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Microsoft's Longhorn

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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Microsoft's provided a preview of Longhorn at WinHEC 2004. The upcoming operating system revision from Microsoft will feature a new user interface called Avalon which will a more colorful 3d interface, which apparently bears a resemblance to Mac OS X according to the author.

A full beta is not expected until 2005, and the average system requirements are expected to be a 4-6GHz PC with 2GB of RAM and one terabyte of storage.

This early preview is to be distributed to developers at the end of the WinHEC conference so more information will likely become available of this conference.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2004/05/06/microsofts-longhorn/
If you change a phone number on your computer it will sync with your bluetooth phone?!?!?! And it works the other way too! Wow! Goodbye PPC... hello x86. Wait a second... gimme some of the Jobsian kool-aid. Okay I'm back.
 
What ridiculous system requirements for an OPERATING SYSTEM!!!!
What's going to happen when you just barely meet those and want to run programs on top of that?!?!? This is just silly. I hope that they try to optimize a little bit, but since it's Microsoft, they probably won't bother. :rolleyes:
 
I saw the requirements before. A triple core 4-6 GHz (64-bit recommended) processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and 1 TB of HD...what the heck? And this is just to run the OS itself. As soon as you open solitaire, I bet it will come crashing to a halt with how many resources are going to be monopolized by Windows. I seriously cannot believe anyone would consider this kind of bloat to be acceptable.
 
4-6 GHz 2 gigs of ram and a terabyte of memory. what made windows so successful in my mind is that it could run on any crappy dirt cheap PC. somehow i can't really imagine that these specs will be the lower end PC even in two years.
 
I highly doubt those are the system requirements for longhorn. Just remember, the dev team is running it unoptimized and in debug mode... so their computers would have to be much faster than the "system requirements."

I also highly doubt Avalon will look as polished as Quartz Extreme. It will probably end up being a hack-job just like XP is. :rolleyes:
 
pennymonger said:
Is there any doubt that Longhorn "bears a resemblance to Mac OS X"? MS is the best at copying.
Click to expand...

No... If they were really good at copying then their copies wouldn't turn out worse than the original :p
 
Before everyone starts making fun of Longhorn's system reqs, remember this is the OS that many of us are going to be... er... saddled with for years to come. It's not likely to be in full distribution until 2007, and if Moore's Law holds up, the typical new system should be running at about 12 GHz by then. So those reqs don't seem particularly silly, especially given the fact that there's going to be some sort of a "light" mode for legacy systems.

That said, Longhorn sure seems to be shaping up to be a classic example of MS bloatware. It's an OS of truly bovine proportions!
 
abc123 said:
i'd really like to see a screen shot
Click to expand...
They are out there, but from what I have seen, it's a bit underwhelming. The GIANT dock looking thing (I can't remember what they are calling it) takes up much more screen than I would care to sacrifice. Things may have changed a bit since then though, as the pictures I saw were from an early build.
 
wordmunger said:
That said, Longhorn sure seems to be shaping up to be a classic example of MS bloatware. It's an OS of truly bovine proportions!
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHAH

Does anyone have any screen shots?
 
wordmunger said:
Before everyone starts making fun of Longhorn's system reqs, remember this is the OS that many of us are going to be... er... saddled with for years to come. It's not likely to be in full distribution until 2007, and if Moore's Law holds up, the typical new system should be running at about 12 GHz by then. So those reqs don't seem particularly silly, especially given the fact that there's going to be some sort of a "light" mode for legacy systems.

That said, Longhorn sure seems to be shaping up to be a classic example of MS bloatware. It's an OS of truly bovine proportions!
Click to expand...

True, processor speeds will be there in six years, but 1 TB of HD space? That's obscene no matter how you look at it.
 
By 2007, I cannot imagine what OS X or XI is going to be like. We'll probably be interfacing with our computers like in Star Trek and the requirements will only be 1/4 as high as Windows while they are still clicking around on their new and improved Tyco rip-off interface.
 
wordmunger said:
and if Moore's Law holds up, the typical new system should be running at about 12 GHz by then.
Click to expand...

Moore's law hold up? are you kidding? In the last 10 and a half months Intel has only gone from 3.2 to 3.4ghz (Granted there have been improvements other than clock frequency)
 
blueBomber said:
They are out there, but from what I have seen, it's a bit underwhelming. The GIANT dock looking thing (I can't remember what they are calling it) takes up much more screen than I would care to sacrifice. Things may have changed a bit since then though, as the pictures I saw were from an early build.
Click to expand...

The screenshots that are out there don't really count... They don't include the new "Avalon" UI, so they basically look like WinXP
 
SilentPanda said:
If you change a phone number on your computer it will sync with your bluetooth phone?!?!?! And it works the other way too! Wow! Goodbye PPC... hello x86. Wait a second... gimme some of the Jobsian kool-aid. Okay I'm back.
Click to expand...

Actually, with Nokia's software for Win, I already essentially had this feature. It had a "sync whenever device comes in range" function. I used IR to connect to my Win PC, so I had to actually turn it on, on the phone, to make it happen, but if my work PC had BT, it would've done it whenever I walked into the room.

I'm still kinda miffed that iSync doesn't have this feature -- it should not be too hard to implement, with some kind of intelligence, i.e. sync upon device entry into range if not synced in x hours or w.e.

Regarding the memory and processor requirements...what does "double core" mean? This isn't the same thing as MS saying they expect the minimal Longhorn PC to have dual processors, is it? But I seem to remember that these numbers, which MS predicts as what their new operating system will need, stay fairly static or even get worse close to the launch. I would be shocked if a PC like they describe was available at the low end within two years....unless they are talking about the server version of LH and there is a much lower req't desktop version....
 
Macrumors said:
...

A full beta is not expected until 2005, and the average system requirements are expected to be a 4-6GHz PC with 2GB of RAM and one terabyte of storage.

...
Click to expand...
All things conseidered, if Mac OS X had similar requirements, I'd be looking at a machine with [at least] 5 GB ram and 1.5 terabytes od disk space. Oh yeah, and at least 2 dual core 6 GHz procs.

I'm so glad I don't use MS Windows.
 
blueBomber said:
What ridiculous system requirements for an OPERATING SYSTEM!!!!
What's going to happen when you just barely meet those and want to run programs on top of that?!?!? This is just silly. I hope that they try to optimize a little bit, but since it's Microsoft, they probably won't bother. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

the hardware industry will love to sell new pc to everyone
 
blueBomber said:
True, processor speeds will be there in six years, but 1 TB of HD space? That's obscene no matter how you look at it.
Click to expand...

You know your right.. but its kinda funny. people were saying the same thing when 1GB was a huge amount.

now i couldnt install all my software in under a gig.

same thing will happen with 1TB :)
seems huge now in 10 years it will be average or almost minimum , My bet
 
Also, as long as they don't get rid of the Einstein guy, the dog, and the paperclip things... well, that's all that matters. Show of hands how many people think Longhorn will be just as insecure as the other MS OSes, and crash just as much???
 
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