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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.'"
It's even uglier than XP, which is no small feat.
(On a serious note, it'd probably be a good idea to fix that--otherwise, grandma's gonna have a hard time figuring out what the "Shu..." button does on her large-text setup...)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.'
The first screen shot is in monochrome, the original Macintosh had more shades of grey than this! :)
Jonathanjk.com
No more Super Mario Land default theme! I'd say that's a step forward.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
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get a free laptop
Train Wreck nothing. If we are going to refer to unreleased software as a trainwreck, then what the hell are we going to call Windows ME?
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
"Redmond speed-up the copies."
We get signal!
(sorry, I couldn't resist)
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get a free laptop
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".
Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM
Following on from what you said, considering that the system requirements for XP Pro state a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the real requirements for this thing could be huge. I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM.
Is 5048 the expected release date?
"This has the makings of a train wreck."
Shouldn't that say plane wreck now that Microsoft is using black boxes?
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!
>to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'
*Dons engineer cap and lights cigar*
Just call me Gomez Addams!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
"I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM."
Windows XP runs fine on 128MB of RAM. The problem comes when you try to install or run applications which require any memory whatsoever.
But Windows XP runs fine on 128MB of RAM.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
NOTHING from Microsoft is disappointing.
I call shenanigans.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
The commenters on Paul's site are even more juvenile than we are.
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!
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.
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 would expect the system requirements of Longhaul to be significantly *less* than XP. Microsoft has already cut so many promised features, it will actually be a downgrade by the time it launches. Of course you'll still need like 1GB of video RAM if you want that spectacular icon preview feature that is all that is Longhaul.
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.
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.
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.
...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001
It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit
"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
Seven floppies, six where meaningful. DOS came on 3. Yes, I've been at this too long.
This is not an illusion, a rip-off, or a ninja technique!
Check you aren't running the 'nv' NVidia driver or standard SVGA driver if you have an NVidia card. That will make the graphics 'slow', as you describe. A 533MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM should be more than enough. Services that are just sitting there will 'sleep' if they aren't being used, so they shouldn't have too much effect.
Next time I see a green light I'm gonna shut off the engine in my car and turn it back on again :)
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.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
You're right. Let's begin using more sensitive terms for such things and then we won't have to check the news every day for disasters before we open our thoughtless mouths.
"Train wreck" could be "rail transport guidance mishap (RTGM)"
"Plane crash" could be "aeronautic ground avoidance exception (AGAE)"
"Tsunami" could be "exceptional aquatic waveform event (EAWE)"
"Earthquake" could be "sudden geological tension release event (SGTRE)"
"Flood" could be "unexpected hydrological intrusion (UHI)"
"Fire" could be "unwanted thermological surge cause by excessively rapid oxdidation of ambient combustibles (UTSCBEROOAC or UTSCEROAC)"
"Atomic attack" coule be "aggressive chain reaction event unfortunately proximate to valuable life or property (ACREUPTVLOP or ACREUPVLP)"
"Heart attack" could be "biogenic oxidant supply chain problem resulting in catastrophic system pump failure (BOSCPRICSPF)"
"Vomit" could be "retrograde migration of partially processed biological fuel mixture (RMOPPBFM or RMPPBFM)"
By using the abbreviations we could all pretend that nothing ugly happens or exists. "Hey, be careful with that! You could have a BOSCPRICSPF!" "What the fuck did you call me, pissbrain?"Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
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.
The reason the Windows GUI appears 'snappier' is because it runs with the highest priority in the system. Microsoft did this to make its OS appear fast and, probably, because that's what many users want - a system that 'feels' quick. The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero), where 20 is lowest and -19 is highest, and thus competes equally for system resources with web browsers, word processors and the like. Resource- and time- sensitive stuff like CD/DVD burning, music and video playback, and system processes typically run with higher priorities, but most of these are user- (or root-) tunable.