Joe Beda writes that slides from the WinHEC sessions are posted up: Greg Schecter: Avalon Graphics Stack Overview [682 KB], Joe Beda: Avalon Graphics – 2D, 3D, Imaging and Composition [284 KB], Kerry Hammil: Graphics on the Windows Desktop [496 KB], David Brown: Avalon Text [1.05 MB]. The slides were targeting hardware people. This was really about letting IHVs know what they can do to prepare for what is coming in Longhorn and Avalon.
Longhorn looks nice, and the integration of all of those technologies would be pretty impressive if they pull it off. That wouldn’t necessarily make them “innovative”, but that doesn’t detract from the product.
I don’t know whether it will be a linux or osx “killer”…kind of hard to judge at this early stage. I hope that it doesn’t kill of the competition if for no other reason than the fact that competition fosters innovation. I also make a living supporting Windows and linux/unix machines and setting up network environments – if linux makes more inroads, my salary is likely to go up ๐
I don’t particularly like the fact that when people make reasonable statements (such as Rayiner saying that longhorn isn’t innovative but bringing all of its features together makes it “exciting”) they get jumped on immediately and called linux trolls. You have a right to your opinion, and so do others.
You love Windows…good for you. Some people prefer linux or *BSD or osx or skyos or…well, you get the point. My Slackware box at work dual-boots WinXP just so that I can walk a couple of my users through troubleshooting steps more easily and efficiently, but I greatly prefer working in a linux environment (particularly KDE). Doesn’t make me any better or worse than anyone else, and it doesn’t make me a linux troll to say it.
Personally, I hope that Longhorn will do everything Microsoft (note the lack of a $ – that just annoys me) says it will. In the meantime, competing OSes are working like mad to implement many of the same features in order to be worthy competitors. That’s good for all of us.
Not like those , changing skins and colors. I mean every bit of behavior.For example , in Gnome , I can switch between so called spacial browsing and browser like ( a la Win) in file manager. And that’s only an example. That’s not customizable DE. If it was like that we could write a petition to MS to add more free themes.And themes eat memory , not only in Win. As I said , let’s wait and see how this develops. I believe is too early to draw some final conclusion about Longhorn. But as I said , the other guys will not go to sleep. I bet they will work their arses to compete.
That’s why it needs to die.
It does more so it needs to die?
Fresco (RIP) is also based on a client/server architecture called CORBA.
Why do people peddle CORBA? CORBA is way, way too complex to get anything simple done. That’s something Microsoft does have right.
DirectX != Direct3d, and you can compare it except for the server client part wich DX doesn’t have.
OpenGL > 3D graphics.
Perhaps because the opengl Architectural Review Board can’t get their act straight? Two years from now you’ll still be waiting for opengl 2.0 while directx 9 is allready here (1 year now?).
OpenGL has been around a heck of a lot longer than DirectX and there’s a heck of a lot of extremely good OpenGL games and applications around. Doom 3 is based on OpenGL. Another “Oh, Microsoft doesn’t want to join committees and contribute to standards” argument. Open standards. Now there’s a concept I’ve heard touted somewhere…
Whatever.
It happens. More often than you’d think.
I mean.. wow.. so a couple of dead Operating systems from the past have similiar features.. big f*cking deal. Where are they now ? Dead and buried.
sigh. The WinFS idea isn’t new. AS/400 and PICK both have the database as the filesystem. I say have because neither technology is dead and buried. Both systems are in active use by various companies around the world, and still being developed for.
I’ve no objection to any company or individual putting together a series of good ideas into a single package. However, I have very little faith that Microsoft will be able to pull this off, and I base that opinion on my own experiences with their technology over the last 15 years.
Not like those , changing skins and colors. I mean every bit of behavior.For example , in Gnome , I can switch between so called spacial browsing and browser like ( a la Win) in file manager. And that’s only an example. That’s not customizable DE.
Agreed, you just weren’t very clear on what you actually ment
Hey, someone else here has actually used PICK ๐
The actual definition of innovation is: “The act of introducing something new”.
Then you just get hung-up on the meaning of the word “new.” What is new? In a sense, every day is new, but practically, five days of the week are often practically the same. A better idea of the meaning of innovate lies in the definition of “invent”:
3 : to produce (as something useful) for the first time through the use of the imagination or of ingenious thinking and experiment
A layman would most likey consider the above a very fine definition for “innovate”.
by that definition almost all software that is written is innovative.
That should tell you, then, that your definition of “innovate” is useless in practice. If all software is innovative, nobody would ever bother to claim that their software is innovative.
But by your definition of innovation, there is almost nothing that is innovative because the “innovative” parts of Lisp, Irix, Next, BeFS were all done by someone before.
Innovation, of course, is a continuum, but there must be a cut-off, otherwise the word would have no meaning. You don’t have to pin-down the cut-off to decide that Longhorn isn’t innovative. There is nothing that Longhorn will do that something else doesn’t do already. Something can be innovative and still be based on prior work — it just has to have some original elements. Longhorn has no original elements! And I do not for a second buy the argument that you can take a collection of non-innovative constituent parts and end up with an innovative whole.
How about plugging in something more exciting like a scanner or a printer or a digital camera?
Okay, the Epson Perfection 610U upstairs works. My cheapo Epson printer works too, as does my roommate’s cheapo Epson printer.
Oh, and my network dongle working was pretty damn exciting — I got it originally for one of my Windows machines, and I tried half a dozen different drivers for it and it *never* worked. I ended up just buying another one for that machine and using the old one on my laptop because I lost my PCMCIA wlan card.
Let’s not pretend linux is anywhere close to easy to use as windows, or MacOS X is when it comes to peripheral devices.
For hardware on modern busses (PCI, USB, Firewire) it is as easy as Windows, at least. You just need to spend 5 min checking if your hardware is supported. I’ll bet if you bought hardware at random, you wouldn’t be too happy with a Mac either!
To those who still don’t understand the definition of innovation, try this little mental excercise: describe all the salient concepts of something, leaving out the details of implementation. Try to really distill what is at the essence of whatever you’re analyzing. Then, compare that distillation to similar distillations of other things. Remove elements from your distillation that appear elsewhere. If you have anything left, you’re innovative.
Try applying this process to things that are generally accepted as innovative — e-mail, ethernet, GUIs, etc. Now, try applying to Longhorn. If you conclude that it is innovative, pray-tell what element you found that couldn’t be found elsewhere.
Oh, and someone explain to me why commercial success has jack to do with how innovative something is? That doesn’t seem at all logical to me! Remember, innovative is not just a synonym for “good”. There are stupid innovations (computer in a porta-potty) as well as great copies (UNIX).
And I do not for a second buy the argument that you can take a collection of non-innovative constituent parts and end up with an innovative whole.
Then you do not buy the concept of innovation because that is the precise definition of it. BeFS was taking existing parts that were not innovative (a file system and a database) and putting them together to create an innovative new element (a database-driven file system).
To those who still don’t understand the definition of innovation, try this little mental excercise: describe all the salient concepts of something, leaving out the details of implementation. Try to really distill what is at the essence of whatever you’re analyzing. Then, compare that distillation to similar distillations of other things. Remove elements from your distillation that appear elsewhere. If you have anything left, you’re innovative.
By that definition then nothing is innovative. GUIs were not innovative because computer graphics existed before, iconographic images existed before, documents existed before, people organized things on their physical desktop before, etc.
GUIs were not innovative because computer graphics existed before, iconographic images existed before, documents existed before, people organized things on their physical desktop before, etc.
A GUI is something more than just a collection of computer graphics, iconographic images, and desktop organization. Each of the component parts had to be greatly modified to first the overall GUI paradigm. Instead of just having random computer graphics, you have a small set of widgets that are used everywhere. Instead of iconographic images representing arbitrary things, (in the Mac GUI), you had a direct relationship between icons and files. Instead of organizing things as you do on a desktop (which doesn’t make all that much sense on a computer), you develop the concept of windows, and (in the Mac GUI), make a 1-1 relationship between file browser windows and file folders.
Longhorn, from all the accounts we’ve seen so far, doesn’t do any of these things. The component parts aren’t evolved to fit a new paradigm. They do pretty much exactly what the corresponding parts did in the systems that came before.
Let me give you an example of a way Longhorn *could* be innovative. WinFS could be integrated with Avalon in a way that transformed the user interface from the “windows, icons, mouse, pointer” paradigm into one of direct interaction with objects (all contained in the WinFS database), that directly represented themselves visually via Avalon. In doing this, Avalon would have to be extended to be data-driven (something NeXT’s GUI never did), and WinFS objects would have to become active data (which old-BFS files never were). The overall UI would need to be modified to kind of model Squeak’s “morph” paradigm.
In the above example, all the pieces are evolutions of existing designs, but are still innovative, because each one has new elements to enable the synergy of the collection. They aren’t just the same old components doing the same old things!
“You’re not the only one testing Longhorn. I’ve tested them all too. (Whenever I needed a good laugh, or whenever Linux developers start to make occasional fuzz about Longhorn…”
Yea, tend to boot into Linux every once in a while when I myself need a good chuckle, reality check on how good Windows has been to me, or more religious FUD on how Linux is supposedly superior. Rock solid stable and it can run pretty much anything I need it too. Linux may be stable, but I have crashed it just as many times in a few weeks as I have Windows XP all year. Programs? Well, I would rather not go there… Windows has all I need, and it seems the very best from Linux are ported to Windows. Hardware tends to work better under my Windows too. Two computers running Windows XP, everything works great. Same two computers running Linux, and both have different issues with hardware. I cant wait for Longhorn. Microsoft is taking their time, but its a good thing. I plan on upgrading when its realeased. Windows has been so great for me before, so why switch? Maybe if I decided to join the anti MS religion…
Nice piece of FUD, there.
Linux may be stable, but I have crashed it just as many times in a few weeks as I have Windows XP all year.
I call B.S…
Some people will spout any bullshit to avoid admitting that they are wrong. The concep of a box enclosing related information (window) is something that did not originate from GUIs. Reusing standard widgets did not originate from GUIs. Having a 1-1 correspondance between folders and windows is just copying the fact that physical documents can only exist in a single physical folder. The fact that they act differntly than their physical counterparts is just and implementation specific detail about the fact that they have to run on a computer and are not constrained by physical properties. Your original definition said to ignore this. Tiling and overlapping windows are the same as tiling and overlapping papers on a desktop. Why do you think a computer desktop is called a ‘DESKTOP’.
Read some of the history of GUI development at Xerox PARC. What they were doign was looking at how an office worker works and replicating it on the computer.