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.'"

Comments

Shadows in the shadow world

[magarity]

The Recycle Bin icon casts a shadow to the left. All the other shadows, including RB's own text, casts shadows to the right. Is it because the RB is itself in a shadow world halfway between here and oblivion??? Such subtle metaphysical goings-on in Longhorn!

Re:Shadows in the shadow world

[As Seen On TV]

Yes, that explains why companies like Apple, and even Microsoft in their own, glacial way, are innovating on a fundamental level while Linux is ...you know. Not.

I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.

Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.

Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.

It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating system, replacing things that are dumb with things that make more sense.

So tell me again, oh please, how Mac OS X is a 20th-century concept.

Re:Bwahahaha

[xsspd2004]

Seven floppies, six where meaningful. DOS came on 3. Yes, I've been at this too long.

Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None

[Digital Pizza]

Back in the day I decided to challenge Microsoft's 4MB RAM minimum for Win95, so I took out the 16MB stick of RAM from my system at the time (AMD 486DX4/120, normally 20MB RAM - funky board with four 30-pin slots and two 72-pin slots), leaving 4MB.

The only way I could get it to even boot was to disable the Soundblaster 16 driver. The drive didn't take a break at all from swapping until I shut down.

Technically, it ran. I'm not looking forward to Longhorn.