Microsoft's Longhorn

[frankly]

its a developers conference; they are showing developers what the technologies inside lh can do

You said the theme and functionality, etc. all would change before release. If all of that will change then what is the purpose of demonstrating it? You know why they are demonstrating it? Because they are going to go five years between OS releases and they want to let the public and their stockholders know that they are still working on something. That is a huge amount of time between updates.

If Apple took that long to update their OS everyone would say they were going out of business. Windows users are so hypocritical about stuff like that.

Frank

 

[thatwendigo]

Sorry, doesn't matter how little it costs for a linux box, what with free OS, minimal requirments, not needing all the constant maintinance of a MS machine or the initial cost of an apple.... linux will not take over the low end computer market. Reason is simple: people who buy cheap computers are not sophisticated users. The vast majority of the world is way too afraid of linux, even just the concept of this thing that is made by a bunch of nerds only loosly associated. Then take your low end users. It's just too foreign.

You haven't been paying attention to what I've been saying, then. One of the things that needs to be completed before LotD can move forwards is a simple, easy to use frontend for Linux. Lindows (now Linspire) is one example of how this can be done and still provide decent compatibility with Windows software, while still competing at the low-end price point. If you think that a startup out of nowhere can manage it, what could Sony, Toshiba, IBM, AMD, and Apple whip up?

Here's a wild speculation for you:
IBM and AMD fab the processors, some kind of low-end PowerPC that is intended to be good enough for daily use on a linux whitebox. Toshiba and Sony provide the drives (HD and optical), and Apple provides the backend. They use Darwin PPC behind a frontend, whether or not it's powered by an Apple designer. IBM sticks it in a cheap chase, the units are shipped off, and everyone gets a slice of the sales for the low market, while also beating the hell out of Intel/Microsoft at that price point. Freescale gets into things when this is shown to work, and they fab the mobile processor for a cheap laptop.

The only missing key is an effective emulation layer for the Windows APIs, like WINE is on x86. However, pushing alternative but compatible standards still gets them a lot further than the dead companies that went head to head with Dell, Intel, and MS.

 

[Phillip]

You said the theme and functionality, etc. all would change before release. If all of that will change then what is the purpose of demonstrating it? You know why they are demonstrating it? Because they are going to go five years between OS releases and they want to let the public and their stockholders know that they are still working on something. That is a huge amount of time between updates.

If Apple took that long to update their OS everyone would say they were going out of business. Windows users are so hypocritical about stuff like that.

Frank

yes, there are showing it off, but the main point is to show the developers; not to the public on how lh is going to look like... its still alpha. go and see how windows xp alphas looked like.

 

[MorganX]

>>How's this for you, then?<<

It's fruitless for us to continue, let's agree to disagree.



>>As for costs? Cellphones have processors that are more complicated than what you'd need for this.<<

Cellphones are sold at a loss. They are subsidized. Commodity hard drives won't be subsidized.

>>Palladium was never really about memory protection. It's DRM control of the entire system and not just media, combined with Microsoft's extra-special attitude about end users. If you ever had a problem with your system and XP, just wait until you try to change something under Longhorn, if they do roll in the "features" of the sanitized Palladium movement.<<

A significant portions was/is about security, particularly protecting against malicious software. Clearly, this part has been drastically scaled back and reduced to the NX bit. Document privacy remains. Most of the hardware stuff is gone for the moment. Realize that business' do want this. The simple fact of the matter is in the future, we will have to pay to play. Imagine if we could get stuff from the grocery store the way we can get digital products.

 

[dizastor]

the screenshots don't look enough like OSX... send those M$ designers back to the drawing board... and for the love of god will someone there go smoke some weed and get an original idea for a change.

 

[dopefiend]

the screenshots don't look enough like OSX... send those M$ designers back to the drawing board... and for the love of god will someone there go smoke some weed and get an original idea for a change.

4074 looks nothing like OSX. I don't know what you people are smoking....

 

[dizastor]

yeah too much win95 not enough osx... back to the drawing board MicroTurd

 

[thatwendigo]

It's fruitless for us to continue, let's agree to disagree.

It's not fruitless. I adapted to what you said I wasn't doing, and now you backpedal. My eMac can stream media across the network while I'm doing other things, which was one of your main counterpoints. In fact, I was streaming media to more than one machine, with more than one task per machine.

But, you know... Whatever. Sure. We can agree to disagree.

Cellphones are sold at a loss. They are subsidized. Commodity hard drives won't be subsidized.

People tend not to buy $300 cellphones for their utility, though. People will buy superior $300 hard drives, and that's one reason that SCSI is still alive. As SATA matures and the drive speeds ramp, it's likely that it could kill the older standard in most applications, but that remains to be seen.

A hardware solution to the problem of drive caching is the same thing as a hardware solution to networking. Are you going to say that nobody would by a hardware switch for networking, because it will never, never, enver be cheap enough to be practical? It happened, and so could this.

A significant portions was/is about security, particularly protecting against malicious software. Clearly, this part has been drastically scaled back and reduced to the NX bit. Document privacy remains. Most of the hardware stuff is gone for the moment. Realize that business' do want this. The simple fact of the matter is in the future, we will have to pay to play. Imagine if we could get stuff from the grocery store the way we can get digital products.

I concede that a large portion of Palladium is for security purposes, and that the technology would add quite a bit to solving the particular issues facing businesses. Those same technologies, though, are going to shoot everyone who isn't in a corporate environment right in the ass. They would permit easy spying on download habits and other invasions of privacy that make cookies look like rooting in the trash, while Palladium/TCI are snooping the mail, tapping the phone, getting ahold of credit card statements, and keylogging your computer.

It makes sense for businesses to want it, both for their own employess, and so that they can rape consumers just a little harder. We have enough intrusions as it is, and Microsoft doesn't need to help them out.

Also, why is it so sensational to imagine we could get groceries the same way we do software?

I think someone's on that already.

If you're suggesting that there needs to be some kind of "anti-theft" push in online distirubution... Well, I'm pretty sure that it's going to be doomed, to at lleast some degree. There are many, many clever people out there who crack protection as a hobby, and only so many who will work for corporations.

The internet is the genie, and it's out of the bottle.

 

[Fukui]

4074 looks nothing like OSX. I don't know what you people are smoking....

I think maybe he's talking about the windows themselves, which um,do look a lot like OS X brush metal (shadowing, transparency in titlebar, metal look to each window, blablabla etc etc). Its funny, but they still haven't got double buffering in yet (watch the longhorn driver vs XP driver video)...

 

[iomar]

Well... I am glad I am using a Mac! If I could only aford getting a G5.

 

[evilsprung]

Well... I am glad I am using a Mac! If I could only aford getting a G5.

i'm sorry, that just sounded funny. hahah

 

[thatwendigo]

Yes, it is. Instead, Windows XP SP2 and Longhorn will use the new memory protection technology in AMD's new procs. It provides an extra flag for all memory addresses to differentiate their content between resources and binary code (and therefore effectively eliminating overflow exploits).

Palladium is not being dropped. As much as I hate to cite the guy as a source, Thurrott's article on WinHEC specifically contains this passage:
Microsoft Refutes Palladium Rumors
Microsoft this week refuted a bizarre report in CRN that stated that the company was dropping support for its Palladium technology (also known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB). "NGSCB is alive and kicking," a Microsoft representative said. The technology will still be an optional piece of Longhorn, and will require specially-made PCs, which include security-oriented chipsets. Sorry, rumormongers.

 

[nmk]

Here's a wild speculation for you:
IBM and AMD fab the processors, some kind of low-end PowerPC that is intended to be good enough for daily use on a linux whitebox. Toshiba and Sony provide the drives (HD and optical), and Apple provides the backend. They use Darwin PPC behind a frontend, whether or not it's powered by an Apple designer. IBM sticks it in a cheap chase, the units are shipped off, and everyone gets a slice of the sales for the low market, while also beating the hell out of Intel/Microsoft at that price point. Freescale gets into things when this is shown to work, and they fab the mobile processor for a cheap laptop.

Wow, that is some seriously wild speculation. However, without even speculating very much, one can easily see how any Linux distro with a user friendly desktop could be the King of the budget PC market. Most users just want to be able to use their computers to email, surf, play and burn music, and type word documents. Most Linux distro's can already do this. Linux is light enough to run on something like an iPod. If major manufacturers stats backing Linux on their consumer desktops, I think the general public will catch on, specially if they can get fully functional computers for $200.

 

[Fukui]

Wow, that is some seriously wild speculation. However, without even speculating very much, one can easily see how any Linux distro with a user friendly desktop could be the King of the budget PC market. Most users just want to be able to use their computers to email, surf, play and burn music, and type word documents.

I agree, except there are too many web sites with ActiveX plugins or are using MS's Twisted Java to work correctly on anything other than windows. They will be quite frustrated, especially home/small business users when they can't access thier banks ect from thier "cheap" computers. This will become even worse once longhorn is out because of its merged XML presentation layer that can be used to both display an applications window's contents and the contents of a web page, allowing a "windows" application to easily be networked (web app) into a webpage...that only works on windows of course. Mark my words, if longhorn succeeds, they WILL own the web.

The only chance for alternatives is for someone, preferaly apple, to turn the market on its head (obsolete the PC for example).

 

[dopefiend]

I agree, except there are too many web sites with ActiveX plugins or are using MS's Twisted Java to work correctly on anything other than windows. They will be quite frustrated, especially home/small business users when they can't access thier banks ect from thier "cheap" computers.

Simple get around ...:: Use Wine and the newest Internet explorer.

 

[MorganX]

>>It's not fruitless. I adapted to what you said I wasn't doing, and now you backpedal. My eMac can stream media across the network while I'm doing other things, which was one of your main counterpoints. In fact, I was streaming media to more than one machine, with more than one task per machine.

But, you know... Whatever. Sure. We can agree to disagree.<<

It's fruitless because I can tell by your network utilization that whatevever your streaming either is extremely low resolutio, unlike the streaming that will occur in the near future with media extenders to TV/HDTV, probably quite small as well. So without me being there, this would go on forever, it's not backpedaling. We're just not going to convince each other; on my G4 experience and you believe you're doing heavy multitasking on your G3 comparable to what I believe will be happening in 1-3yrs.

>>People tend not to buy $300 cellphones for their utility, though. People will buy superior $300 hard drives, and that's one reason that SCSI is still alive. As SATA matures and the drive speeds ramp, it's likely that it could kill the older standard in most applications, but that remains to be seen.<<

And thus, SCSI still "does" cost more, particularly the controller and has not and proably will not become a commodity standard for desktop computing. Apparently not enough people want to buy superior, and they are, SCSI drives to create the volume to allow them to become commodity. If you willing to pay, you can buy a flash HD which will end the problem altogether, but it's too expensive to become the defacto standard. Why do you think Apple switched from SCSI to IDE? Because IDE is superior? No.

>>A hardware solution to the problem of drive caching is the same thing as a hardware solution to networking. Are you going to say that nobody would by a hardware switch for networking, because it will never, never, enver be cheap enough to be practical? It happened, and so could this.<<

It's not quite the same, hardware cashing is more expensive than switching. You know there are really high performance cached switches and guess what, they're not on your neighors network. Is there a theoretical possibility there could be a breakthrough, of cousre. Just as there is a theoretical possibility a SCSI controller could become cheaper and less complex to manufacture than IDE. So much so that Intel integrates it into it's chipsets and gives it away free as it does IDE/SATA.

>>Those same technologies, though, are going to shoot everyone who isn't in a corporate environment right in the ass.

It makes sense for businesses to want it, both for their own employess, and so that they can rape consumers just a little harder. We have enough intrusions as it is, and Microsoft doesn't need to help them out.<<

It will be optional and will require applicaitons and hardware built to specifically support it. Now if the entire industry hops on board, 1) it's not just Microsoft anymore and 2) opportunity for new hardware and software developers.

>>Also, why is it so sensational to imagine we could get groceries the same way we do software?<<

I was referring to stealing from our desktops and not paying for the content we consume en masse. Not the technology that enables it. Law and the public have not caught up to technology yet. Many of us still believe if it's done over a computer we should have the right to steal.

>>Well, I'm pretty sure that it's going to be doomed, to at lleast some degree. There are many, many clever people out there who crack protection as a hobby, and only so many who will work for corporations. The internet is the genie, and it's out of the bottle<<

It's not going to be doomed. It's going to be proprietary. So much for open source ruling the future. Fairplay is doing well now, but I give it no more than 2 yrs before apple rewrites it making it more than a wrapper on an open format or it will die. JMO.

 

[frem001]

Dock

Hmmm. This OS seems to be perfect for easter. Did anybody else notice what longhorn wants us to do to our contacts in this screenshot ?

M.

That dock on the side is obscene. If I were working my eye would just keep looking back at it all the time. Not very productive if you ask me... and to the ppl who are excited about all this crap... I can't wait to see the thing crash.

 

[dopefiend]

That dock on the side is obscene. If I were working my eye would just keep looking back at it all the time. Not very productive if you ask me... and to the ppl who are excited about all this crap... I can't wait to see the thing crash.

This is the point where you would minimize it......

 

[a_iver]

And that's the point where a dialog box comes up and tells you "You have performed an illegal operation". I think the big side panel looks crappy too. I said it before and I'll say it again: More and more people will be using the OS X features for the blind. The thing is big almost black blob on the right side of the screen sucking you in while your eyes burn in that brigt glaring clock. Don't look into the light!!!

 

[dopefiend]

I think the big side panel looks crappy too

Its customizable

And that's the point where a dialog box comes up and tells you "You have performed an illegal operation".

and I didn't get any You have performed an illegal operation error

 

[thatwendigo]

It's fruitless because I can tell by your network utilization that whatevever your streaming either is extremely low resolutio, unlike the streaming that will occur in the near future with media extenders to TV/HDTV, probably quite small as well. So without me being there, this would go on forever, it's not backpedaling. We're just not going to convince each other; on my G4 experience and you believe you're doing heavy multitasking on your G3 comparable to what I believe will be happening in 1-3yrs.

Actually, those were the monitor figures for my download/upload rates to the outside world. The file sizes for the stream to my machines on the network were 40.7MB, 41MB, and 9MB, with the music stream set to random play (which could mean anything from 1MB to 98.9MB for a live concert that's the longest file I possess). Each of those files was sent to three machines at the same times, and the music stream was also open to three machiens, while the same videos and iTunes were played on the hosting computer. So, my machine was hosting twelve movies and four audio tracks at once, while also allowing me to do things in the background.

Considering that I'm talking about an out-of-date processor and chipset, that's not bad.

And thus, SCSI still "does" cost more, particularly the controller and has not and proably will not become a commodity standard for desktop computing. Apparently not enough people want to buy superior, and they are, SCSI drives to create the volume to allow them to become commodity.

Perhaps, and perhaps not. IDE wasn't faster than SCSI, but there could be other factors at work in the failure to adopt. Most people don't even know what's under hood in their machines, let alone whily SCSI would be superior. Howver, a number of the smaller vendors (and a few of the big names now) are starting to offer SCSI system drives at smaller capacities to speed the overall OS performance, with SATA or PATA storage drives.

If they'd done that to begin with, maybe things would have been different.

It's not quite the same, hardware cashing is more expensive than switching. You know there are really high performance cached switches and guess what, they're not on your neighors network.

Yet. Give it time for technology to trickle down. Bandwidth is starting to be important to people at home, and more and more machines are adopting faster and faster formats (Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, and so on).

It will be optional and will require applicaitons and hardware built to specifically support it. Now if the entire industry hops on board, 1) it's not just Microsoft anymore and 2) opportunity for new hardware and software developers.

To begin with. The foot in the door strategy is one that Microsoft has hardly failed to exploit in the past. Once they get people used to the idea at work, it will be easier to push at home, and by then, the hardware prices will have come down because of sales to businesses.

I was referring to stealing from our desktops and not paying for the content we consume en masse. Not the technology that enables it. Law and the public have not caught up to technology yet. Many of us still believe if it's done over a computer we should have the right to steal.

Ah, right. The recording industry and movie industries are both suffering terribly, what with overall sales up year-over-year since the appearance of file sharing. I forgot about that.

Many people, myself included, pay for their content. It's just nice to have a taste of it before you jump in.

It's not going to be doomed. It's going to be proprietary. So much for open source ruling the future. Fairplay is doing well now, but I give it no more than 2 yrs before apple rewrites it making it more than a wrapper on an open format or it will die. JMO.

Open Source hasn't lost until people cave into the proprietary standards entirely. Apple's walking a thin line at the moment, and it remains to be seend just how far it will go before either Apple or the industry gets tired of the way things are going. There will always be a core of people who won't accept the proprietary crap, though, and they're the ones who will create the next Napsters and DecSS when the new media comes out.

 

[thatwendigo]

Wow, that is some seriously wild speculation.

No, no, no... Wild speculation is when I say that Mac OS 10.4 will be 190% the speed of Panther, and that won't only be due to the 4.0ghz 975 dual-core, dual-processor (effectively quad-processor before SMT) machines that Steve Jobs demos QuartzX 9 (the DirectX port that fully accesses those cards that have been holding out on us) and the Red Box technology that was supposedly going be in Rhapsodt back in the day. Red Box is a WINE-like abstraction layer that allows PowerPC chips to emulate Windows APIs at a mere 15-20% performance hit, but because the 975 is so performance heavy, it doesn't matter.

The kicker is when he introduces a machine with only one of the dual-core chips as the PowerBook, which they then benchmark against all the top desktop processors and have compete or win. A roving Mac Performance tour will be taking the new machines around and making stops in major cities that have Apple stores, so that PC people can bring their custom rigs to square off against the new monster machines. Steve Jobs is invited to join the Kerry ticket as Vice President, but declines in favor of becoming CEO of Disney, who he uses to award Pixar the distribution deal they could never have before.

Armed with the might of his new media empire, Jobs buys three of the record studios and ends their anticompetitive practices by rolling them into a single entity that uses mac-equipped studios to offer time to up and coming bands so that they can have demos out on the iTMS. A new voting system is placed onto the store, so that these bands can pay an entry fee to get their music out and possibly win a contract by appealing to the public instead of to executives. This leads to the collapse of the other two studioes because they can't compete, and then Jobs spins off the music division once more, but not before creating a coporate charter that disbands all assets and returns any rights to the artists the moment that the basic policies are violated.

With IBM, AMD, and Freescale announcing a cooperative PowerPC design effort, a new generation of the architecture completely obliterates Intel's designs and Paul Thurrot is finally seen to admit that a mac can compete with windows. That's all we get out of him, even though all benchmarks, even those done by Intel, show that the new 980s are blowing away their chips, while running at a core temperature of only 30 watts. Apple and the others in the cooperative start an initiative to create a "budget" line where the low-end chips are competing with Intel's mid-to-top offerings, allowing OS X to come to those who have never touched it before.

A new, upgradable all-in-one replaces the iMac that was killed in 2004 (as it is now 2005), and it allows every single component of consequence to be swapped as if they were modules that had no bearing on the rest of the system. When new processors show up, the basic design has been created to be capable of handling anything on the roadmap, out through the next three years. It costs $1200 and is the return of computing for the rest of us.

Most users just want to be able to use their computers to email, surf, play and burn music, and type word documents. Most Linux distro's can already do this. Linux is light enough to run on something like an iPod. If major manufacturers stats backing Linux on their consumer desktops, I think the general public will catch on, specially if they can get fully functional computers for $200.

Consumer machines (not game machines or pro workstations) are eventually going to either nosedive or become ridiculously expensive, depending on who has theirr way. If Linux wins, then it will almost certainly drop, unless hardware companies get even greedier than they are.

 

[a_iver]

Its customizable

My dear lord, that Microsoft has thought of everything.

 

[jeffbistrong]

Beyond that Unix isn't inherently better then any other OS. Windows HAS the ability to be secure if they didn't recycle code and if they would rewrite the OS from the ground up and that is exactly what they are doing with Longhorn. They are rewriting from the ground up. Do you have any idea how many years longhorn has already been in development? I think they started in Fall of 2002. That is aprox 5 years this OS will be in development. A 5 year development timeframe tells me Microsoft IS taking development seriously. If they weren't serious they could simply pump out an OS next year. (In fact they are coming out with an interim XP release called Windows XP Reloaded.) Like it or not Microsoft has gotten the stability issue resolved with the NT core. Now they need to focus on security. If they can get that right (And from the looks of Windows XP SP2 they may be.) they could have a solid product.

For Windows to be secure . . . . they need to stop being greety be somewhat open source. That way all the security holes will be out there in the open, just like unix, and they will be fixed before anyone can get to them and exploit them. Then we can talk about secure. They should open up maybe just the NT core of the operating system. Let other people see it. They can copywright it, do what ever they want with the code, just get it out, they may be making progress. If they did this, then maybe they would face less lawsuits, less people would hate them, and more producivity. There will alwsys be flaws in anything, nothing is perfect, but then they can create a better product.

 

[MorganX]

For Windows to be secure . . . . they need to stop being greety be somewhat open source. That way all the security holes will be out there in the open, just like unix, and they will be fixed before anyone can get to them and exploit them. Then we can talk about secure.

Actually MS patches faster than open source and any other OS vendor according to security studies. Most other OS' ARE benefiting from obscuirty. Remember hackers want publicity and fame. You don't get that hacking 2% of the market.

After a vulerability is discovered, that's when hackers write for it. And it's not until tools to allow non-programmers to create exploits does it become a severe problem. Therefore the fastest to patch once a vulnerability is announced is scored highly when determining it's security. That is why Windows has been ranked more secure than Linux, Unix, OSS recently.