Longhorn Beta is Disappointing 1086
bonch writes "Well, Longhorn beta 5048 was released a day before the start of WinHEC 2005, suggestive of the fact that it is not terribly impressive. Paul Thurrott (a Windows writer whose previously reported review of Mac OS X Tiger was updated after user feedback) confirmed this today in day two of his blog from WinHEC. Microsoft needed something big to kill the hype of competitors, but screenshots show minor visual updates from the last beta, and to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'"
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:5, Informative)
Following on from what you said, considering that the system requirements for XP Pro [microsoft.com] state a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the real requirements for this thing could be huge. I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM.
If you'd ever been to Longhorn while skiing (Score:2, Informative)
The name of the project is a reflection of the ski hill area.
And so Longhorn is really just not that interesting, either.
Now, if it had been called Granite, from the Red Mountain Ski Area in the Purcells up in BC, instead of from the coastal mountains, we'd be cooking with gas!
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:2, Informative)
Regarding XP: I started out my current CPU with 256MB and it was acceptably fast until I ran anything, like Photoshop. A look at memory showed from start-up I had 50% free. When I moved up to 768MB I found I still had 50% free after startup. Only when I pushed it up to 1.3 GB did I notice startup consuming less than 50%, it seemed to cap around 370 MB, so there's obviously some formula for loading DLLs. The question is, will this practice extend to Longhorn and at what point do you get out 100% of the memory you add.
BTW: Win95 with 8 MB paged like there was no tomorrow.
Change much? (Score:2, Informative)
The buttons make perfect sense (Score:2, Informative)
Red (w/ power button icon): shutdown
Yellow (w/ remote power button icon) : stand by
Green (w/ spark icon): restart
If you can't associate green with "go", red with "stop" and yellow with "stand by", I hope you don't drive.
RMN
~~~
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:3, Informative)
Sure. Microsoft also told everyone that Windows 95 would run on a 486-66 with 4MB of RAM just fine too. And it did. If by running you meant lurching like a drunken backpacker with a cast and crutches.
Hearing that as the "just fine" spec makes me very concerned for what the real just fine spec is. Probably 1 gig of RAM and a 3GHz processor, I am guessing.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:2, Informative)
If all the components were slower in a laptop you'd notice a performance hit all the time, not just when you're paging or loading an app.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:1, Informative)
Baloney.
What's baloney? That my 128MB Windws XP systems runs Office 2003 just fine?
OS X runs decently on a 350mhz G3 with 256MB of RAM.
256MB of RAM? You mean twice the 128MB of memory that Microsoft is recommending for Windows XP? How well do you think OS X would run with 128MB of memory?
I SERIOUSLY doubt that Shoehorn is going to be anywhere close to that.
Based on?
It's bloated like Patrick Deuel after an all-you-can-eat buffet.
So far Windows XP seems to have the lowest memory requirements compared with Linux or OS X. Your "OS X runs on 256MB of memory just fine" argument does prove otherwise since we were talking about 128MB of memory...not 256MB
try "successor to OS 5" (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [wikipedia.org]
It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001
It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:1, Informative)
That's very true. On my machine, the graphics in KDE and Gnome are quite slow compared to Windows. The graphics in Windows hardly ever lag.
However, the slowness in graphics in Linux might be because of the number of services that are running (haven't checked what's running in depth), but I would guess that's not the only reason.
It's also true when compared to Windows 2000. I formatted and installed Windows XP (used to have 2000 installed) and it runs a whole lot faster than 2000 ever did on my machine. That's with a 533MHz processor and 256MB RAM.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:5, Informative)
Found it! (Score:3, Informative)
In short, a "|" really means "power on", as in physically connected to the mains, while "0" means "power off", as in physically disconnected.
When combined with an unbroken circle, as found on older monitors, it's a power toggle switch. The button is supposed to be sunken in while in the on position, and popped out while off. But it is still a physical power switch.
The broken-circle with line, as found on newer stuff, is "stand-by". Functionally, on my monitor and where I can find it the key part about its behaviour is that it only signals the device to turn off or on; it does not physically disconnect the power.
Still no sign of that green exploding circle icon though, but with a bit more training we might all eventually be able to shut down a Longhorn machine with confidence...
Re:Train wreck indeed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:1, Informative)
"A common trick to improve desktop performance...was to renice X to a negative number. The tuning in the 2.6 kernel scheduler...[is] specifically designed to not need [negative] nice levels for any normal userspace tasks... If X is reniced to a negative number it is very easy and in fact likely that audio playback will suffer under heavy use of the desktop... To see what nice level X is currently running at, start the 'top' utility and look in the column NI. 0 is ideal, and any negative number is bad. You can fix the situation instantly (as root) with 'renice 0 pidof X'..."
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:3, Informative)
Renicing it as suggested doesn't do much. If you were a Linux expert, I'd say install a kernel with pre-emptible syscalls... but if your distribution doesn't supply that already, I don't think the benefit would be worth the work you put in.
(Unless you consider "learning more about Linux kernels" to be a benefit on its own, in which case, go ahead)
Not a beta! (Score:3, Informative)
Sheesh, people.
At least have the intelligence to tell the diffrence between a beta and a preview build.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Train wreck indeed (Score:1, Informative)
Anyway, if you drag a font into the Fonts folder, the second half of the 3.x dialog appears to install it.
Incidentally, the font folder doesn't (now that I've played with it a bit) behave properly as a shell folder. For example, dragging fonts to the Recycle Bin is ignored. It should behave consistently when doing this.
And since when do you install apps by dragging them off a CD? Last time I checked the logo certification required you to use a
Re:Train wreck indeed (Score:2, Informative)
Long filenames are better than 8x3, but why squander characters uselessly? "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents" comes to mind
Why default to having filename extensions turned off? Is giving the 'type' field "Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation" and hiding the extension really better than showing the ".PPT" extension?
What in the world was on their minds when conceiving the 'improved' file search functions in XP's Explorer? This UI is just plain wrong
If you double-click on an unknown file type Explorer now defaults to a web search to find what program is likely to open it by generating a URL like this one
http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/
Problem is, if Firefox is the default browser then this doesn't do anything (haven't tried it with Opera or others, so don't know if only IE will work, but kinda suspect this is the case).
Part two of this is, if you choose the other option - "Select the program from a list" - then the next dialog box *still* defaults to "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file". I don't know how many times I've had to "fix" someone's computer where they didn't have the required program installed, said, "Yes" here, and related, for instance, a PDF file to open with "America Online".
Why have error messages become even more cryptic over the years? Why is it the embedded help is next to useless? Even DOS commands have the "HELP command" or "command
Why was it a good idea to 'integrate' IE into the OS? In IE v3 and earlier if I linked to a XLS worksheet the browser would open an instance of the program associated to that extension (Excel, in this case), and the user would get full usability.
In IE v4 and later the viewer that renders XLS file strips out Excel's print formatting capability and gives me the browser's much weaker one (I know - there are ways around it, but why take something simple, and useful, then transform it to a more complex and less useful entity)?
Why... why