Firm Release Date for Longhorn

Cutting corners to make shipment date

[grelmar]

MS announced it will be shipping Longhorn in 2006, after pressure from OEM companies for a firm ship date.

They're going to eliminate certain key components, most notably WinFS (the new file system) in order to meet the new ship date. WinFS was a major "selling point" behind Longhorn. From the CNet article, a lot of the other improvements sound like so much hot air and marketing mumbo jumbo.

Mark 2006 in your calendars, and let's just see if this turns into vaporware of a level rarely seen outside the gaming industry.

Wired Article [wired.com]

CNet News [news.com.com] (a much more in depth article)

_{Dunno how I missed this on Friday.}

_{Oh! Wait! Yes I do, dang home reno is eating up my life. No time for geeking.}

[dillonstars]

Also on BBC News [news.bbc.co.uk]

[Lord Majestic]

most notably WinFS (the new file system)

Yeah I remember reading about same thing under different name scheduled to be released in Cairo and I was reading about that in early 90s ;)

Personally I think the most important thing Short-horn will do is getting .NET on every desktop - Microsoft is really dragging its feet with the framework that is not as common as those who program in it would like to see.

[grelmar]

and a technology called Indigo intended to make it easier for PCs to use online services and talk to small devices - will be compatible with both Longhorn and XP.

Can you say "massive security hole"?

I knew you could ;)

[RainMaker]

Quite frankly I can't wait for Longhorn to come out. I can see it going two ways. Either everyone is going to see it as a really nice piece of software from the "worlds fearless leader" or everyone is just going to sit and point and laugh. quite frankly I think this is almost the first stepping stone for MS in a do or die situation. The heat is on for MS to come up with something a lil more solid in the security area. XP is nice, when it works. It doesn't "not work" because of the OS. It's the security crap that it lets other "thing" in it that disables and breaks things. A borken OS is a decrease in productivity and a loss in money.

[DaveAtIFG]

XP is nice, when it works.

Hey, lets be fair here, Microsoft has improved! It took six service packs to get NT4 right and only four service packs to get 2K right. That's quite an impressive improvement I'd say. ;) Who knows? They might even do adequate testing on Longhorn before they release it.

[kevinpate]

> might even do adequate testing .. before they
> release it.

It seems there will be less for them to test, so
maybe they'll have the time to do it right :)

[Chaos]

The improvement Microsoft has made has been the elimination of the Win9x kernels. Thats pretty much it. From a security standpoint, they really haven't don't much to fix their broken code. What they have done in SP2 to tighter down security is limit the capabilities of the operating system (*cough ... raw sockets). I really have no respect for this approach. Lets hope they don't keep this approach when designing Longhorn. I endorse Microsoft's position on keeping support for another industry stadard (OpenGL) as an intergrated part of Longhorn. Kudos to Microsoft for that. WinFS is a very new paradigm for data storage and retrieval. I don't see why they just don't include SQL Desktop Engine as part of the OS, and if a company wants to utilize the built-in database capabilities, they can - rather than having to use the integrated filesystem database. Its a neat idea with a lot of nice enhanced intergration capabilities, but at this point, i think they're innovating just to innovate, not to really solve problems.

[Lord Majestic]

I don't see why they just don't include SQL Desktop Engine as part of the OS

Its too heavy for a filesystem - one does not need to get SQL server to gain full-text search capabilities. My view is that they do not include filesystem based on SQL server due to performance reasons.

Microsoft appears to be moving strongly in direction of managed code (.NET), this is good as its a good clean start, and it will also make code more portable to other OSes that run Mono.

I endorse Microsoft's position on keeping support for another industry stadard (OpenGL) as an intergrated part of Longhorn.

I am not so sure about OpenGL - Microsoft did not spent so much money to establish successful DirectX only to support OpenGL. IMHO had it not been to Carmack then OpenGL would have been mothballed (sp?) on Windows systems as Microsoft is not exactly known for supplying oxygen to compatitor's software.

[Chaos]

I agree with Lord Majestic that John Carmack's use of OpenGL has lead to support in Longhorn. There was a talk a while back when Microsoft threatened to not support OpenGL (PFD_SUPPORT_OPENGL for you lower-level coders out there). In the longhorn generation, i believe that they are going to provide a managed interface for it. So again, Kudos to Microsoft for the decision. Independant game developers will now be able to make C# tools that use any rendering API of their choice.

[Hester]

The thing is, with important stuff[1] being taken out of Longhorn, where's the incentive to upgrade? Unless it is visibly superior to XP in a wide range of ways, I can't see many people upgrading.[2] The jump from 98 to XP was a vital one, but I've yet to see anything groundbreaking in Longhorn to tempt me. (Even though I've installed a high-powered graphics card in readiness.)

Worse, there are reasons not to upgrade. I'm not keen on the system initially called Palladium[3] that controls what hardware and software will run.

[1] In the eyes of the average home computer buyer

[2] After all, many people are still on 98, and even 95.

[3] Sorry, forget the new name for it

[Receptional Andy]

Sorry, forget the new name for it

It's now the catchily-named "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base for Windows" I believe ;)