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Windows Operating Systems Software

A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053 758

Posted by timothy from the look-away-look-away-look-away dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, here is a look at what Microsoft has in store for it's future operating system. 'Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.'"
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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053 More

A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053

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  • Resources (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:03PM (#8492513)
    Are you so sure it wouldn't, Microsoft was never one for making a small package, and Longhorn is meant to be run on machines of 2006, where there is much more RAM in the the system.

    • Re:Resources (Score:5, Informative)

      by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:10PM (#8492569)
      Actually the amount of RAM put in consumer-level machines hasn't increased that much. It is quite common to see a P4 with 2.4Ghz and only 256MB RAM in the stores. And this amount has been quite stable (more or less) over the past few years.

      So the 2006 consumer-machines might habe 512MB of RAM. But if 483 are needed just for Windows not much is left..

      • Re:Resources (Score:3, Interesting)

        by leifm ( 641850 )
        256MB is perfectly adequate for just about everything. I got my Inspiron with just 256 because Dell charges a ridiculous amount for extra RAM. The only time I feel like I need to push it to 512 or more is when I have a number of development things running.

    • Re:Resources (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Vaystrem ( 761 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @06:36PM (#8493128)
      I beta tested Windows 98 (dangerous to admit that here) and would just like to point out that the beta version ran better and used less memory than the final did because the Final had more features than the beta did, and I'm sure for other reasons as well.

      So the submitter's comment that "Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources" isn't necessarily true.

  • uhh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Naksu ( 689429 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:03PM (#8492517)
    So the big news is, an alpha version of an operating system from an OS family known to eat lots of memory, actually eats lots of memory?

  • Let's get this out of the way (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aliencow ( 653119 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:04PM (#8492518) Homepage Journal
    "They must be running IIS on Longhorn!" or something. I heard that if nobody says something like that in a Slashdot thread, the universe implodes.

  • Perhaps it's ready now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by vitalstatistix ( 451754 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:04PM (#8492523)
    They're just waiting for the hardware needed to run it to become available...

  • Final Release (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:06PM (#8492543) Homepage Journal
    Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.
    No actually, they have the all important Brushed... I mean Slate look in place, so thats development pretty much wrapped up on this version.

  • OS "improvements" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:06PM (#8492545)
    Am I the only person who thinks improvements should come in the simplification of code rather than adding new features? I would much rather have another version of Windows 2000 that runs more efficiently than whatever may come from Longhorn. It's beginning to sound less like an application launching layer and more like a 3-ring circus stuffed into a shoebox.

    • Re:OS "improvements" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:11PM (#8492581)
      ah but bill gates doens see it that way. He believes the future of computers is in the software. Pack it full of "features".

      Here read up on what he said at MIT [mit.edu] on computers.

    • Re:OS "improvements" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:15PM (#8492611)
      Am I the only person who thinks improvements should come in the simplification of code rather than adding new features?

      Yes. That's why you should switch to Linux. Windows can't just be "simplified", they have created a monster in the form of NT kernel and now they need to deal with it. Switch to a lean, mean POSIX kernel.
      • Does anyone else see the irony in this person using the term lean in relation to the Linux kernal?

        It's far from lean, and I don't see it getting any leaner. You just need to choose which bloat to take, or go with one of the BSDs, one of the Unixes, FreeDOS or OpenBeOS.

        • no. why ?

          with windows, you are stuck with the kernel it comes with.

          with linux, you can pare it down to the bare essentials when you compile it yourself.
          sure, Lindows may be a little bloated for usability, or Xandros.
          but Debian or Gentoo ? hardly.
          can you tailor you WinXX kernel to your hardware while removing extraneous crapola ?

    • Re:OS "improvements" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy@ g m ail.com> on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:18PM (#8492636)
      I would much rather have another version of Windows 2000 that runs more efficiently than whatever may come from Longhorn.

      XP. Turn off the Fisher-Price skin and its accompanying hand-holding elements and it's faster than Win2k (from UI improvements as much as software optimisations).

      OTOH, if all you're after is an "application launching layer", then I sincerely doubt _any_ version of Windows is appropriate for you.

    • Re:OS "improvements" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by prostoalex ( 308614 ) * on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:20PM (#8492645) Homepage Journal
      The thing about "efficiency" improvements is that the potential market is not that large. There might be maybe 20 people on this planet willing to pay $200 for a Win2k that occupies 32 MB less of memory space.

      As Netscape example has shown, if you deviate from your core business and start re-writing the entire codebase for the sake of "cleanliness" and "efficiency", someone else will step into the market, and by the time your re-written product is capable of running on Casio watches, the market has made several steps forward in terms of functionality.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeLinux ( 20366 ) <joelinux@gmail.E ... minus physicist> on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:07PM (#8492550)
    Is this Gate's law once again counter-manding Moore's Law?

    Joe

  • Finally proof that Microsoft is stealing GPL code (Score:4, Funny)

    by Michalson ( 638911 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:07PM (#8492551)
    I just wonder how they where able to graft X-Windows into their current source code.

  • I Hear Intel (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Lost Supertone ( 754279 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:08PM (#8492561) Journal
    Intel: Hey Microsoft why don't you slow down windows a bit? Microsoft: Why? Intel: That way home users will actually have a reason to buy a 3Ghz processor

  • New GUI? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skjellifetti ( 561341 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:08PM (#8492562) Journal
    At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.

    What'd they do? Replace the Windows GUI with Gnome?

    ducks

  • so... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:09PM (#8492565)
    microsoft works with computer vendors to make it that the new opperating system requires a new computer to be compatible with it. Revitalizes companies like Dell, HP, etc. Everyone walks away richer (well except all of us who will have to throw away our current computers).

    Dang, i remember the days when 8 megs of ram was a lot, and 80 meg hard drive would never get filled.

    • Re:so... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:25PM (#8492682) Homepage
      Well you might trying to be sarcastic but um yeah.

      Sorry hate to break it to ya but 8MB of ram is shit for a compiler [that is meant to handle a program of any respectable size]. 80MB of disk space is little space to hold source+builds, etc...

      The trick [which most miss] is an acceptable rate of growth.

      I imagine 100 years from now a PDA will have a baseline of 1TB of memory [anything less will just be inhuman]. The point is right now that would be insane.

      Similarly sure 20 years ago 8MB of ram was godly [cuz quite frankly the average program was of limited appeal and functionality]. You can pick up a 512MB of ram for relatively cheap [~110$ CDN for PC2700].

      So it isn't unreasonable to assume a desktop user would have 512MB or even 1GB of ram [it's much I agree but not overly excessive]. If windows required 512MB of ram 10 years ago they would have gone out of business. Right now though it's not asking too much.

      That being said I agree with the sentiment against bloat. I run icewm for the sole reason that it takes 10MB of ram. Combined with X my entire "desktop" takes less than 30MB of ram. It would be nice if the next version of windows didn't take 200MB of ram when idle but alas it wouldn't be cool enough if you didn't have a million little things going on all at once.

      Tom

    • Re:so... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:29PM (#8492715)
      All the more reason for budget strapped people/small business/univeristies to take another look at the free unices or stay
      with Linux if they have already switched.

      I have another idea: As soon as things like CPU freq scaling and ACPI really mature in the Linux kernel, you can bet your bottom dollar that people will argue that not only does Linux save you on upgrade costs, but can save you millions on the desktop in power operating costs as well.

      Have you noticed how much juice the Prescott sucks up?

      • Re:so... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dzym ( 544085 )
        And as long as the Linux kernel developers are actively blacklisting old and new ACPI implementations instead of actually making the code work with the hardware, ACPI support will never mature.

        And it's not like you can run a modern Linux desktop distro on a 486 100mhz nowadays anyway. Face it, requirements have changed in every way imaginable. You and the grandparent poster are already as ancient compared to the current generation of computers as we years ago were compared to the cardpunchers of days yor

  • vacaum (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Vlion ( 653369 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:09PM (#8492566) Journal
    I see Longhorn ain't going to play nice with even XP-class machines. Oh well, not like I wanted my rights digitally managed anyway.

  • Meanwhile in his deep undersea fortress... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:10PM (#8492577)
    Bill gates has called a meeting with the memory chip manufacturers...

    GATES: "Gentlemen, I'm here to offer you a proposition. With my evil, resource bloating operating system, you can join with Microsoft and we will band together and control all the memory on the planet."

    JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN: "I am not comfortable with this."

    GATES: "I understand."

    (He presses a red button on his arm rest)

    (A trap door opens up from the ceiling and 10,000 copies of WordPerfect, Borland C++, Lotus, and Quattro Pro, bludgeon the Japanese semiconductor CEO to death. His lifeless body slumps over.)

    GATES: "Anyone else have any problems with my plan?"

  • C'Mon, It's Pretty Much An Alpha Release (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Naked Chef ( 626614 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:11PM (#8492582)
    Of course it's a resource hog, they probably have every debugging feature turned on in it. Is there a point to "reviewing" this build?
  • I found a handy page on Google [worldmoneyfair.com] with some torrents and other doodads. You may want to check how much RAM you have first ;-)

  • Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) * on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:13PM (#8492597) Homepage Journal
    Hey, if you're extremely worried about the RAM resources, are too cheap to shell out that extra $40 for 256 MB of memory [pricegrabber.com], or expect to run the whole thing on TI-83 calculator, then maybe next Windows is not for you.

    If you want functionality, you have to dedicate resources, if you don't want much functionality, stick to Linux on a floppy [linuxlinks.com] with pre-installed vi and life would be great.

    Mozilla Firefox 0.8 is currently taking up 63 MB of RAM, and that's just a browser with no media players, mail clients, task schedulers, etc.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:19PM (#8492643)
      Hey, if you're extremely worried about the RAM resources, are too cheap to shell out that extra $40 for 256 MB of memory, or expect to run the whole thing on TI-83 calculator, then maybe next Windows is not for you.

      There are plenty of otherwise perfectly good PIII machines out there with 1+ GHz CPUs that are limited to 1/2 GB of RAM. Adding another 256MB DIMM may not be an option.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )
      I have 6 windows open.

      slashdot, penny arcade, FX networks flash monstrosity, and 3 random mozilla.org pages (just to add windows)

      I am using only 38 MB

      with one widnow it was 18 MB only slashdot (wich did seem high, but not anywhere near 64MB).

  • Obviously (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jedi Holocron ( 225191 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:13PM (#8492600) Homepage Journal
    Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.


    It will consume more...

  • Long live Clippy! (Score:3, Funny)

    by dapyx ( 665882 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:16PM (#8492614) Homepage
    Probably they put the animated "Clippy" on the Start button.

  • Article Text (slashdotted) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:16PM (#8492615)
    A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053 - Page 1
    Posted by Team Flexbeta on 05 March 2004 (34135 views) Rating: 4.64
    Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, we wanted to take a look at what Microsoft has in store for us. We take a quick look at the recently leaked Longhorn Build 4053.

    For those of you that are lucky enough to have snagged a copy, remember this, Build 4053 is still a baby, not even in Beta stage yet, so we will not go in depth into subjects such as the theme, sidebar, etc.

    The installation wizard has improved greatly from past installers that Windows 2000 and XP had. No more will we see the plain DOS like setup screen, its all graphical now with minimal questions during the installation process, which, has its good and its bad. For a home user upgrading to Longhorn, the installation is a breeze, start the setup, enter the key and go take a nap, by the time you wake up it will be done. If the setup continues on this path towards final release, then the use of an answer file will be necessary to alleviate any post installation changes, especially for a network administrator implementing a company wide roll out, but Microsoft has always provided excellent administrator tools for this very reason. The installation did take an awfully long time, especially during the "Hardware Detection" phase, but I'm sure that this will be improved upon in the months to come.

    Even though the initial startup is extremely fast, once logged in the system crawls along, taking a seemingly endless amount of time to get everything up and running. This too will definitely improve over development time.

    The layout is clean and clutter free. Minimal icons are presented on the desktop, which is one of my pet peeves; I go to great lengths to maintain an icon-less desktop. The sidebar is definitely going to have its share of protestors, me being one of them. To me, no matter what is docked on the sidebar in the final release, it is a huge waste of space and system resources that a vast majority of users will just turn off. There will be more applets applied to it in the end, search bars, link bars, etc, so as the sidebar comes of age, we will examine it once again.

    Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources. My test system is an Intel Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 512 MB of RAM, so it is still running at a good pace, but anything less than this makes the system crawl along at an insanely annoying pace. When the final build is released, the recommended system requirements will be roughly the same as Windows XP, but as anyone that has tried to run XP with multiple users will testify, simply having the recommended requirements is just not enough.

    At this point in time, build 4053 is basically Windows XP with a different theme, even though some new technologies are being created and there are dribs and drabs of them in this build. Build 4053 is still a lot different from previous builds where some of the new technologies Microsoft is working on were clearly integrated, such as the Hardware Carousel, WinFS, etc, in this build like Build 4051 (PDC) they are absent or implemented at a minimum.

    There are very visible bugs at this stage, but it seems that some of the major pains that plagued previous builds have been worked on or corrected. The infamous Internet Explorer memory leak seems to have disappeared, and that was a huge memory leak, but as I sit here writing this, the commit charge is growing and growing, so there are still memory leaks in some processes and/or services that are running.

    Some features previewed in previous builds have been developed to a greater extent such as Contacts, Photos and Videos. The layout and orientation of the windows has been vastly improved. All links and graphical elements have been fine tuned

  • Reason for Delay (Score:3, Funny)

    by ortcutt ( 711694 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:21PM (#8492655)
    Maybe it won't take until 2006 to finish Longhorn, maybe they just need to wait until DRAM prices fall enough that people will be able to afford to run it.

  • Longhorn schedule (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shawkin ( 165588 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:21PM (#8492658)
    Sources working at the Redmond campus say that it is common knowledge on campus that Longhorn will not ship until mid 2007. With current technical problems mounting, the same sources say that 2008 is starting to look likely, if not optimistic.

    Those who have to use the current build say that it is not stable at all. Apparently, there are new failure modes in the DRM and file systems that are "very difficult to analyze and very non-intuitive to troubleshoot or even understand." The failure modes are reported to totally freeze the computer, prevent rebooting and resist reformatting.

    If true, the words "difficult and non-intuitive" are not encouraging, particularly when used by very experienced users at Microsoft .

    • Re:Longhorn schedule (Score:3, Interesting)

      by andy55 ( 743992 ) *
      Sources working at the Redmond campus say that it is common knowledge on campus that Longhorn will not ship until mid 2007.

      Those are some pretty big words. Too bad you can't name those sources. If you look at the development of Mac OS X, I can't wait to see where it's at by 2007--whew--or even 2006. Whatever the case is at MS, they're in serious trouble if they don't ship asap, with Linux and Mac OS X getting better and/or more widespread by the quarter. Once again, I'm starting to fantasize, thinking

    • Re:Longhorn schedule (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dohcvtec ( 461026 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @08:27PM (#8493710)
      Sources working at the Redmond campus say that it is common knowledge on campus that Longhorn will not ship until mid 2007

      Wow... Windows XP was released in 2001, so that will end up being a 6-7 year interval between OS releases. I'm not sure what that will mean, but that's a really long interval between OS releases.

  • Of course it uses heaps of resource... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kiwioddBall ( 646813 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:25PM (#8492683)
    Every Microsoft operating system during development does! The OS is not designed to run on systems that we use now, it is designed to run on systems that we will be using in 3 years time.

    Historically, when Windows NT received heaps of exactly the same flack about it running extraordinarily slowly from reviewers quite simply because they weren't smart enough to work that basic fact out.

  • What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by steve_stern ( 686745 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:25PM (#8492687) Homepage
    This is like breaking into Linus Torvald's house, stealing his sketch notes about Linux, and making fun of them for having such poor quality.

    Its a product that won't hit the shelves for 2 years. It was compiled in debug mode - of course its going to be a resource hog.

    • Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by atlantis191 ( 750037 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:29PM (#8492714)
      This is slashdot. Microsoft usually does not get a good rap here. Sometimes wrongfully so, sometimes rightfully so. There is no doubt that this windows will use more memory than XP and previous versions ever had by a longshot. But to call an OS thats supposed to be used 2-3 years from now a resource hog is rediculous.

  • Not too horrible.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dave1212 ( 652688 ) * on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:31PM (#8492730) Homepage
    ..for a Windows build, in terms of window colour (brushed metal, like OS X). As far as everything else, it isn't needed. These screenshots show how nothing has really changed.

    Come on x86ers, save up for a Mac (even a used one) and get more stuff done more enjoyably. If you're going to spend $ on new hardware (which Longhorn will surely require for 95% of the pop.), don't run the risk of it not working with your setup.. and you can still run *nix or a BSD.

    must not post while Bob is involved.

  • Windows 98 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SimonInOz ( 579741 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:32PM (#8492731)
    Last Friday, I had to fire up an old, tired PC running Windows 98. Gosh, a real dinosaur - 166Mhz, 256Mb RAM, MS Office.
    It was weird. It booted quickly, and the whole thing felt snappy. Menus actually popped up on screen immediately. Explorer did things, instead of hanging about "thinking" all the time.

    Windows XP doesn't feel like that, even with my brand new 3Ghz, 1Gb RAM machine.
    Why is this so? Why are the menus so slow - and what have they done to Windows Explorer to make it so snail-like?

    • Re:Windows 98 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:41PM (#8492786)
      Who really needs all that power. While I know I am talking to a group that loves more power and can find ways to use ever bit of their processor. The average computer user uses their computer for Word Processing, Excel, E-Mail, and internet. Do you need 3ghz and a gig of ram. No. that windows 98 machine will work wonders, and honestly is probably more efficient than having something with a bunch of bells and whistles.

      I was asked to help out with a friend of mines company when they purchased a bunch of new computers. He was going to use them for word and e-mail and that was about it. He brought this list of a couple computers he was thinking of purchasing each about $1000, I was like here we can go buy 3 computers at that price that are a little older and you are set. He now running 5 machines with 98 all networked and with a networked printer for what he was planning on spending for 2 new computers. And they work great.

    • Re:Windows 98 (Score:3, Informative)

      by BubbleNOP ( 688841 )
      I have a dual 350Mhz Pentium II w/ 256mb RAM running XP Pro and it's very snappy. For starters, go to Control Panel, System, Advanced, Performance, Settings and set it to "Adjust for best performance" on Visual Effects.

  • Not sure if people have made this joke before (Score:5, Funny)

    by chiyosdad ( 759746 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:33PM (#8492744)
    So, first he calles it micro - soft, and now he's calling it long - horn?

    micro. soft.
    long. horn.

    I think that makes my phallic implications painfully obvious. My work here is done.

  • Hello? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:37PM (#8492763) Homepage
    It's called debug code. Just look at FreeBSD:

    fafnir# ls -l /boot/kernel/kernel
    -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5940286 Feb 26 00:52 /boot/kernel/kernel
    fafnir# ls -l /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC/kernel.debug
    -rwxr-x r-x 1 root wheel 30170033 Mar 7 21:31 /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC/kernel.debug

    Enabling debugging options makes the FreeBSD kernel five times as large; if anything, I'd expect Microsoft to have even more debugging code in their pre-release builds.

    • Re:Hello? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nate Eldredge ( 133418 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:52PM (#8492857)
      Yeah, but most of the stuff in the kernel.debug binary is just debug symbols -- they live in the file but aren't loaded into memory. If you compare the two with the 'size' command you'll probably find they're much closer. But this Windows thing apparently (article site is down just now) has 483 meg resident -- which is gigantic, and debug symbols would have no effect on this.

  • 4053 Tweak Guide (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07, 2004 @05:44PM (#8492807)
    Longhorn 4053 Tweak Guide [nextl3vel.net] ...

    Found this over at Neowin [neowin.net] ...

  • .NET (Score:5, Interesting)

    by owlstead ( 636356 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @06:05PM (#8492940)
    I am not surprised. They probably used .NET to build it all. That means a few things:

    - they are now using components (with .NET style SOAP XML messaging)
    - they use bounds checking all over
    - more meta information on objects is stored
    - libraries are probably more extensive - makes reuse better
    - more things are service-driven, so more is in memory all the time

    This all comes down to more memory use. Look at Java. It's fast enough nowadays, but it still uses a lot of memory resources. You get more runtime functionality (reflection etc) in return. .NET does essentially the same, but it will have the same drawbacks as Java - slower execution and larger memory footprint.

    This is a good thing though, it's a one time performance penalty returning huge benefits. It won't favour small/old machines though.

    The future is runtime.

  • Old news and a link to a similar article (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @07:02PM (#8493281) Journal
    Now that the link is slashdotted, I'll post another review / info page about this alpha build from PDC:

    http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/longhorn_4051. asp [winsupersite.com]

    There are no apparent differences between that reviewed build (4051) and the one in this article.

  • Games vs. OS's (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Barkmullz ( 594479 ) on Sunday March 07, 2004 @07:07PM (#8493301)

    First of all, I am sure it was compiled in degug mode - resource hog.

    Secondly, whenever ID Software [idsoftware.com] claims:

    -"Our next game, DoomQuad, will require that you travel forward in time and get yourself a system powerful enough to run it. Unless, naturally, you are content at playing the game at -2 FPS".

    ...everyone starts foaming at the mouth with excitement.

    Now M$ has a product that requires you to have a somewhat beefy system and everyone starts bitching.

    Why am I not surprised? This is slashdot after all.

  • You can buy machines preloaded with longhorn alpha (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 07, 2004 @07:21PM (#8493384)
    Hey, I found out today you can buy computers pre-loaded with the alpha version of Longhorn - the store was all white with wood floors, and they were selling these cool MP3 players too.

    My laptop came in this cool aluminum case, and it's running pretty well. Searches were really fast and the new browser (I think they are calling it Jungle or something like that) was really great. Plus I had no viruses even when I connected it to the internet for a minute without thinking!! And in this version they made that huge bar on the side of the screen you could see in the article screenshots resizable. So I think Longhorn will do just fine.

  • The user interface sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Monday March 08, 2004 @07:28AM (#8496769)
    By looking at the screenshots, I can say that the Longhorn GUI sucks. First of all, the sidebar is useless and takes too much screen space. Secondly, they have flatten the GUI too much, and suddently the user can't tell a label from a menu item. In previous versions of the GUI, the 3d elements made clear which parts of the window are editable and which aren't. Without 3d, it is much more difficult to quickly judge the borders of each area.

    The only good thing about Longhorn is WinFS. Something that the Linux community should embrace. I have said it previously, and I will say it again, that we need to manage information, not binary data. The operating system must be aware of the types of data stored on the disk. It is a task not to be left on the application layer.

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