody else pointed this out. This made the rounds internally under the headline "What's wrong with this picture?"
...well, early and very rough. If you go back and look at the Mac OS X public beta, or even the 2004 WWDC demo of Tiger, you'll find that our early builds differ significantly from the final releases of our products.
Look, I'm not gonna criticize Microsoft for showing early, very rough code and having it look
But the thing is...every single one of us, to a man, would be ashamed to show something like that in public. Seriously, we'd hang our heads in embarrassment.
Microsoft's position, of course, is, "Don't look at the icons or the controls. They're not important. We're demoing underlying technology." Which is fine. But that's not how we do things. If you're going to take the time to put a UI on a demo product at all, take the time to do it right. Don't just slap something on there and say, "Oh, this'll all come out before we ship." That's not fair to your product or your customers.
It's just another sign of the difference between our philosophy and Microsoft's philosophy. I don't think either one is objectively right or wrong, but I won't hesitate to tell you which one I think is better.
In other words, the OS is trending from promising towards disappointing. The whole point of the big screen dog and pony show is to build excitement about the coming OS (yes, even at the developer shows). By bringing out a version that seems worse than the last one MS is killing enthusiasm for Longhorn.
I take it you don't read at -1 do you?
but i think whatever OS has most (clueless) users will be targeted most
You'd think that, wouldn't you? But no, the OSX users are targeted not often at all, maybe never. Why? Decent OS architecture going on there. Decent may not even be generous enough.
(Note to OSX users: This is *not* intended as a flame. I'm only pointing out that you don't have to become a computer engineer, when the OS designer doesn't sell you garbage.)
Most gated community residents are clueless when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, but murders still happen more frequently in a Sao Paulo shantytown. Why? Why indeed. Go live in the Microsoft ghetto if you want, but don't say we didn't invite you to your own mansion.
What I noted looking at the control panel screenshot, is that it looks a lot more complicate than what I remembered back from the days when I still used Windows (:grins:).
I mean, people always say "GNU/Linux is difficult to master, you need to be a genius to use that"... "what a mess of options, how can I find a way through that"... and then... please compare: Windows (Ok, the "classic view" link is there, but that's just an example) - A GNU/Linux desktop
This seems a common trend while time passes: systems become bigger and more difficult to use if you're not a literate (who, ten years ago, would have cared about what's a gateway being on Windows? who _doesn't_ now?). Good luck for GNU/Linux, then. It has been ten more years of experience in being complex. :-)
Seriously, computer literacy is becoming a prerequisite for every system out there, and this makes switches easier from Windows to anything else. Even if this isn't the matter, they're all becoming "more to read and less to click".
(PS: Counting the seconds before someone says something about how MacOSX solves all these problems by being the most simple system in the world yaddayaddayadda. :-) )
42.
"Go" doesn't in any way mean "restart" to me. How on earth did you get that association (besides looking at the text below the button)?
It was a really good paper.
Or anywhere else for that matter. I still can't play many
But note: when a device is off, and I press the button with that icon, it turns on. Conversely, if the device is already on, pressing it turns it off.
So, now here I am presented with what seems to be a power button, on a device that is currently on. So pressing it should logically turn it OFF.
Except, hey, WTF, why is it yellow? And what's that weird red thing next to it? I have searched through my entire house, and I haven't found a single device with that icon on it. On the other hand, I've found paired on/off buttons where a single line (|) means on, and a circle (o) means off. I've always understood those to be switches dedicated to on or off, and the combined broken circle one to be a toggle.
So hell, now I don't know what to do. Well, that happy looking green thing looks to me like it must be a lively "just keep things on please" button, so I'll consider that a cancel button and press that.
Whoops.
"they just need to add new features"
Not just new features... they have to add features that people actually want. Apple does this.
For example, Expose was the big hit of Panther, and now Spotlight and Dashboard are going to be the big hits of Tiger. Sure, the performance and GUI enhancements are nice (except for perhaps the Finder), but they are a sideshow.
Microsoft needs to add something that will make people actually want to upgrade. They can say they will improve security, but that isn't something the average user will notice right away. In fact, it should be something the user doesn't notice at all since the OS should protect them in the first place. Microsoft needs to have something that has a tangible effect on the end user.
If people can't tell between XP (or 2000, or ME for that matter), they are in for trouble. Then they won't bother purchasing it. But if they see that there is a good reason to upgrade, they will.
Jaguar and Panther could both play DVDs, surf the web and play games... but Apple came out with features in Panther that made people able to do those things easier and/or better than before.
My point is that most new features are mostly marketing fluff, and if M$ wants really pull this off, they have to offer something truly innovative and useful.
So, for example, the icon for a Word document in Longhorn displays a miniature version of the first page of that document and a Microsoft PowerPoint slide show icon displays the first slide
Sorry but, don't KDE have this feature now?? and frome quite some time? Again, I think MS is just copying features from other platforms and selling them as Great Inovation(tm)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
yeah, except red (stop) could be meaningfully used to convey all three, and yellow (how do you come up with an automatic association between yellow with "stand by"; if anything, it would be "caution" or "prepare to stop") and green (go) don't really apply to any of the three.
as far as the icons on numerous home appliances, i think the 'power' icons they use for shut down and stand by tend to be used fairly interchangeably, and i've never seen the 'tentacle' icon anywhere that i can remember.
at any rate, my personal pet peeve regarding the shutdown dialog, as someone who tends to use keyboard shortcuts far more often than the mouse, is that it is not clear which one is currently selected and which one will be activated when i hit enter. i usually hit the left/right arrow keys a couple of times and watch for the annoyingly subtle change in color to know which icon is currently highlighted before i hit enter.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I just checked each of these on my machine.
.pdf in Preview, activate Dashboard, and the cursor will change to a hand as it floats over the (dimmed and unclickable) document.
Activate Dashboard, the iChat/Volume/Battery/Clock menus in the menu bar still work and pop up over the Dashboard layer.
Not correct. A click outside a widget dismisses Dashboard.
Open a
Not correct. Outside widgets, the cursor is an arrow regardless of context.
Dashboard Translation widget, click the 'swap' button several times and the focus ring will flicker madly
I wasn't able to reproduce this. I don't know what you meant by "several." I clicked it 20 times. No error.
Finder, start renaming a file and the insertion caret will flicker twice on each keystroke until the name wraps to the second line
That was an occasional bug in 8A425. Are you using a pirated copy?
System Preferences/Mail, now showing the third major window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic)
No, that's Aqua.
Spotlight, randomly fails to index non-boot-drive partitions
Obviously not reproducible. Spotlight will not index a volume if there's insufficient free space available. We look for about 1/10th of one percent, if I remember correctly.
Your response may be "oh well, they're all minor"
No, my response is "Please stop using pirated copies of Tiger that you download off the Internet and then complaining about them."
I just got done with their Internet Security and Accelerator training. This, plus the stuff i've seen in Longhorn, plus the other things I've seen remind me of the movie 'The Hudsucker proxy':
"Idea man treading water"
Microsoft has not produced ANYTHING compelling in the last three years. It's more an excercise of 'lets sell them on more features', rather than 'lets sell them on something that improves the experience'.
The constant treadmill arms race of spyware/patch/reboot (Which I've seen take well running machines and reduce them to perma-reboot) plus bloatware that sucks the life out of a P4 with HALF A GIG of RAM. (Have you noticed the difference in performance between a new installation pre and post Office 2k3?)
So, lets pitch the API, lets pitch the file system (oops, can't do that in time), lets pitch your old hardware, and lets do it in the usual lock-step upgrade deathmarch again.
I think they've run out of useful features to add...and I think it's gonna bite them in the ass.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Next time I see a green light I'm gonna shut off the engine in my car and turn it back on again :)
No, sorry. You've very likely seen the text and therefore know what the buttons mean. It has nothing to do with your brain.
And: name one device with a button that has a bunch of lines organized in a circle meaning "restart". A better icon for restart might have been something like a web browser's reload button, or maybe the "recycle" logo.
I couldn't figure out the difference between the red and yellow buttons. The icons are nearly identical, and with my experience with 'nix window managers, I figured that perhaps one of the buttons saved what programs were running before logging out, and the other one didn't... but then what would the green lines-in-a-circle mean? I couldn't think of reasonable meanings for all three buttons, so how could I be sure that any interpretation I had for one or two of them was correct?
Consider another common association: red means "incorrect" and green means "correct." So maybe the green button means "yes, I want to shut down the computer" and the red one means "never mind"? There's just way too much room for ambiguity, and besides, if the icons are so poorly designed that the only way to tell the buttons apart is by the color, they fail to be useful.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
personally neither microsoft nor apple will get any money from me in the future.
the industry is headed for open source and free(dom)
software.
proprietary products are a 20th century concept.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I find it interesting that you feel that not releasing more service packs, patches, and no longer supporting an operating system is sabotaging it. I'm afraid that the end-of-life of any product is something you'll have to get used to. There is an end to the support of everything. Operating systems, cars, computers, you name it.
When I saw the word "sabotage" I was assuming you were going to state that Microsoft was going to do something devious and illegal. But you just said that they will stop working on it. I am not sure, but it seems that Microsoft has been supporting their operating systems for longer periods than Red Hat has. I know, I know, you don't get the source, but that probably doesn't make a difference to most users. Unless we can expect them to learn the code and fix bugs for an entire distribution by themselves.
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
That's an interesting point and I have to say that I agree to a certain extent that that's what they seem to be trying to do. What I don't understand is why.
Apple HAD to make a break from classic Mac OS, because it was really pretty awful. NT isn't awful. It's not great, but it's in nowhere like the trouble OS 8 and OS 9 were in.
Microsoft really could do what Apple's doing and introduce new bundled features on a year-to-year basis, or even sell them as $50 Plus Packs, and maintain a steady income without either losing market share or alienating customers. They don't need to be pulling the "All New Windows" every few years like they did in the '90s... they reached a reasonably stable peak in terms of what they're really capable of doing right with Windows 2000.
They've got a mature product they can build on, sell new accessories for it, bundle it as "Windows 2004, you get Windows 2000, the XP Plus Pack, the GUI Glitz Plus Pack, and a special this-release-only sidebar, a combined value of almost $300, for $150. For only $75 more you get the Professional Pack, normally $125, in Windows 2004 Professional".
That's how a mature company sells mature products, and it's what microsoft really needs to do. Because, Microsoft is a mature company, they've got the brass ring and there's no way they can significantly boost Windows sales over what they'd be without building a "successor OS". They don't need to act like a startup now, it's just getting in the way of doing the best job and making the most money.
Time for a reality check. By the time Longhorn is actually released, Windows 2000 will be 6 - going on 7 - years old. That's quite a reasonable support window (and certainly as long, if not longer, than any alternatives).
>Not correct. Outside widgets, the cursor is an arrow regardless of context.
Did you try this? I can reproduce exactly what the guy is talking about in 8A428.
And yes, Mail's toolbar buttons are drawn in a style unlike anything anywhere else in the system. There is even a hidden preference (not going to say what) to change them back to the standard style. And when he says "plastic", he's clearly referring to the optional "no divider" toolbar/titlebar combo, which is new in Tiger and is not used by all applications. It's used in Mail, System Prefs, Xcode, and Spotlight, but is not used in Sherlock, Preview, Internet Connect, Activity Monitor, etc. As with metal, there seems to be little rhyme or reason as to when it is or isn't used.
>>Spotlight, randomly fails to index non-boot-drive partitions
>Obviously not reproducible.
There are other cases besides just low disk space where Spotlight will not index a volume. That, coupled with the lack of UI feedback in regards to said volumes not being indexed, could easily lead a user to believe it is "randomly" failing.
I don't want to make an enemy here, but you've hit on one of my personal hot buttons.
The core vision of the company I work for is to make IT as you know it obsolete.
Seriously. Right now, computers fucking suck. Seriously. All of them, even the ones we make. Computers are absurdly unreliable, and ridiculously hard to operate. The mere fact that we've raised an entire generation of people who think that IT is a valid career choice is testament to how we've dropped the ball for the past forty years.
We're just now -- literally, just this week -- starting to get to the point where computers are beginning to understand two vital things: inference and implication. If I e-mail a document to somebody in my address book, my computer can now infer that that document is related to that person; when I search for that person, I get that document, or vice versa. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Servers should be entirely self-configuring, entirely self-adapting. Can you believe that just a couple of years ago, people had to sit down in front of servers and key in lists of IP addresses to enable things like print services? You had to actually sit down and tell your computer about the printer sitting next to it.
No more. Now, with Bonjour (née Rendezvous, and please don't ask) computers and services are auto-configuring. This is, again, just the tip of the iceberg.
You're probably going to hate me for saying this, but IT employees contribute absolutely nothing to an organization. They produce nothing, they transport nothing, they collect nothing. They're an expense. One we hope to render completely obsolete.
Will we still need computer repair men? Sure! We need air-conditioner repair men. We need electricians. We need plumbers. But the idea that a small business should be expected to keep an air-conditioner repair man or an electrician or a plumber on staff full time is absurd. Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, the idea that a small business should have its own computer repair man will be equally absurd.
That's our goal. That's where we think we're headed.
You know what, other Apple employees read this board. And if you really are an Apple employee, you might want to watch your language, if you don't want to have management try to figure out who you are by what you know.
Regardless of your passion, your language does not reflect well on Apple. I'd almost think you were some 15 year old with a student developer account on ADC or paid the regular price to get access to Tiger seeds, so you know what's in the software.
People on this board are Apple customers or potential Apple customers. Insulting them is unbecoming. If you really are a Tiger engineer, perhaps you need some time off away from the computer before you post more.
What's more, some people like posting to boards like this without thinking that the corporate mothership is watching their every move. Why not let people discover Tiger for themselves and speculate about it? It builds more excitement about it if they learn just how cool stuff is on their own.
It's like you want to stifle discussion or something. I don't really think you're an employee, because you'd post anonymously.
Or maybe you're actually from the competition, trying to leave a bad taste in people's mouths.
Which is not to say that what you say is necessarily untrue or in some cases unfunny, just, not said with Apple elegance, and thus, should not be said with the Apple 'we.'
They also suck since it is near-impossible to see which button has keyboard focus, instead of the regular dotted rectangle used in the rest of Windows they have a slight lighter tint when active. Real easy to tell. I end up having to switch focus a few times before pressing enter every time just to be sure that the button I want is the active one.
On the contrary. The problem is that the general population had been fed a pipe dream to them, and now are finding it wasn't true. You are right now describing this dream.
I don't need IT people myself. Computers are easy to fix and service. IMHO, the largest problem ironically is with all the usability improvements that have been made.
Try with a comparison:
Not so long ago, at a company that sells stuff the computers would run DOS. The disk would be nearly blank, the only thing running on it constantly would be the selling terminal application. It would be efficiently handled with only the keyboard.
Then there would be a big server somewhere handled by a few people without much trouble.
These days, the same computer runs Windows. It faces viruses and worms due to stupidities committed in the name of ease of use. The same application is now a GUI, which makes it really pretty, but adds extra workload in the terms of interface programming, which increases the possible failure mode, and makes automated testing harder.
The whole system is managed by an army of often poorly educated people, who run around the company removing viruses, reinstalling systems, and bitterly complaining that people can't just get into their head that life would be much easier without Outlook.
Not saying that the UI hasn't improved, but I'm pretty sure that for commercial purposes the DOS version of all this stuff was working better.
The interesting thing is after this week they will no longer have any kind of shelter from open review and discussion of Tiger. If it's internals are as shaky and obsolete as you say, this fact should come through clearly in the product reviews to follow.
We won't see non-NDA reviews of Longhorn for a year and a half (even if things go well). And the ones that do pop out prior to RTM - "previews" not "reviews" - will always be able to fall back on "ah, but it's a beta, the shipping product will look a lot nicer". Which is what they said last year.
It showed that a cooperative development based on free will and open standards could lead to complex software projects
Sorry, I guess I didn't get the memo. Was that ever in doubt?
What this "cooperative development" thing cannot do is produce consistent results. Have there been success stories? You betcha. But they're so few and far between that all they really do is serve to emphasize the barrenness of the landscape between them.
Linux is, for all intents and purposes, dead as anything other than a server operating system. And frankly it was dead as a server operating system until SGI came along and dragged it into the 21st century. It has one and only one advantage that keeps it hanging on: It'll run on leftover hardware. Got a PC from 1995 that you're not using for anything? Put Linux on it and use it to serve files. It won't be easy, but if you can get it to work at all, it'll work well. That's an important niche to occupy. But it's fundamentally a stagnant one.
Linux contributed to bring several technologies that were only available on costly enterprise systems to the masses
Let's be fair here. Linux hasn't contributed a damn thing. It can't, because of its license. Nobody can actually use Linux code for anything unless they're willing to give up commercial control of their project. Nobody is willing to do that.
Want to talk about what the BSD guys contributed? Go right ahead. You'll get no argument from me. But Linux has contributed nothing. Rather, it cloned existing implementations and walled them off so nobody could actually build anything on them. Which I think goes a long way toward explaining why Linux has stagnated while Mac OS X has surged ahead. We can surge ahead because we're not constantly getting harassed by lawyers from the FSF.
I find pretty sane to see developers asking themselves "How can we make that software easier to use ?" all the time.
Sure it is. But it's not sane to ask those questions to the exclusion of other areas of advancement. Oh, sure, those guys are tweaking the background color of the file browser, but they're overlooking the completely fucked up font rendering architecture, or the essential inability to localize the system. That kind of thing.
Linux isn't a "file-by-file" clone of Unix
Sure it is. All the run-time programs are basically file-by-file copies of Unix programs: init, inetd, the various networking daemons, all the command-line tools. Over the years people have sat down and copied Unix --Unix from the 1970s, remember -- file by file like the monks of old, dutifully reproducing everything even if it's just obviously stupid, like the init/inetd/cron/init.d/rc disaster.
And launchd didn't scrap all of them - it is just a system to unify daemons configuration and launching. Note that similar tools exist under Linux and the BSDs and that every major distribution features standardized configuration files.
Maybe you don't understand what launchd is. The launchd program replaces six entire subsystems. It gets rid entirely of init, rc, init.d, SystemStarter, cron and inetd. Makes them go away. No, no similar tools exist on another operating system.
And what if a critical service fails to start because of its malformed XML configuration file ?
Define "critical." We're talking about the difference between a bootable configuration and a non-bootable configuration here. On Linux, if init fails to start, the computer cannot be accessed by anybody, anywhere, via any method. One typo in the init configuration file can render the computer completely non-functional.
There's no such problem with launchd. If some configuration file gets fat-fingered, the service described by that file won't start. Maybe you'll be without SSH access, or without Open Directory. But the system will be running, and the problem can be fixed.
One of the features we've built into the preferences
I generally like your posts, but this one was kind of dumb. Look, we've been hearing this promise for about 30 years now, and I don't think it's any more true today than it was then. The fact is that companies staff all of their mission-critical business functions and probably always will.
Examples? My company is not a shipper, but we have a full-time employee that handles shipping arrangements, puts incoming parcels where the belong, and has outgoing boxes ready when FedEx gets here. We're also not a staffing company, but we have an HR person. Neither are we a construction company, but we have a maintenance guy who also remodels our building as needed. Finally, we're not an IT consultant, but we have IT people on staff.
IT people will go away whenever companies no longer use IT. Until then, every place that depends on their services for daily operation will have employees that run them, just as they also have shipping, HR, and maintenance workers. I like your company (and would like them even more if you sent some free stuff my way, hint-hint), but you've done an excellent job of advancing the state of the art of the computers on the average employee's desk. That's just the tip of the iceburg for a lot of us, and no amount of CUPS-style printer autoconfiguration will change it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?