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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.'"
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!
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.
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..."
Calling something disastrous "a train wreck" is a long-established idiom that isn't going to just go away because a train wrecks. And frankly, I think calling it "an unfortunate choice of words" is just a big, steaming load of language-police bull crap.
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.
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.
It probably helps to think of Windows in two different terms. 1) the Operating System 2) The environment. The OS probably changes very little from major release to major release. The environment, however, with all those background tasks, DLLs, pretty widgets and sounds are what seems to gobble up the majority of resources.
MS keeps bloating the OS, making apps ever less convenient and usable. MS seems hell-bent on "developing" itself out of business.
On the contrary, I think they've got some people who don't give a rat's patoot about hardware or kernel particulars, but just want a warm fuzzy computing experience and that is what they target. That and making sure there's always some incremental improvement which keeps you coming back every couple years and upgrading Windows or Office.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"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.
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 :)
I have been in a train wreck where people were crushed and killed less than a metre in front of me (no more taking front carriage for me). Even in that light I find nothing wrong with someone using that expression.