More on Longhorn

An anonymous reader writes "Everything I have read concering MS's future plans: Palladium, Client/Server tie in, Office 11 breaking backward compatability, 3 year licensing plans, product activation - all leave me with a foreboding sense of the potential synergy for furthering Microsoft's goals of complete domination. Now this article tells about Longhorn's new filesystem being based on the the future Yukon server. And surprise it will only work with new hardware, which they want to be Palladium enabled. And all pitched to you under the rubric of Security & Efficency. For years MS has been accused of only wanting people to run MS Software. Now according to the article, 'Microsoft doesn't think computer users should have to use one program to read and write a word-processing file, another to use a spreadsheet, and a third to correspond via e-mail. Rather, the company thinks, a single program should handle it all.' One program to rule them all, one program to bind them, indeed."

BeFS

[bradams]

...the new file system will also function efficiently with hard drives holding at least one terabyte of data...

Creating such a file system is an extraordinarily difficult task, one that has been attempted for years by database companies, including Microsoft, but that has never reached fruition.

The BFS used in BeOS uses 64 bit addressing (18 exabytes) and has been working for over 5 years...

Re:.. and in the darkness bind them

[marauder404]

In the Land of Richmond where Shadows lie.

Richmond? Home of tobacco? I had no idea it was such an evil tech powerhouse! Perhaps you meant "Redmond?"

MS is already doing this, its called COM

[LM741N]

COM= "component object model"

Programming the COM in Python led me to the realization that most MS programs are just wrappers for the COM. Thats why its so easy, for example, to embed Visio drawings in Powerpoint, etc, etc.

BTW, with PythonWin you can access the MS COM directly without even starting a program. e.g. I've used the Excel functions to bring up a spreadsheet, fill it with data, and then save it, all without ever calling Excel.

Rob.

Re:.. and in the darkness bind them

[prichardson]

It goes:
9 rings for men
7 rings for dwarves
3 rings for elves
1 ring for the dark lord

The Power of XML

[Crash Culligan]

[Longhorn] will have a new look and feel, very different from Windows XP's. Its guts will also be radically different from Windows XP's, because they're based on XML -- extensible markup language, the emerging lingua franca of the Internet.

I must have missed something somewhere -- when did XML become a programming language?

Has anyone here ever worked with RTF? It's a way of adding basic font, size, layout, and color information and whatnot to a text file. You can think of it as a sort of HTML-lite. It was supposed to be cross-platform too, but Microsoft produced a version of it which was so alien that no other RTF system could handle it without preprocessing.

Now Microsoft is using XML, a cross-platform, open data markup system, and using it extensively in a proprietary, closed operating system?

XML is pretty open (at least, now anyway). What's going to make Microsoft's implementation of it "special" (in that Microsoft-special way) is the internal and proprietary XSLs which read and interpret the tags to display the information on screen and in print. Other systems can read the XML documents, but to make sense of them the way Longhorn's software will requires information that Microsoft yet again won't share.

It should be possible to recreate XSLs from the structure of the XML, which would seem to make it extremely easy to reverse-engineer. In order to prevent that, Microsoft has to "extend" XML in such a way that it breaks on other systems.

I fear for the future of XML now.

Re:You are not taking the long view

[Dexx]

> Stop fixing win95 problems when they pop up
They have - as of end of year it's no longer supported software.

u need a clue.

[valmont]

convenience does *not* provide an excuse for, nor does it supplant strong security design at the core of your operating system.

Just take a little look at security focus archives, you'll see that most of the security flaws in windows come from the tight integration of web-related scripting technologies with the core of the operating system.

Read my journal. Look at Code Red and Nimda. How do you think they spread so FAST? The best-known component of those viruses is the one triggered in an email attachment. But it doesn't stop there. The virus modifies every single html document that lives in IIS's web root, including HTTP 404, 403 *and* 500 documents, by appending a javascript window.open call to a "readme.eml" document which exploits Internet Explorer flaw with handling mime types and gets it to execute some code to further infect the machine of a user who browses an infected site.

Did you read the latest security holes? The one that leverages the help dialog box "functionality". Pretty evil.

All those components are tightly integrated within microsoft's flagship operating system, and ZERO thought was put into easily enabling or disabling those features to temporarily protect users while not impairing core functionality.

As far as i'm concerned, you've gotta be a fucking suicidal retard to be using the windows operating system for anything but playing games. Granted it does, at times, serve its purpose of a mildly friendly/convenient operating system on cheap hardware, but those security holes are just too fucking evil, and you sure as fuck get what you pay for.

Oh yeah and now Palladium. So not only are we looking at an OS featuring piss-poor security, we're also looking at a totalitarian privacy-invading roadmap. i weep for computing.

heh.

fuck windows. fuck it right in the ass.

Go Apple. [apple.com]

one program can be done well...

[burns210]

"Microsoft doesn't think computer users should have to use one program to read and write a word-processing file, another to use a spreadsheet, and a third to correspond via e-mail. Rather, the company thinks, a single program should handle it all"

gobe productive [gobe.com] anyone? they have an all-in-one "word processing, page design, spreadsheets, charts, illustration, photo retouching, even slide-show presentations" program that is very lean. If memory serves it fits in a couple dozen megs of space(or less), not the couple hundred that office takes up. Oh, and did i mention, it is going to be GPLed [osnews.com] soon?

Re:.. and in the darkness bind them

[Lemmy Caution]

Microsoft is trying to get legislation to force people to use their software? Since when? And since when did Microsoft have data indicating that MS software causes cancer, yet refuse to relase it and go on marketing it as safe? And Phillip Morris is quite happy to continue advocating against anti-smoking legislation in the rest of the world, even as it puts on a 'friendlier face' in the US - and they sure as hell tried to keep the antismoking legislation at bay. There are plenty of smoking-workplaces in the rest of the world - and if you are a waitress or bartender, you're probably in a smoke-filled environment. (Again, the "change jobs" rejoinder applies to MS users) Nothing that Microsoft has done comes even close to what the tobacco industry has done to keep money coming into its coffers.

If you had a sister addicted to crack, you might claim that it was "her choice," but you certainly wouldn't think that her drug dealer was innocent either.

Incidentally, you can access Exchange mail with standard unix MUA's and fetchmail.

Re:Been there, done that.

[JourneymanMereel]

Not so long ago the standard repost to any Microsoft post was the time a system stayed up before the blue screen of death. Funny thing, you don't hear that half so often since Windows 2000 and XP hit the stores.

Well, if you really want it: 10 days. Or did you want an average? 'Cause that was the max on a Windows 2000 domain controller we had at work. On a 1GHz proccessor, 2 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of RAID drive space... not what I would classify as hardware starved. We recently reformatted it and made it a file-server only and it hasn't crashed in the two weeks since we did that. But, that brought the grand-total to 5 high-end Windows machines (we had to put in another dedicated domain controller to replace the functionality we removed) to do the job that one Novell box running on a P-II did for 2 years with an average uptime of 60 days, which was about the timeframe that we normally decided to take it down for some major change or another. I still don't understand why we ever switched.