Looking at Longhorn 793
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."
rofl (Score:1, Interesting)
"After turning off Windows Future Storage (WinFS) to speed things up, I was still astonished by how poorly the system performed."
Wow.
Please... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it be easier for me to navigate my windows if I could move between them as if I played Quake, instead of just clicking on the particular window I wanted?
Would I get more girls if my mailbox spun in cool 3d, instead of just opening?
Would my productivity improve if it took 5 more seconds to open a window just because it had to be animated, instead of just appearing?
Would it be easier for me to read text if all windows were transparent?
Is the human mind better trained to cope with windows if they are rotated 45 degrees along some axis?
I simply don't get the 3d desktop, but then, I prefer stuff that work, instead of stuff that looks good and doesn't work.
Re:Filing system (Score:3, Interesting)
Judging by the screenshots... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bass ackwards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone else noticed... (Score:5, Interesting)
seems like mostly eye candy (Score:2, Interesting)
microsoft faces some big future challenges and they recognize this.
OpenGL 3D interface? (Score:4, Interesting)
So who is "innovative" now?
OS X Login Window (Score:3, Interesting)
Mac OS X:
http://www4.macnn.com/team/osx/osx_consoleLogin.p
Oldschool Mac OS 9 (foreign):
http://www.macopoli.com/Sito/Schede_figg/Login.gi
Now, if the Longhorn login window "shakes its head" when an incorrect login/pass is entered, *that* would be copying.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, find a Mac and try logging in with a bogus login/pass combination... the login window jitters side to side for a moment as though it's shaking it's head in a "no" fashion...... something straight out of NeXTSTEP/Openstep).
Parental Controls (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Parental Control (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently you don't have kids. First of all, 5 year olds are not interested in porn. If they bump into it, the first time they ask 'whats that, daddy ?' and I explain 'those are naked people who like to show themselves on the internet. Some people like looking at that'. 'Oh. okay.(closes window)'
It's by demonizing things that you make them interested. If you teach your kid about it, they understand (on their own level) and fit it into their world. If you don't teach them, they sooner or later bump into it and have to wring it into their world with a concept of forbidden stuff.
Then you are what we call a "bad parent"...
lol. Good one. You can shoot again.
Gathering ideas for Linux Windows Managers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This beats me (Score:2, Interesting)
Having the carefuly read an entire dialog box because it looks like every other damned "Yes, No, Cancel" is not nearly as enjoyable as a good old "Save changes, Discard changes, Cancel", or whatever the current options are. (in my opinion anyway)
Why dont the buttons in this dialog have "Terminate, Debug" on them? I know its an alpha but the change wouldn't be that hard and would make the damned thing easier to deal with.
Re:In other words... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Journaling File System: for those who don't kno (Score:5, Interesting)
About this 'transaction based' stuff... the question is does any user application support transactions? If I run 'rm *.o' in a directory and the system crashes halfway through the rm command, is the state rolled back to what it was before the command started? I doubt it. Each individual unlink() call might count as a transaction, but unlink() is supposed to be atomic anyway.
It would be neat if filesystem transactions were available to applications. For example, take the most obvious way to save a file that is currently open in an editor: truncate the file and write it out again. Without transactions this is horribly unsafe, the system might crash after truncating or there just might not be enough disk space to write the new version. But if you could write code to do:
begin_transaction();
ftruncate(fh, 0);
write(fh, buf, size);
end_transaction();
it would be just fine. (Of course, you'd need to check the return value from end_transaction() to make sure everything went okay... you might even check the individual ftruncate() and write() calls in order to bail out early.)
Similarly, shell commands could be an individual transaction. So if you said 'tar x archive.tar' then it would be guaranteed that either the whole archive unpacks successfully, or the filesystem is untouched. Who knows, this might even make shell scripts a reliable way to write small programs.
Re:NEWSFLASH, NTFS is a journaling filesystem! (Score:5, Interesting)
NT 3.5 did though. Quit sticking your foot in your mouth. Concede the stupid point already. Yes, Windows NT had a journaling file system before Linux did, mainly because it needed it. All those reboots due to crashes really hose up your filesystem you know. Having a journaling filesystem helps you recover easier.
Don't forget sound... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, spare me the "No no, computers should be quiet" lectures because I'm not proposing making the noisy or obnoxious. Rather, I'd like for MS to provide more sound options to add. For example, it'd be cool if progress bars could alter the pitch of a
It may not be immediately obvious to people why anybody'd propose this, to them I say "think about the information your unblinking ear could receive." A lot of us listen to music while using our computer, right? Well why not provide some extra cues as to what your machine's doing?
I like to multi-task. I do 3D stuff and find my computer chewing up CPU cycles for minutes at a time. While it's doing that, I fool around on Slashdot or IM or whatever else is entertaining. Sometimes, though, I don't realize when it's done. I just keep an eye on task manager. It'd be nice if I could set up progress bars to generate a tone or drum beat that changes as the process gets closer to finished. I'd like to be able to have scrollbars provide clicking noises to let me know how far they've moved, that way when I use the wheel to move I can have an audio cue to let me know that.
If I put more time into brainstorming ideas, I'm sure I could cook up a lot of useful things to cue sound effects off to. Sadly, though, I don't always have access to them. I'm a little bummed about that. Adding sounds to Opera to let me know things like when a page is opened has given me a lot of insight into what the machine's doing under my active window.
Now, again, before everybody tells me how annoying that'd be, consider that every video game you play has a lot of sound effects, and your computer has a volume control. I'd like MS to explore more audio related UI experiences so I have more to play with. That doesn't necessarily mean I want everybody's computer to sound like R2-D2.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
0 mouse clicks.
By my calculation, that's (infinity)% faster!
Re:These sorts of questions apply to all devices.. (Score:2, Interesting)
linux has no features I see in the screenshots (Score:3, Interesting)
* a convenient login widget
* easy to use admin tools for login access
* more convenient and innovative UI metaphors
Instead open source continously copies a 2-3 year out of date commercial UI. OS/X and Longhorn beat Linux hands down on the desktop - even if they didn't have applications the UI and much of the underlying technology is better for consumer use.
Now, granted, BSD and Linux will blow OS/X and Longhorn out of the water on serving static webpages, running MySQL, Zope and sending e-mail
And re: on GUI elements of desktop dominance no one seems to consider advanced storage and filesystem features like ACL, EA, indexing and database features, etc. as all that important. ReiserFS might enable this sort of this 10 years in the future but it doesn't provide it at the user level.