Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

Gullible Jones · 2005-04-24 03:00:22

Wow, they're using Arch's unofficial slogan now...

Somehow, the ideas presented in the above article don't strike me as ones that will work out.

(Auto-defrag? My God... Why the hell can't they just switch to a better filesystem?)

poetofnumbers · 2005-04-24 06:31:26

I always have admired the ambitious slogan "It doesn't work unless it's right."

As far as auto-defrag, I don't think this is a bad thing for average users. Gamers will probably want to be able to turn this feature off, or have some assurance it won't start up in the middle of an intense death match. But for most people, Windows holds their hand. The article seems to confirm that Longhorn will continue to hold this market. Still, I'm interested to see what Microsoft produces.

Gullible Jones · 2005-04-24 10:36:00

Judging by what I've heard, something very bloated.

(They plan to implement a 3D DirectX-based desktop if you can believe it, with drop-shadows everywhere... Eyecandy to match E17, by default. :shock: )

(mez) · 2005-04-24 13:11:46

Well, something has to force people to upgrade their pc. Just want to get on the internet and use email? Well, tough. You'll need a 5GHz CPU and 3GB of RAM just to run our OS. But bear in mind that with such a low spec, IE won't even open. So believe us when we say that your 18 month old pc is obsolete, and Upgrade Now!

iphitus · 2005-04-24 13:15:01

'AutoDefrag' is completely idiotic.

Why dont they just write/steal a decent filesystem that doesnt need to be defragged?

Like reiserfs3/4 or even ext3.

iphitus

IceRAM · 2005-04-24 14:20:45

ipithus, note that dp discovered an important improvement in pacman's speed when 'defrag'-ing /var/pacman/lib (see this thread).

I didn't think defrag-ing was importat in Reiser3, until dp 'ruined' this dream. There must be some kind of explanation. I don't know much about Reiser3, but I am interested in improving performance.

darkcoder · 2005-04-24 14:47:08

iphitus wrote:

'AutoDefrag' is completely idiotic.
Why dont they just write/steal a decent filesystem that doesnt need to be defragged?
Like reiserfs3/4 or even ext3.
iphitus

I read a magazine review where they review many defrag programs from Windows own Defrag to Diskkeeper Pro, and found that the advantage on NTFS from defragging was not a big issue anyway.

polarrr · 2005-04-24 17:34:34

Oh man...you shouldn't have posted that defrag thread. While I was thinking "that's awesome!" and proceeded to do that, all of the sudden, brain fart clouded my mind and deleted the whole /var/lib/pacman directory. And I realized how nasty it is to have a fresh /var/lib/pacman directory. Nothing like a full system up and running, only to have pacman think I have no package whatsoever installed Reinstalling seemed like a quick fix, thus here I am, with freshly installed Arch! Feeling nice and clean now actually.

DarkPath · 2005-04-24 18:51:33

"It just works"...

more like...

"It just doesn't have any features we promised"

This would probably be of more interest to me if I wasn't already living the good life with Arch! 8)

dp · 2005-04-24 19:26:13

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 … 87&tid=218

i especially like this comment:

*raises hand*
Gates: "Yes. You there with your hand up."
Me: "Mr. Ballmer? Mr. Gates? What about spyware and virii on the Longhorn platform?"
Bill: "As our slogan says, 'It just works!'"
Me: "Oh."

(around middle page)

Gullible Jones · 2005-04-24 19:35:09

Yep... And it sure will, so long as they stick with Trident for the IE rendering engine. And so long as they plan to integrate IE with MS Antispyware... :shock:

shadowhand · 2005-04-24 21:40:19

I think Longhorn will be the downfall of Windows. Why? Because companies are going to hate it. How many IT guys are going to like having "auto-defrag" and "the ability to drop files into multiple folders"? I'm willing to guess not many.

dp · 2005-04-24 22:30:51

shadowhand wrote:

I think Longhorn will be the downfall of Windows. Why? Because companies are going to hate it. How many IT guys are going to like having "auto-defrag" and "the ability to drop files into multiple folders"? I'm willing to guess not many.

the "files into multiple folders"-concept i seem to have difficulties to understand. there is for ages the symlinking on more mature filesystems that does exactly this ... and if it is to be taken word-by-word, it would be a really downside having one file multiple times on the harddisk (what a waste of space)

the auto-defrag is something that makes sense once a year as a cron-job or so, but for sure not automagically done in background while you work on important documents (assuming something goes wrong, windows will crash, as we know from experience, and your work is lost unsaved)

in general, the automatic doings of os's like windows make me think it is dangerous - i "feel" more save working on important stuff on an os like (arch)linux where you know that nothing will be done automatically, if you don't like it to happen (and you can turn it off!) ... if machines do too much on their own, this makes humans nervous ... didn't we learn nothing from science-fiction?

Gullible Jones · 2005-04-24 22:41:32

Remember, Windows 2003 will probably be updated for some time to come... And from what I've seen and heard, it looks like a halfway-decent operating system. If the patches keep on coming, I don't see why companies will abandon it.

(Okay, Windows 2003 is only halfway-decent if you don't count the cost... $1000+ is bloody ridiculous for an operating system that doesn't even use permissions.)

dp · 2005-04-25 00:41:33

why paying for windows if you can pay for mac osx and have a much better solution?

to tell the truth: if there would be natively available ms-office for linux (e.g. with mono), i would pay for it (student licence) and definitely drop my windows partition for ever ... the core windows architecture is crap and will always be if not written from tabula rasa the right way (listening to unix/linux/... people how a OS should work (start with permissions and file structure))

;-)

cactus · 2005-04-25 00:55:20

Wasn't the NT kernel build by that VMS guy?

Gullible Jones · 2005-04-25 01:13:05

Dunno, haven't any experience with it. I know the 9x kernel was written by a drunkard, though.

iphitus · 2005-04-25 02:03:41

IceRAM wrote:

ipithus, note that dp discovered an important improvement in pacman's speed when 'defrag'-ing /var/pacman/lib (see this thread).
I didn't think defrag-ing was importat in Reiser3, until dp 'ruined' this dream. There must be some kind of explanation. I don't know much about Reiser3, but I am interested in improving performance.

No filesystem is immune to fragmentation but many do a good job at avoiding fragmentation.

Just take note at the fact he's been running since 0.4, so just think of how many files have been created/removed/updated/changed in his pacman directory.

But most of us here havnt been running since 0.4, and i reinstall yearly to clean my system out, removing programs i compiled from source but didnt PKGBUILD, so fragmentation is not really a big issue for most. And besides, of course pacman will be a lot faster after moving the directory, all the files will have been cached in memory.

Either way, you must agreee, NTFS is a terrible filesystem. My friend runs XP and he defrags weekly because it gets so fragmented, or at least, much more fragmented than ext3 or reiser*

And the files in multiple folders, it'll just be form of symlink. With all the filesystem related features ms have been touting, unix permissions and now symlinks, you cant help but wonder where they're going to steal this all from.

cmp · 2005-04-25 07:58:41

From what I guess this "files-in-multiple-folders" paradigm has nothing to do with symlinks. It's should be the meta data of the files, so you could categorize your files. Of course this could be also achived with symlinks, but this seems to be a pain in the ass.
I think this idea of the MS folk is kinda cool.

dp · 2005-04-25 10:12:57

cmp wrote:

From what I guess this "files-in-multiple-folders" paradigm has nothing to do with symlinks. It's should be the meta data of the files, so you could categorize your files. Of course this could be also achived with symlinks, but this seems to be a pain in the ass.
I think this idea of the MS folk is kinda cool.

cmp: if i understand right, this is what winfs should do: provide a db-like access/storage of data on the drive. if so, the files are not at all in multiple folders but you simply have multiple queries having the same file as a result. if i'm right, then MS tries to confuse people instead of explaining them how databases work - argh!

kth5 · 2005-04-25 10:15:40

cmp wrote:

From what I guess this "files-in-multiple-folders" paradigm has nothing to do with symlinks. It's should be the meta data of the files, so you could categorize your files. Of course this could be also achived with symlinks, but this seems to be a pain in the ass.
I think this idea of the MS folk is kinda cool.

but doesn't that idea come from macos? take not even os9, all macos had the feature of copying one app to a folder (no matter where) and just about any corresponding document would automaticly get associated with it. i think they do something like this with files. store them centrally somewhere and just reference them in a "virtual directory".

dp · 2005-04-25 10:40:53

kth5 wrote:

cmp wrote:
From what I guess this "files-in-multiple-folders" paradigm has nothing to do with symlinks. It's should be the meta data of the files, so you could categorize your files. Of course this could be also achived with symlinks, but this seems to be a pain in the ass.
I think this idea of the MS folk is kinda cool.
but doesn't that idea come from macos? take not even os9, all macos had the feature of copying one app to a folder (no matter where) and just about any corresponding document would automaticly get associated with it. i think they do something like this with files. store them centrally somewhere and just reference them in a "virtual directory".

i don't know macos in detail, but it may most probably be so ... as you described it, it is similar to .desktop files, right? (i don't have much access to macos)

kth5 · 2005-04-25 10:47:40

dp wrote:

i don't know macos in detail, but it may most probably be so ... as you described it, it is similar to .desktop files, right? (i don't have much access to macos)

well not exatcly, i know from macos 7 that every parttition with hfs(+) on it can have a Desktop folder which gets merged with the one on the hdd you're booting from. files with the same name get indexed though. all this is just a visual solution, it doesn't touch the physical files.
anyhow, wherever a new 'drive' was plgged in macos will index it and look for new apps to use as well. that takes some time... heh

thegnu · 2005-04-25 20:46:00

dp wrote:

why paying for windows if you can pay for mac osx and have a much better solution?

Not to knock Mac OS, as it IS a *better* solution, but...

1. It is illegal to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, as per their licensing agreement
2. Mac OS has terrible hardware support in comparison to Windows
3. It's very very finicky about the hardware it runs on

I'm convinced that at least 50% of the instability issues commonly attributed tp poor Windows design is because of crappy hardware. Apple sells an equivalent to a $500 Dell at >$1000. If you spend >$1000 on PC hardware, you get a heck of a box. If Apple dominated the market, we'd be in worse shape than we are with Microsoft, IMO. Isn't one of the reasons why PPC Linux isn't that big because the hardware is relatively obtuse to figure out? God, try installing Linux on one of those early, fugly iMacs.

As far as the filesystem thing goes, I think MS specifically DIDN'T take an open source filesystem because they don't want to endorse them. NTFS really isn't all THAT bad, I think (except that it's like eight years old). Isn't the filesystem going to have a database view? I thought that's what the "files in two places" thing was about. You can create filters to view your files by, and save those filters as view folders.

I'm interested in what Longhorn turns out to be. I'm scared, but intrigued.

phrakture · 2005-04-25 20:57:29

cactus wrote:

Wasn't the NT kernel build by that VMS guy?

Yes. The original idea was created by him, but basterdized by the entire team - he spoke up about it at one point, saying that most of his stuff didn't work the way he intended...

Arch Linux

#1 2005-04-24 03:00:22

Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#2 2005-04-24 06:31:26

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#3 2005-04-24 10:36:00

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#4 2005-04-24 13:11:46

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#5 2005-04-24 13:15:01

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#6 2005-04-24 14:20:45

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#7 2005-04-24 14:47:08

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#8 2005-04-24 17:34:34

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#9 2005-04-24 18:51:33

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#10 2005-04-24 19:26:13

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#11 2005-04-24 19:35:09

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#12 2005-04-24 21:40:19

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#13 2005-04-24 22:30:51

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#14 2005-04-24 22:41:32

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#15 2005-04-25 00:41:33

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#17 2005-04-25 01:13:05

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#18 2005-04-25 02:03:41

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#19 2005-04-25 07:58:41

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#23 2005-04-25 10:47:40

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#24 2005-04-25 20:46:00

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

#25 2005-04-25 20:57:29

Re: Windows Longhorn: "It Just Works"

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