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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
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.'
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".
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!
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!
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
Have you seen that start menu? More usable? It's got a motherfucking scrollbar inside of a fucking menu.
Whats next, a row of ugly windows tabs, with some hidden, or even better multiple rows of tabs?
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.
"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."
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.
Do you pick the color of paint before the foundation of your house has been laid?
Obviously you have never built your own home or even seriously thought about architecture. Yes of course you pick the paint before you start the foundation. You don't want to be designing while in final production do you? That would be stupid.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.'
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.
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?