You’re referring to XAML, right? When I saw the demo, the Microsoft people were suggesting that one could write XAML, publish it next to HTML pages, and then the OS could download the XAML and run it as an application, just like a browser displays a page.
Is this still the plan? How will this affect non-Windows computers? Will there be other Linux/Mac/Non-windows “application browsers” that can run XAML?
What will Longhorn be?
The latest C’T talks about just that:
Heavy on .NET - which C’T doesn’t think much of.
Pseudo use of open standards - the MS implementations of different standards (XML and certain Web services are mentioned) are almost but not quite standard, and the “not quite” spots aren’t documented as to how they differ from the standard.
No change in the MS policies regarding documentation of APIs - this goes against the court decisions in the cases against Microsoft, but MS doesn’t care.
Further integration of applications and operating system - WinFS will be a database built into the OS to provide a system wide address book that all applications can use, but which will most especially benefit Microsoft’s own PDA and cellphone products.
Expanded DRM - to make it harder to use programs or view content that is not approved.
Higher requirements on the PC - 800MHz and 256MByte RAM are listed as the minimum.
Automatic indexing of files and their content with WinFS. Can you say “Big Brother” and “Performance block?”
MS says it will improve security and stability - they’ve been saying this for a long time and about every new version. Things do seem to be getting better - slowly.
The current test version eats 4GBytes of hard drive space - they expect that to drop by at least 1 GByte by the final version. That is without a single application, mind you. No office, no graphics editor, just what Windows brings withit.
Killer vector graphics for the icons - they’ll scale beautifully, but you need a faster graphic card to deal with them.
An image based install - the setup routine copies an image of a functioning system onto your hard drive and then modifies it to make work with your hardware. Faster setup time is the result.
Drive letters will be hidden in the Explorer - it shows the volume names instead, although you can specifically request the drive letters if you want them
The search function searches in WinFS, if you want to search the whole drive you have to use the advanced options - which then also want to search the internet. Lovely.
Outlook express no longer has its own mailbox files, it uses WinFS to store your stuff. This could make for lots of fun when you try to migrate to another (non-MS) email client. It also means that OE only runs if you have it on an NTFS partition.
The firewall is active automatically on all network connections - oh, ducky. You’ve got to poke holes in your firewall before you can share files on your LAN. Maybe the final version will do this automatically when you make a share. The current test version doesn’t, though.
A massive pardigm change - Windows gets a split personality supported by special hardware. Half of the system is the conventional windows system and the other half is the NEXUS trusted system. Nexus doesn’t trust the standard system, and only takes data from it through a filter that looks for nasty stuff. Nexus also does all the secure crap that supports DRM and TPM with extra hardware.
This isn’t all, of course. Just the stuff that sticks out.
That looks like the plan. Scares the crap outa me, though. A Web page that can be executed as code? Scary shit.
There probably won’T be any “application browsers” for other systems at first. You saw the note up above, XAML is just that little bit different from XML - and not clearly documented as where the differences are.
BTW:
C’T is talking about the first release of Longhorn in 2006.
Don’t know if this is good or bad, but Clippy will be replaced by the Big Haired Lady. 
How’s this any different from, say, Java? The security issue of web-based code will be based on having a proper sandbox to play in, to allow code to not hit core components. In theory, Longhorn has this security, especially because said web components are running via .NET managed code.
Not too off-topic…
I’ve been running Win98 SE since shortly after it was released, and I’ve yet to see any compelling reason to “upgrade.” Every program I’ve considered purchasing in the last few years runs just fine on it. It runs my DOS stuff, it runs my Windows stuff. When software and hardware manufacturers start dropping support for Win98 in large numbers, I’m off to Linux. (Windows 2000 looks more appealing than XP, but I’m not sure all of my hardware would work with it.) So far though, everybody seems to be maintaining support for my OS.
I’m interested to know what the knowledgeable among you think about this. Am I missing anything important by not switching to a more recent version of Windows?
Mort Ford - Where is this article you’re talking about? I have no idea what C’T is.
I like the built-in firewall idea. I know XP uses it, but I’m not sure if it’s enabled by default (I still stick with Windows 2000 and plan to for the forseeable future). Too many people I know with high speed Internet access don’t even know what a firewall is. Then, when I tell them, they don’t really seem to care! Even after I tell them about all the people who got nailed by Blaster while those of us who weren’t even patched were never affected due to our firewalls!
Whatever, people. Install free software at almost no effort to you OR end up paying valuable U.S. currency to me to clean up the mess that shouldn’t have happened. Your choice.
As long as you can turn the firewall off (and install your own if you want), this seems like a good plan.
That one seems strange. It just seems to be a superficial GUI change for no apparent reason. Am I missing something here?
Poor Windows 2000 device support is largely a myth. I’ve found very few hardware products that had drivers for other Windows OSs, but not 2000. In fact, many manufacturers are going to the Windows Driver Model (WDM) these days:
(Sorry, missed this quote or I’d have put it in my previous post.)
Well, it really depends what your requirements are. Windows 2000 and XP and far more stable than 98SE. They use a more robust, secure, and efficient filesystem (NTFS) than Win98 (FAT32). 2000 and XP are the children of Windows NT, which was made for server environments, so stability was a great concern.
2000 and XP also offer built-in file compression, though with drives as cheap as they are now, file size isn’t a big problem anymore. XP has a built-in ZIP file extractor and CD burning support.
There are many other differences, as well.
Check out MS’s Windows 2000 Product Information and a similar page for XP for more information.
Whoops. Clarification. I meant the CD burner was built in to the OS. Obviously any modern OS can burn CDs with third party programs - even DOS.
I don’t understand what any of this means. Total gobbledygook.
What I want to know is; how good will the games be?
For games, probably the same as XP, with three exceptions.
Of course, this is all speculation, and depends more on the individual game programmers than the OS.
C’T is one of the most respected computer magazines here in Germany. Very good, and very thorough.
Their test reviews of the latest SLR digital cameras looks like something that came out of the testing labs of the camera manufacturers - they went to the trouble of having high precision test patterns printed (offset print or something) and developing special software to evaluate the pictures made. The end result is a set of number that tell you the real optical acuity of the camera.
Much the same way, they are very thorough and critical in their software reviews. They’ll tell you about all the “gee-whiz” stuff - but they keep firmly in mind the “under the hood” stuff that nobody sees but that still has to work properly.
As for the firewall, whether is should be on by default (or not) really sort of depends on the targeted user. A business user shouldn’t need a personal firewall - his company’s servers should be adequate to the job. A home user, on the other hand, probably should have it on by default - as you say, most home users don’t know what a firewall is. Typical reaction of a home user “Firewall? Whazzat? Can you eat it?”
At any rate, C’T has gotten a copy of the latest beta (or is it alpha?) of Longhorn and tore it to shreds - just like they do any piece of software.
What’s good they hold up for you to see - but they also point out the bad spots.
Oh, gee thank you MS. Do you think my 33.6K modem is up to the job?
It is strange, and at least partly cosmetic - it moves Windows a little away from the archaic drive letters and closer to the appearance of the unix style file systems.
Longhorn will supposedly be more flexible in which drive is what, no longer adhering strictly to the drive and partion numbering scheme that backs the drive letters. Win NT (since V4.0 that I know of) been able to reassign drives and stuff dynamically - except for the C: drive.
Apparently this all isn’t perfectly integrated yet in Longhorn - C’T tells of installing it onto the second partition of a drive and having it work just fine. Until they tried to change some boot options. Then Longhorn couldn’t find the boot file. It must still be on the first partition of the first drive, and still was. Problem is that that wasn’t C: anymore but D: - and the boot option program was still expecting it on C:
I’m more interested in what WON’T be there - eg. Windows XP made it a lot more difficult for me to process Java, MP3, Indeo, etc…
The difference to Java is that Java is not the basis of everything your operating system does - and MS is pushing XAML as the base of the whole system.
There is a short sample of code in the C’T article that opens a window with an OK button and say “Hello.” Straight XAML, pure text, and all you do is point the browser at it and it opens up and looks like any other program under Windows.
Maybe this will be adequately locked down in the sandbox - but maybe not.
“.NET managed” doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence in me, not with Microsoft’s security track record.
It’s kinda hard to sum up what Longhorn is. It’s a whole load of stuff.
Mort Furd covered a lot of the ground in his post. I think a few of the points raised are more C’T editorial opinion than genuine criticisms though. Maybe I’ve misunderstood some of the points being made; anyway I’ve posted my observations below:
They’re entitled to their opinion, of course, but I think the use of managed code in Longhorn is without doubt a good thing.
Bear in mind this isn’t even a beta version of the software. It’s non-commercial, available only to MSDN subscribers so they’re not required to meet the requirements of the court orders on this release. I’ve seen a lot of documentation with the big red “subject to change…” disclaimer on it, so it’s unlikely that the code interfaces are finalised yet let alone the documentation.
Which open standards are they adding “pseudo” support for? Web services aren’t standards. XML is a standard, but I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that MS is abandoning it for a “pseudo” implementation.
System wide address book has been in Windows since version 3. Outlook uses it, my (non-MS based) PDA uses it. It’s not especially good so a lot of software uses it just as a master list and keeps its own annotations separately. What’s the problem with making it better? The API is there, documented, for any developer to use.
I may be alone here, but I actually want integrated DRM. I want to use the management abilities it will give me - quite a few document-centric businesses are also eager to see consumer-level DRM become available.
Most NT-based versions of Windows already do this (Indexing service). It’s not known as a big performance issue. I have no idea why you think this is a “Big Brother” move. I’m not sure that being able to find my own files counts; can I invade my own privacy?
Very true, and it goes even further than that with the whole Avalon GUI system being vector based. It will put some serious demands on the graphics hardware, but it’s becoming a necessary step in the evolution of operating systems. I habitually run at very high resolutions on a big monitor and my system icons are absolutely tiny - we need to be able to flexibly scale these vital parts of a GUI to keep pace with the expanding resolutions and workspace provisions.
If MS is to make this OS secure it really has to run on NTFS partitions. FAT32 and below do not support security rights, and so cannot be the basis for a secure OS.
Migrating to other email clients should actually become easier. WinFS will be, by necessity, an openly documented system so any migration routine should be able to trivially retrieve the contents of an OE inbox. It’s not like Eudora, Netscape and other non-MS email clients have subscribed to a giant unified email store that Longhorn has now rejected. They all have their own proprietary systems as well - let’s see if they’ll store their content in the indexing filesystem or maintain their proprietary formats.
Not necessarily a split personality, but a management of trust boundaries and an assessment of how much any piece of code is trusted. All data that crosses a trust boundary should pass through some kind of filter since it is being moved into an area of escalated privilege.
I should perhaps have been more clear in my post.
The points listed are ones that I picked out - not the magazine. The actual article ran to about ten pages (I don’t have it in hand right now.)
As for “Big Brother” and “Performance block:”
Given the MS tendency to transfer data back to MS, and not tell you exactly what is being transferred (license/registration stuff,) do you really want a condensed version of the contents of your drive prepares and waiting? This is the “Big Brother” aspect.
As for a performance block, in all versions of Windows that I’ve used (at work, I don’t let it in my home) the indexing has without fail always kicked in at some inconvenient time. For this reason, I have always turned it off at the first convenient opportunity.
As for WinFS and Outlook Express mail folders, I’ll say this:
Netscape and others use simple flat text files that anyone can read. Eudora piddles with it a bit (the last version I used stored attachments as seperate files,) but you can still open it with a text editor and do something useful with it if your mail program dies.
I see nothing, anywhere, that says that the WinFS format will be any better documented than other MS formats.
Pseudo standards? XAML. It is not quite straight XML, it is XML with MS extensions. Anyone who has watched MS for any length of time has seen it all before - Embrace and extend.
I won’t argue at all about the NTFS partitions - FAT32 is completely naked with regards to user rights, so this is a good thing. It does make me wonder about the construction of WinFS, though. WinFS is (supposedly) a database. Why should that be melded so tightly with the filesystem?
I’ve not personally experienced a performance problem with the Indexing Service. Of course it’s a world of different hardware out there and it’s bound to perform differently in different places. We’ll just have to wait and see really.
I think it’s unlikely that MS are building a system that allows them to transfer your entire harddisk back to Redmond. Such actions cannot be hidden and would be revealed quite soon after the OS launches. I know a lot of people think Bill routinely rummages through their dirty laundry (for example the hoo-ha about IE maintaing a “secret” history that you can’t delete - just a combination of a problem with the IE5-IE6 upgrade and the usual anti-MS FUD) but I’m not sure what the gain from MS’s point of view is. They’ve got internet connections there - they can go get their own porn; they don’t need to steal mine! Besides, I can just use the Longhorn DRM to deny them access to my documents ;).
WinFS has to have a documented API. If it doesn’t, what use is it? It’s not a format, it’s a service-oriented concept and I’ve always found MS to be very generous with their documentation for these kinds of things. The documentation on http://longhorn.mdsn.microsoft.com is still patchy (and still covered with disclaimers about it being likely to change), but it’s there.
XAML absolutely is straight XML. It obeys the rules of form, declares its namespaces and can validate against a schema. Of course it has MS “extensions”; that’s kinda the whole point of XML - y’know, the “X” part. Part of the atraction, for me, to the Avalon/XAML model is the ability to build data-driven interfaces on the fly using XSL/T to manipulate XML data into XML-conformant XAML. For XAML to not be well-formed XML would make many of the benefits of moving to that system entirely worthless.
As I understand it WinFS is an alternate method of navigating the filesystem. Instead of being forced to obey a rigid folder hierarchy it allows files to be searched, selected and grouped by attribute just like rows in the database. How useful this actually turns out to be remains to be seen, but it’s something that’s been on the cards for years - I remember hearing rumours that SQL Server 7.0 would add similar functionality. Maybe it’ll be the best thing since sliced bread, or maybe not - I think this is a case of “time will tell”.
I thought that was Mac? The only argument Mac users can put up is that their OS doesn’t crash but I’m not even certain about how true that is.