Looking at Longhorn

ShinyPlasticBag writes "Paul Thurrott has an excellent preview of Longhorn milestone five over at his Supersite for Windows. It looks like this may be Microsoft's equivalent to OS X -- the next version of Windows will have a 3D accelerated desktop and other graphical goodies. In addition to this, it will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."

In other words...

[joeszilagyi]

...Windows 2005 will be Macintosh 1997.

Re:In other words...

[Quarters]

Only if they go back to cooperative multitasking, drop memory protection, get rid of about 99.99999% of the third party applications on the market, start making their own hardware and nuke all of the big name and beige-box builders, have really expensive peripherals, and charge an arm and a leg for it. Oh...and get a cadre of black turtleneck wearing, angst filled, coffee-house frequenting zealots to crow about it for no other reason than to just crow about it.

Finally

[handsomepete]

Examples of visual effects that will be enabled in Windows Longhorn include:

Windows tumbling onto the screen.

Rotating windows.

Warped windows.

Ah, just what I've always wanted - A version of Windows that acts like a home video made by my parents.

Whoa!

[Dark Lord Seth]

It looks like this may be Microsoft's equivalent to OS X

So, when do we see MS using a BSD kernel for Windows? I mean, there are so many advantages and- ... Hey, why are Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates in front of my house with a torch and a pitchfork?

All the answers, but still too many questions

[failedlogic]

With all the detail in the article, one thing is still missing:

What does the blue screen look like? Is it still blue? Why not red? Has it been changed or improved in anyway ( transparency, DirectX 9 features ) .... ?

Re:In other words...

[joeszilagyi]

Apple zealots are so easy to needle. Just ask them why they only get 1% of the floor space in any CompUSA store, and you can watch their entire world cave in on them as if they were a living, breathing black hole.

Those in glass houses...

[BoomerSooner]

You pull the plug on your linux box and corrupt a "slew of data" and someone else is a "retard".

Move out of your glass house before throwing stones.

Re:In other words...

[cioxx]

in our defense, at least our laptops are thinner.

Re:Retards

[harlows_monkeys]

any of you old-school Linux users remember pulling the plug or hitting power on your Linux box back in the day and immediately screaming "OH SHIT!" when you realize you probably just corrupted a whole slew of data? I do.

Sometimes it is nice to NOT have journalling. 1982. Caltech High Energy Physics VAX. Sunday morning. I am working on a program that has a config file in /etc. I want to delete the config file. Out of habit, I automatically type "passwd" after "/etc/". Oops.

Solution: run to the VAX, and hit the power switch. I caught it in time! /etc/passwd was still there after the fsck. :-)

Alas...the next time, I didn't run fast enough, and lost the file, so had to restore it from backup.

The next time after that, the other sys admin got tired of that, and so made a hard link to /etc/passwd so that we could just link it back after I'd remove it. That was fine until I accidently copied something to /etc/passwd instead of rm'ing /etc/passwd. :-)

So, finally they made a cron job that checked /etc/passwd every few minutes, and if it was good, made a backup, and if it was missing or appeared to be trashed, restored it.

Reminds me of:

[Virus1984]

The Microsoft motto: "we're the leaders, wait for us !"

Fisher Price

[Anonymous Coward]

So how much money does Microsoft pay Fisher Price to design there GUI?

Different name, same result

[molrak]

From the article, underneath a screen shot [winsupersite.com]:

Explorer.exe is now a .NET managed code application, but it crashes frequently.

Well it's good to know that Windows hasn't changed that much. (yes, I know it's an alpha, but explore.exe crashes have happened to me in every final version of windows that I have used.)

Re:In other words...

[KilerCris]

From the front page of the site:
upcoming Windows operating system technologies. These exciting products include Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1),

Anyone else disturbed that this guy conciders SP1 to be an "exciting product"/"Windows operating system technology"?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Retards

[coldguy]

See, seems to me that the proper solution to this problem would be to remove your root priveleges...

Re:OSX...

[Doug Neal]

You're new here aren't you? :)

Re:All the answers, but still too many questions

[MikeFM]

Yes, it's a transparent blue foreground over a blue (same shade) background. Very cool stuff.

If you try to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to reboot Bill Gates disembodied head shows up in glorious 3D and mocks you in an evil way. Hrm.. actually that'd be kind of cool. Would make a nice Linux screensaver. :)

I can see it now:

[fireboy1919]

Macintosh: I made that stuff back in -
Windows:
Now slow, I say, slow down there just a second, boy, and lemme talk a little sense into ya! (If that boy don't stop talkin' he's gonna sunburn his tongue.)
Macintosh: ..but I already...
Windows: Whoa there boy! (Nice kid, but he's about as thick as a whale omelette.) You can't, I say, you can't just take credit for things that ya didn't do! (This boy's about as sharp as a pound o' wet liver.) You can't just keep crowin' on about how young you feel and how hard you work. You just gotta start bein' the best boy you can be and show those folks you can do it just as good as them!
Now go on, I say, go on boy, an' show 'em what you're made of! Now git!
Macintosh: Ah..yeah. Later.

"Oh! I have an idea!" said one Microsoftee...

[Opiuman]

In their quest to show as little information as possible into as much screen real-estate as possible, Microsoft has set a new record.
"Oh! I have an idea!" said one Microsoft senior engineer to his underling, "Lets make all the fonts and icons bigger so we can ditch that accessibility control panel and replace it with a "My Yet Another Other Stuff" folder. "Oh yes!" shouted the underling, "and that way we can perhaps hide how painfully slow we make a super-computer crawl."

Has anyone noticed the PNG pictures?

[pierre.ch]

Hey, soon this SuperSite will provide links to gnu.org Go go go Thurrott...

Re:Glass houses and the like

[iggymanz]

3D accelerated desktop

bah, that's all about using more and more computing resources to present less and less information about what is going on inside the system to a clueless end user. Well, they don't fool me.

Re:Retards

[Rellik66]

any of you old-school Linux users remember pulling the plug or hitting power on your Linux box back in the day and immediately screaming "OH SHIT!"

A minor correction: it's "OH FSCK!"

Re:In other words...

[Lord_Slepnir]

I applaud you. Now I just pray that thousands of black turtleneck wearing, angst filled zealots dont' come streaming out of the coffee houses and launch a jihad against you. Latee' burns hurt a lot.

Longhorn vs. RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

When I tested Longhorn a couple of months ago with M2 (i think it was), shortly after booting I noticed that it was consuming 306 out of the 320 megabytes of RAM in my computer. With no programs running besides whatever happened to load on startup with the default configuration.

I don't care how good or bad the shell is if I am only left with 14 megabytes of RAM to run my programs after booting.

Re:In other words...

[quintessent]

Yeah. I really miss Windows 3.1.

Re:Please...

[christopherfinke]

I meant to say "...that kid in Jurassic Park", in case you missed the reference.

Jurassic Park? Missed reference? This is Slashdot, not, uh, some other place where, uh, that would, uh, happen.

Re:"Stacks" in Longhorn like "Piles" in Panther?

[skt]

Why would they call it "piles".. am I the only person that always associates that word with this [medinfo.co.uk]?

And so we see....

[MisterEGecko]

In one of the captions: "The taskbar, Start Menu, and sidebar are almost infinitely configurable. " Where infinity is approximately equal to four. -- The Gecko of Mysteries

Re:In other words...

[Prof.Phreak]

On top of the fact that XP runs FASTER without the SP1...

Re:Filing system

[ukyoCE]

At least for me the problem is being able to use the same data from both operating systems. I have to use Fat32 for most of my data so I can cross between linux and windows XP. I wouldn't even have XP installed right now if there was no file system that both Windows and Linux could read. I'd never even be able to give Windows a fair try for my desktop if i couldn't access my school work, mail, bookmarks, etc.

Re:Those in glass houses...

[Alsee]

Move out of your glass house before throwing stones.

Or at least open a window first :)

-

Re:Retards

[Alsee]

delete the config file. Out of habit, I automatically type "passwd"... the next time... The next time after that... fine until I accidently copied something to /etc/passwd instead of rm'ing /etc/passwd...

At that point I'd just rip the fscking 'P' off your keyboard.

delete /etc/asswd
Error: Unable to delete asswad between chair and keyboard.

Chuckle.

-

Re:In other words...

[christurkel]

Ah! How uneducated you are, Grasshopper! Mac OS X has preemptive multitasking, protected memory and many, many third part applications, see? Wisdom comes from embracing the black turtle neck!

WindowMaker??

[Billly Gates]

Wow, look at the deep blue hues and the dock at the left portion of the screen? What will the guys at Microsoft innovate next!

Seriously, the colors are cool but strong colors effect productivity. Light hues or grays which the standard Windows desktop is modeled after is actually designed to make you productive. Just ask any physcologist or go to any modern school. Dark gui's however do excite emotions which Microsoft wants so people buy more of their products. Amazing!

I wonder how modifiable the gui is.

At what cost?

[simetra]

So, when you save a picture, do you have to fill out a questionaire? I can picture it now:

Clippy: I see that you're trying to save a file. I see that this file has a .jpg extention. This must be a picture. If you're not comfortable with extentions, I can hide these for you in the future. Please take a moment to fill out this questionaire in order to save your file.

1. Is this a photo? yes no

2. Did you take this photo? yes no

3. If you didn't take this photo, do you have the legal right to save this file to your hard-drive? yes no

4. If you didn't take this photo, please type in the Name and Social Security Number of whoever did take this photo. (No information is being sent to Microsoft at this time).:

5. If you're ready to save this, please click Yes. If not, please click No. If you'd like some time to think about it, click Later. If you'd like more information about Microsoft's revolutionary new file system, click Help.

OK. Please stand by as the information about this file is verified with Microsoft (note: you need an internet connection to proceed. Click Set Up My Internet Now to commit to a 12-month subscription to Microsoft Windows (formerly MSN) and to activate access to your hard-drive.). Once we've verified your legal right to save this file to your hard-drive, you'll be given a short (5-7 minute) questionaire to provide further details about this file to make finding it easier the next time you plan to view it with Microsoft Photo Monkey. Thank you for choosing Microsoft!

Linux Geeks?

[simetra]

Am I the only one who thinks there's nothing lower on the food chain than a Windows fanatic? Like the guy on that webpage, or the creepy wind-bags in PC Magazine? As a Linux Geek, at least I have a clue as to how and why things work; rather than a boner from the latest cute icons and wallpapers.
Cripes.

jfs comment

[pigfukr]

hahaha, once again linux users proud of a feature even os/2 had before them.

IE vs. e.g.

[The Monster]

IE the system crashes

Do you mean 'e.g. the system crashes'?

Oh. I get it now. You just have the order wrong:

IE crashes the system

That makes perfect sense now.

Re:I can see it now:

[Chris Mattern]

That's not Longhorn, that's Foghorn!

Chris Mattern

idiot lame filter idiot lame filter

This is just so we can..

[Anonymous Coward]

have a 3d BSOD!!

Re:In other words...

[moosesocks]

In other news, the makers of prosthetic limbs expect a large increase in demand sometime during the summer of 2005.

3d = fun, but...

[msh104]

3d accelerated desktop ? much fun... but does longhorn have any "must have" features like an inproved default word program or at least a new version of that patiance game. why am i only reading about "look and feel" and not about the "great new progs"?