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.'"
Opinions on GUI. (Score:2, Interesting)
Does/did the Windows 2k classic style GUI really need replacing?
Scroll bar in menu (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? There's still room on the screen for it to taller. A scroll bar should be the last resort.
Yuck.
The WinHec demo seemed ok to me (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not interested in getting in a comparative argument with some other eye-candy oeprating system that apparently ships this month; i'm only speaking about longhorn in terms of what i saw demoed and comparing it to what windows xp does today.
One interesting thing i noticed is that i thought some of the demos would be a bit.. "cooler". The underlying possibilities with the new frameworks that are going in should really have some growing room in them that the demos really didn't convey.. or so i'd think.
The Metro format was a surprise to me as well. I'd be curious to see some sort of technical analysis of it. Note also that from a cursory glance it seems like a royalty free format that wouldn't necessarily shut out F/OSS implementations.
Riiiiight . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
If it is bad, Paul is the guy who should be the one to call it first, he's life is so tied up with Windows Development.
Second, by calling it a "train wreck" prior to release allows him to provide a nice counterpoint to his ridiculous cheerleading, so that when Longhorn is released, he can whoop and holler and say stuff like "It was touch and go for a while, but MS has released the greatest OS since TOPS-20!".
The fact that Longhorn likely WILL be a trainwreck is orthogonal to whether Paul would call it one at this point in it's development.
Longhorn - overrated (Score:2, Interesting)
Shadows in the shadow world (Score:5, Interesting)
No offense (Score:1, Interesting)
No offense, but why...because you don't like to use a non-MS browse, but want the features of firefox?
Honestly, I don't know a technical user that uses IE these days. And further, I look forward to Longhorn with dread because it has DRM wrapped into the core. Longhorn will be the decision point to whether my next PC will be an x86 or a Mac.
Re:ummmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I say this from Firefox running in Windowmaker with several partially obscured xterms peeking out behind it.
What I'm wondering, is whether M$ will have sense enough to steal OSX's network "location" feature, so that I don't have to tell customers that there is no easy way to set up their XP machine to have a static on our DSL, and DHCP when they take the laptop to work. Might not hurt to lose the "we won't let you start IE from a fresh install" thing they have going on too...
Re:No offense (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not alone, and I think it's reasonable to wonder if the future of the PC platform rests on how well Longhorn turns out. I can buy a Mac that performs, is dead-sexy (and small) enough to sit on top of the desk, and runs a really sweet OS.
Plus, a lot more people are talking about Macs than they are about the big grey box hidden under the table.
Re:Train wreck indeed (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I have a healthy dislike for XP over the very clean Win2K and I don't welcome more of the same. Just pointing out that what you see now is unlikely to be what you see when the product actually ships.
TW
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you need to look more into what services are running.
Re:They can't ever do the "right" thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
What utter drivel. They're both operating systems, aren't they? Both offer the same basic functionality to users, don't they? If I were looking to migrate from one to the other, wouldn't I have to directly compare both on some level?
"Different validation"? What on earth...?
Longest... learning curve... ever. (Score:3, Interesting)
"So how do I stop the computer?"
"You press 'Start'."
[Cue head pounding]
Re:Pre beta review (Score:4, Interesting)
...only if it's easy to disable. The last thing I need is my users joining to another domain and getting a)the other domain's domain admins have Administrator rights over the laptop and b)all the logon scripts and group policy of the other domain are convieniently applied to their computer. Translation for all you Unix and NetWare admins out there:it's like hopping over to a client site and giving root on your laptop to their admins. Why would you want to do that?
I have actually had end users join their laptops to the domains at client sites for one reason or another and my head started spinning around and smoke came shooting out of my ears. If they make this any easier I'll start doing flips in mid-air, I'm sure.
Like I said, easy to turn off then no problem. Easier to turn on and I will cry.
Windows 2000 Redux (Score:3, Interesting)
Admittedly, I love three features that I have experienced on XP machines:
- Having the ability to monitor network traffic in the task monitor
- Running multiple users simultaneously
- ClearType
Despite these nice features, well, there just seems to be some deep, overall suckiness with Windows XP. It doesn't seem right: It's like Microsoft forgot why it was in business.Has anyone else experienced this feeling? Is anyone else worried about the day when drivers for new hardware no longer work in Win2K?
Public release Holiday 2005 is not far off (Score:3, Interesting)
Also in the main article is the expection of RTM in Mid-2006, but more importantly the "public release" for holiday 2005 (whatever that means - I'm guess the "holiday" is not Halloween!).
That would seem to me that around the end of the year they'd have the product pretty much done if they felt it ready for public consumption. So if people are complaining of features they do not see now, that seems pretty justified given the short amount of runway Microsoft really has left to them. It seems to me that for something the size of an OS, beta 1 at least would be "feature complete" if not perfect. And as I said beta is very close now.
Personally I do feel it's way to early to call for a "train wreck" but this guy also knows more than most of us, so perhaps that's an intuitive statement based on a larger body of knowledge than we have access to.
Ominous (Score:3, Interesting)
I am entirely confident, and have been for some time, that one way or another, Longhorn is going to represent Microsoft's last stand...this will be made even more certain if it is a failure. I've said it before and I'll say it again...Microsoft have never had a coherent roadmap after NT 4, and that fact is now clearly showing.
Bankruptcy won't be here for a while yet, but market irrelevance is coming up fast...I'm predicting that by 2012 at the latest, Windows' market share will have almost completely evaporated.
If you're a Microsoft shareholder, I have one word of advice for you at this point: Sell. This is one ship which, when the sinking process is closer to completion, you really won't want to still be on.
Re:Bwahahaha (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting desktop background... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Train wreck indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Try bringing up c:\windows\fonts or Control Panel->Fonts.
Then File->Install New Font.
What appears? A genuine Windows 3.x dialog box. I kid you not. One with 16-colour icons and separate controls for choosing the drive and the directory. One which looked old in Windows 95 and is still in Windows 2003.
There's a picture of it in action at http://www.ascendercorp.com/fonthelp/fonthelp_win
These sorts of problems are really sloppy.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way I could get it to even boot was to disable the Soundblaster 16 driver. The drive didn't take a break at all from swapping until I shut down.
Technically, it ran. I'm not looking forward to Longhorn.
tired of the Apple fan fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm tired of every story on Linux or Windows being used by Macintosh fanboys to attempt to promote Apple. Every time it's the same lies, distortions, and inaccuracies. What do I have to do in order not to see that kind of junk anymore?
As for Tiger, just about every supposed "innovation" in it (scripting, RSS, search, Dashboard, Video Chat, etc.) is either not new, or even a blatant rip-off from some other company. As far as I'm concerned, Apple seems to be back to their old evil ways: patents, false marketing claims, and blatant rip-offs. The engineers who ran MacOS into the ground seem to be in charge with OS X again. The software architecture still sucks relative to something modern. But, unlike a few years ago, Apple doesn't even have a research lab anymore, nor do they even manufacture their hardware anymore.
Guys, please spare us both the debate: keep Apple fan fiction to the Apple section.
Re:Shadows in the shadow world (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been a longtime user and administrator of Apple machines. I don't work for Apple, as you seem to point out in every single one of your Slashdot posts, but I do know something about the company.
10.0 should have been the "Public Beta." Sure, Apple was going through an important transition period, but 10.0 was so incredibly bad that it perpetrated myths about OS X which still haunt Apple. Eye candy grinding the system to a halt? Spinning rainbow of doom? Unresponsive Finder? God forbid we begin to discuss the developer releases and betas. Apple menu? No Apple menu? ah HA! Lets put a blue Apple in the middle of the menubar where it can be covered up by text.
Give me a break. Apple's fucked things up, and recently. In production software, no less. It's all fine and good to make fun of Microsoft on Beer nights, but when you come home to the company that released iTunes 2.0 (aka iDelete) you should be a little humble.
Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None (Score:2, Interesting)
No Fedora is really the king of bloat, it is not designed to be backwardly compatible. I did try to run Fedora on an old box and it was a disaster. Having set that I still think Fedora is well worth considering at say 256MB or more, I have never found hardware problems with it.
>it's using 14M on my system.
LOL, I think here they mean GNU/Linux rather than just the kernel, you can't do much with just the kernel. The kernel is pretty fat, hopefully Hurd/L4 will get going one day...
> I doubt any modern version of Linux would be any better than Windows XP with only 128MB of memory.
I disagree, Windows XP is a dog at anything under 512MB, however I have an old laptop where the latest Gentoo happily runs at 64MB (although it took a week to install). The latest Slackware runs good too.
The great thing is that you can cut your cloth according to your hardware, Gnome for a megabeast, XFCE for older hardware and Ratpoison if you want to be really cool. By using a goo with a smaller memory footprint you can save quite a lot of RAM.
With Windows there is no way to keep older hardware going because it is unsupported by Microsoft. With tender loving care, Computers can run far longer than five years. The environmental damage of throwing a perfectly working computer in the bin is unacceptable.
Increasingly I think that computers will increasingly be made more sturdy (at least in the EU where the law is changing to make the manufacturers responsible for the cost of disposal) and boxes will keep moving much faster through several owners, starting off in a business, then a rich western house, then a student, then a two-thirds world student etc.
Re:tired of the Apple fan fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
In my opinion the post-1998 hardware and software have really gone the other way. PCI, USB, AGP, ATA/SATA, DVI, these are all familiar. BSD, OpenGL, PDF, LDAP, SMB, yes HTML and RSS, these are all familiar and not invented at Apple. And these things are much of what is under the hood on MacOS X.
So now should we berate them or praise them for adopting good industry standards and not reinventing more of them? Maybe this qualifies as a little less "innovative" but IMHO this is scoring much higher on the "pragmatic and timely" axis.
NVIDIA doesn't build any of their own hardware either. So is that good or bad again?
Runs fine in 64MB too (Score:3, Interesting)
As I discovered after installing it, Windows XP runs just fine in 64 Meg of RAM on a 400 Mhz PII. Course this was a lab system that only had to run the latest version of our backup software, and a VNC server. (ECC RAM is required more is out of the question) I do all my real work on machines running FreeBSD, but when you make your money from Microsoft Windows you have to test with it once in a while.
Re:Shadows in the shadow world (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.
Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.
Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.
It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating system, replacing things that are dumb with things that make more sense.
So tell me again, oh please, how Mac OS X is a 20th-century concept.
Re:Why do they need Longhorn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple users, such as myself, are enthusiasts. When Tiger comes out, we'll be in line at the Apple store, or waiting at our mailbox for it. But that's because we love Apple products and trust Steve, our deity, to pull something wonderful out of the his hat for us. So much for $129.
Windows' deity is Bill, and frankly Windows users seem to have a love/hate relationship with him. Consider Windows XP Service Pack 2. Nobody's being asked to pay $129 for it, even though it took about the same amount of work to produce as Tiger. It's free. And the Kool-Aid drinkers in major corporations are still rejecting it, because they know it will give them nothing but throbbing migraines for the next month. Such is the reputation of Microsoft and its updates.
So look. If you're having trouble getting people to accept your essential update for free, can you imagine how tough it is to get people to pay for the next version?
So Bill's minions have no choice but to try and make their new system the greatest thing since sliced bread. Frankly, I don't see how they're going to do it because the pain of moving to a new Windows version is just plain huge, and people know this now.
D
Re:Shadows in the shadow world (Score:3, Interesting)
Not correct. A click outside a widget dismisses Dashboard.
It's a subtle bug (and I am using a legit final copy of 8A428):
1. Activate Dashboard
2. Move a widget (I tried a sticky and the weather widget) over the Menu Extras area (i.e. iChat/Volume/Clock)
3. Release the mouse button.
4. Click AND HOLD on the widget over where a Menu Extra would appear (i.e. click on the widget where the menu bar clock would be).
5. Drag the mouse. The Menu Extra's menu is revealed.
This does not affect the any of the 'standard' menu items, nor the Apple or Spotlight Menus. It is also possible to initially position the widget over any location in the menu bar, click and hold the widget such that the mouse pointer is over the menu bar, then drag the widget over the menu extras and see the same error.
It's not a big deal. But the problem is still there. =) I accidentally encountered this problem last night.
Re:Shadows in the shadow world (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand the question. Spotlight indices are stored on the volume itself. It's not like you're copying data from the removable volume to your system disk.
But if you want to exclude a volume, all you have to do is drag it to the privacy pane of the Spotlight prefs window.
Whatever name you choose, it is definitely one thing: INCONSISTENT.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If you're looking to Apple never to change anything ever, you're using the wrong company's products.
Also: Wailing about textured windows has precisely as much effect today as it did five years ago: none at all. Don't like 'em? Buy a PC. It's a free country.
Here's another bug for you to check off: Even if you enable the root user, you cannot drag executable files between folders in the System tree.
Do me a favor and help me come up with a reason why you would ever want to do that.
Re:Shadows in the shadow world (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure that's true. But it ain't workin'. Go look for yourself. Type Wo or Ya or Tu and tell me that they look right to you. Get somebody to fix it and I will happily stop spreading false informations.
I removed the
That's fine. I was talking about
If you hose
That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".
So if it were just the torch-and-pitchfork-waving Internet mob and not Moglen and his cadre of fanatics, that would somehow be okay with you?
I am also sure you'll find websites like http://i18n.kde.org/ [kde.org] worth reading.
Yes, I certainly did. The lesson? You have a very, very long way to go. I mean come on. Environment variables? And four different ones at that?
In order to localize, you have to adapt not just the UI language, but the number and currency formats, date and time formats, the system calendar and measurement units. For example, if you pick up your computer and move it to Tel Aviv, you have to switch the language to Hebrew and the writing system to right-to-left. You have to use the Hebrew calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar. You have to use 24-hour time instead of 12-hour time. You do get to continue to use the ###,###.## number format, but you have to switch currency units to the new sheqel and units of measurement to metric.
That's localization. Linux can't even approximate it yet.
Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous.
You know we're not talking about DHCP here, right? We're talking about the fact that the routing table dynamically reconfigures itself based on available interfaces via configd. We're talking about the fact that if you're currently using your AirPort card and you plug in to an Ethernet port, all your services will invisibly move over to the new port instantly without interruption.
Beyond that, yes, we have Bonjour. Which, incidentally, we give away for free in a POSIX-compliant reference implementation on our Web site.
The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.
And that would have been really cool, had anybody actually done anything about it. Nobody did until we came along. We took the Zeroconf spec and turned it into Rendezvous, which thanks to a trademark settlement is now Bonjour. In the process, we built it into everything, created a compliance logo program for it, and distributed reference implementations to vendors. Now Bonjour is built into every network printer
Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.
I've lost track of which article you're quoting. But believe me, okay? I'm sitting in front of a computer with Tiger right this very second. The cron daemon is not running.
See for example http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/ [tldp.org]
How is a blind person supposed to read a lengthy tutorial? Aside from that, the document you refer to consists of a lengthy list of third-party work-arounds for services that should be a core part of the operating system. Should be? No, in this case, they have to be. It's a bootstrap probl