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Microsoft Demands Removal Of Longhorn Images
bonch writes "After the previously reported release of the Longhorn beta at this year's WinHEC, Neowin and other Windows sites are reporting that Microsoft is going around sending legal letters demanding removal of Longhorn Build 5048 screenshots. Paul Thurrott discusses it on his site, stating that Microsoft never told anyone beforehand not to post screenshots of the publicly available beta, and links to the new galleries he has up now. 'Enjoy it while it lasts.'"
Maybe Microsoft is afraid Apple will steal some of its features?[1]
Or perhaps Microsoft just needs more time to cover up what they stole?[2]
On slightly different note but on topic, did anyone else notice how the Recycle Bin icon's shadow slants left while the text's shadow slants right?
[1]hahahahahahaaaaahahahaa
[2]most likely imho
To me this pretty much looks like Microsoft ran the screenshots up the metaphoric flagpole and didn't like the salutes. Instead of spinning it as beta (which we in the IT community have come to understand, if not respect) and appropriately rough-edged, Microsoft apparently has decided to take the low road and is going to hold its breath until it turns blue (irony). Too bad, the images do suck, but I think Microsoft in its eagerness to prove "me too" for having a cool new OS stumbled mightily this time. Fortunately, having $50B petty cash makes recovery from these inconveniences convenient.
This has to be my most appropriate experience of the "Nothing to see here, move along" error =)
if the reviewers LIKED it, those screen shots could've stayed up...
Sheesh. Microsoft can't even be original in this -- Apple was way ahead of them.
Apple rumors aren't considered confirmed until there's been at least one notice from Apple Legal.
.. Have people been turning to stone?
Starsucks
So, if you do and they then sic the attack-lawyers on you, why are you surprised? Because they didn't do it previously? Guess what? They can pick and choose.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If not, Microsoft is using it's multimillion dollar legal department to bully people into doing/thinking what they want.
Hold on a minute while I try to not act suprised.
"Powers. I have them."
...give a four year old some marker pens (primary colours) and ask them do draw a UI. There's your screenshots. :)
It would be a shame if apple copied MIcrosoft's style and UI design, once again.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
The screen shots I've seen so far have been UTTERLY unimpressive. Essentially XP with a different color scheme. IE 6, Media Player 10, etc, etc, etc.
It's hard to hype a product when there is so much evidence showing the opposite.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Look at the screen shop showing "My Music".
Now look at the top left explorer bar and see the link that says "Purchase Music".
Could this be why? Where does the link go? Isn't that illegal in the settlement with the justice dept/EU.
Just curious,
Enjoy
It's just the normal noises in here.
Screenshots? Who the hell needs screenshots when you can get the entire operating system yourself?
"Apparently, there is a condition in the EULA preventing people from posting screenshots. Nobody saw anything like that."
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Ar
ajf
So in Longhorn, can I drag documents onto a button on the taskbar to open it, rather than holding the mouse down waiting for the app to appear?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Interesting, BTW, how all those car magazines get away with pictures of pre-production prototytpes snapped during their road-tests. Somehow, car manufacturers don't see a problem there.
Having said that, if he agreed not to do it he shouldn't. Period.
This is going to be the problem in IT, too much legal messing about, both in forms of submarine patents and EULA with incredible conditions.
From the Blog
Honestly, how many of you read fully the EULA that comes with the SW you download ?
What if at some point a company tells you that you have violated their EULA and demands money ?
Sadly, the law, does not obey to "common sense" and "by law" you will be obliged to pay...
Solutions ?, maybe an EULA that is no longer than 25 lines (80 characters each long) ?
I guess Microsoft is afraid that Apple would snag that oh-so-yummy Longhorn interface. With a couple days 'til Tiger launches, Apple could put in a serious cram session to update the look. Cram Apple, cram!!!
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Granted, it isn't a radical departure from XP. It almost looks like Luna running a different theme.
But I like it.
It's about time someone had the gumption to put forth a clean and understated UI. Lord knows we have more than enough in-your-face real-estate-hogging themes floating around out there to satisfy even the most testoterone-laden adolescent.
I haven't been truly satisfied with any minimal UI appearance since the early-nineties heyday of NeXTstep and IRIX. I never thought I'd say it, but thank god for Microsoft. I hope, in spite of the underwhelming public feedback, that they continue down this more mature and elegant route.
Don't let them see we haven't changed anything yet!
At least now Jobs has something valid to complain about MS copying them.
;-)
Why?
At least OS-X looks nice. But Longhorn? They took the Fisher-Price interface from XP and made the colors even uglier. Instead of jolly candy-like blue, now they have murky-organic-sludge greenish. I can hardly wait (...to disable the "themes" service).
And for those who might call me an Apple Fanboy, check my posting history to see how much karma I've lost over the years in just about everything I post that mentions Apple in any way.
Microsoft don't want you to realise how little has Lonhghorn has changed from XP until you've bought and installed it.
I don't exactly understand the comparison between Apple's actions taken in response to a leaked copy of a whole operating system and Microsoft shitting itself because people can see a few screenshots that basically amount to a shitty looking theme. Apple seems fairly justified in not wanting developer copies of its operating system circulating, whereas Microsoft just looks foolish.
But all that R&D for "look and feel"!!
I dont feel sorry for them as they copy linux' look.............
I agree! So they hired an artist to make a better looking start button. Wow, do I really need to upgrade to get a better looking start button?!
I'd much rather have drag and drop easy installations.
No registry to screw up.
No shared DLL's.
Performance.
And to never have to install a print driver again.
In some ways this is like when a movie is about to be released, but the studio will not let the critics screen the film. If a studio knows their $70,000,000 film sucks that bad, they know better than to let critics screen it. It is time to get the PR people over to yahoo and amazon to leave 5 star reviews.
Plus, the screen shots MS gave out, there was nothing special there. Nothing secret. Nothing new. If someone did not tell me it was a new Windows, I would have guessed someone got a new wallpaper for their XP machine.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
this is perhaps the only thing thurrot has ever written that i've liked.
who is she? leave a comment!
Meanwhile telling people to get them off their websites is a guaranteed method of making sure everyone will download them and save them and look them over much more critically, trying to figure out what Ms doesn't want them to see. Pretty effective marketing, really.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"They promised to "wow" us all with a whole new Windows experience"
And they succeeded. I can honestly say their new "Shut Do..." menu option in the Beta truly did make me go "wow".
As in "Wow, WTF are they thinking?"
Seriously, just how much work do they have left on this "Beta"? Getting kind of late in the game to have such glaring UI problems.
Nevertheless, I really wonder how many of MS' GUI designers actually consider function over pretty colors. Not to be an Apple fanboy (I don't even own a mac), but OSX's GUI seems to have function as well as slickness. I'm anxious to see if Longworn :D will do the same.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
1.) Comparing a leaked copy of the OS to screenshots is silly.
2.) Apple didn't sue over the leaked copy of Tiger. They watermarked it and caught the guy through technical means.
3.) I think you seriously need to rethink your definition of "right to know" as it is nothing like what anyone I know uses. See I have a "right to know" MS is dumping toxic waste in my backyard. I don't have a "right to know" anything I want about their unreleased product.
As for harming MS, if you can't see how these screenshots do that you haven't been reading the critical reviews of it. It has been widely panned as actually managing to make XP's interface look positively sleek and elegant.
I already saw it, too late for you.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
According to Thurrot, MS was afraid someone might try to steal their UI. What a joke. Who the hell goes to Windows to figure out how to design a UI? Hell, if their competition decided to copy the Windows UI, it would only help MS anyway.
People's suckage has nothing to do with MS. People manage to suck plenty all by themselves. You have obviously never worked in retail where you can see the masses up close and personal.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Hey, how's that tinfoil hat holding up?
It will go the way of Napster
You mean, become a company that does legitimate business, instead of a company that goes out of its way to facilitate copyright violation on a massive scale?
buy some members of congress, get them to pass new laws
Actually, massive copyright violation was already against the law. We have a long standing tradition in the US called, "just because it has become technically easier to do it, doesn't means it's OK to rip off artists"
form an industry organization
Those organizations were around a long time before Napster. Because there were music piracy and "I want to be entertained for free" problems before, too.
sue and make the targets highly visable
Well, that makes sense, since the people that were using Napster to rip off copyrighted material were being highly visible and crowing about how clever they were to find a way to get around paying for their entertainment.
distribute faulty crap to frustrate people
Hmmm. Who would that be frustrating? The only people I can think of would be the people trying to get it without paying for it. Have you seen "faulty" crap coming through iTunes or any of the other well regarded subscription systems? No... it's a lot like complaining to the police that some street corner drug dealer just sold you some faulty heroin.
All this almost makes me want to switch to a Mac, if only they were not so bloody expensive
Huh! I wonder why that would be? Maybe because the x86 architecture is much more open, more widely supported, and MS has such a huge audience that their stuff ends up being a better deal because of scale? I don't spend much on machines, either. But I'm quite happy with XP and Win2K/3 depending on what I'm up to.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Welcome to the world of the MacMini.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
He would be OK in my book if he did all of those things. I still wouldn't buy his software, though...
The real problem of microsoft is that these days, most people don't care about which version of windows they run.
They just use whatever is on the pc they buy. They probably don't even know thay they can buy windows separately, so for them it's more like when amd or intel announce a new processor: it's something that they will care about whenever they decide to buy a new pc.
It's a bit like if a car manufacturer was making a big fuss about a new engine that they're designing. It's not something that will make people change their car.
I'm mirroring the screenshots on my blog, so you can stare at the ugly UI for as long as you want.
My website is: http://www.collegechixors.com
Sorry to disappoint you but the gallery shots as they are used here are almost certainly fair use. They are certainly being used in both a news item and discussion. The person who posted them in reference to a news article is a well known journalist. Copyright laws in Germany are actually quite draconian - Thank you BMG!
Thalasar
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
Nope, I'm not talking about MS copying Apple... I'm talking about the submitter, who carefully left out this important point from Thurrott's post:
"Apparently, there is a condition in the EULA preventing people from posting screenshots."
You may continue MS bashing now...
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
OK, is it just me, or has Microsoft taken the Apple idea of barely-distinguishable icons for minimize/maximize/close, and made it even worse by making two of them the same color AND made them butt ugly.
The Motif/Windows Classic version may be butt ugly, but at least they're easily distinguishable and big enough to click easily.
And as the years go by, my wife's Mac looks better and better, until I have finally decided to break down and get one myself. If aint about 'the pretty colors' as you put it, it is about PROGRESS.
The kind of progress that we wanted when we went from Win 3.11 to Win 95. The kind of progress we expected when we went from Visual Basic to C#. Or better put, the kind of PROGRESS that we USED to get from Microsoft. Disclaimer: Yeah, I used to work for Microsoft, so fucking what?
The point is; progress seems to be coming slower and slower, in the exact ways that Lucovski pointed out when he left the company. Personally, I am getting sick of hearing about shit, only to later hear that the one thing that would make me spend money beyond MSDN has just gotten ripped out.
Many of us who make our living on Windows and other Microsoft products would like something more to talk about than just .NET. Unless you have had your wife laugh at you as you search for device drivers while she just FUCKING WORKS, knows exactly what I am talking about.
In short, we are fucking fed up.
You are right, it aint about 'pretty colors', it is about showing us that the company can still produce something BETTER than what we had before. If they cant do it in the GUI, why the fuck should we believe that they can do it in the file system?
First impressions are a bitch, and these aint good ones. We've been looking at the same shit for two years now, and I dont see any progress anywhere, just ugly screens of boring shit.
Apple's shit may not be all that much better, but they at the very least manage to put a nice ribbon on it, and act like the shit is special enough to want it.
XP works; Win2K3 works damn well. But, if you are trying to show me something new, the very least you can do is take the time to make sure it aint similar to what we have already seen or at the very least not fucking ugly?
"The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build."
Is your job to add the suck before or after core API's? I assume there are people responsible for both.
While I didn't really give Windows a spin back on v2.0, I did use 3.0 when it first came out, and worked with it ever since.
... but the "magic" to Apple is that they're always making improvements that count. A modern OS X box always feels like a "fluid" work in progress. You never know when running the "Updates" tool will grab some new version of one of your Apple branded applications, a firmware update for a peripheral of theirs, or even a whole new update to OS X itself. When I run a "Windows Update" by contrast, I'm more annoyed than anything else when it has something new for me to download - because hell, other than "Media Player 10", what real new improvements to any of their apps did they send anyone lately? It's always boring "security fixes" for another broken detail in the OS allowing a hacker to compromise something. Basically, just another patch that'll tie up your computer for 10 minutes updating and requiring a reboot - and all so when it's done, things will still run and look exactly like they did before.
The only real meaningful improvements to Windows I saw were 3.1 to '95, and then the release of Windows 2000. XP is a bunch of "candy coating" on top of 2000, and IMHO - all the "NT" versions (3.5, 3.51 and 4.0) were medicore at best.
Now, granted, I'm not even beginning to try to speak for all users. I'm only talking about what I've seen from my perspective. But I've worked in I.T. and computer support for the last 15 years, and I've tried practically all the OS's out at one time or another.
I spent 6 years rolling out NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and finally some Win2K boxes for a mid-sized company, and frankly, it shocked me how many basic administration-related functions were non-existant or cumbersome to use on the server side. We were always buying one 3rd. party product or another to perform a function which I thought should really be handled by a "business class" OS on its own.
A couple years ago, I started switching to Macs and OS X - and now I only have one Windows XP PC left at home. I'm sure I'll hang onto it and it will always have its purposes
Does anyone really care? Honestly? /.?
Most people here will never use Windows again if they can avoid it, so what's the point of always trash talking it? As someone who wants Microsoft to actually raise the bar a little and see them succeed again, I'dve liked these to be "cooler", but I don't see the point in yet another MS bashing post, aren't there enough of these already on
Like I said, just my $0.02
You can get them via Google's image cache:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=http%
He'd probably claim that they were an integrated part of Windows and couldn't be shipped separately.
deus does not exist but if he does
Or, more accurately, simply commented out of the HTML.
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And here is some random text to attempt to satisfy Slashdot's inane content filters. Apparently, it has to be quite a bit of text. I don't know what the average line length is that it requires, but it looks like it's unreasonably high.
I use XP with the silver interface and don't mind it at all. These Longhorn shots, however, look pretty bad. It's almost like they're using Linux UI designers!
Seriously, surely they aren't paying whoever came up with this. I've seen better interfaces done by unpaid amateurs on skinz.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
He wants a computer, not a toy. The Mac Mini is cute and all, but it's also dog slow.
"Dog slow" compared to what? It's the low-end Mac. It's obviously not going to be as fast as a dual G5. Since the guy spends < $500 on his PC's, he's not exactly in the 'high-end' category.
In terms of style, it thrashes any PC ever made. In terms of performance, it can't hold a candle to anything in its price range.
That myth was debunked the day the Mac mini was introduced. When you compare similar offerings from other manufacturers, the mini impresses.
When Apple bundles an application, if you don't like it you can easily swap it out. Hell, even the Safari Web Browser Preferences, has a drop down "Default Web Browser" menu, allowing you to choose any other web browser you've got installed on the system. And if I want to delete Safari without any impact to the system, I can.
Can you do that in MS WIndows? Certainly not without fucking around under the hood, and the official Microsoft line is that you can't and shouldn't try.
Oh, and Apple isn't a monopoly either!