Slashdot Mirror
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. :)
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
Don't let them see we haven't changed anything yet!
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.
Welcome to the world of the MacMini.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
I agree. In XP (my employer runs Windows only), I use the gray theme with a clean desktop image. In OS X Panther (my laptop),I use the silver/silver theme. I'm a designer, I work with a lot of color, and I need neutral edges and backdrops. Ever try to color correct orange tones against a candy-bright blue?
The human eye needs resting space. White is too bright from a CRT or LCD monitor, so give us a good-looking, uncluttered gray option and type that sets well against it.
I've been thinking a lot about interface design in Flash and html, and I seem to see the OS-level interfaces picking up stylistic elements of popular websites (Adobe and Macromedia jump to mind). Is it just me, or has the thin-line, dove-to-charcoal gray trend gained momentum recently?
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.
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.
Shot 1
Shot 2
Shot 3
Shot 4
Shot 5
Shot 6
Shot 7
Shot 8
Shot 9
Shot 10
Shot 11
Shot 12
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.