[KLUG Advocacy] Windows Longhorn (was GEEK JEOPARDY 15 DAYS)

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

> moved to advocacy because this is getting off-topic.
> >>>> > They are doing the
> >>>> > transparency thing and animated and bouncing icon stuff like in OS X.
> >>> This is progress?  First thing every power user will do is turn that
> >>> crap off.
> Lets just hope you'll still be able to turn that crap off.  You can 
> barely turn off the MS Office's annoying paperclip, 

Nah, that is EASY to kill.  You simply uninstall (or don't install in
the first place) "Office Assistant".  I don't have much compassion on
this count,  it plagues people who did a default rather than a custom
install.  ALWAYS to a custom install and look at what crap it is
throwing in.

> you can't turn off the little flying pieces of paper when you copy a 

winfile.exe! :)  Honestly, it is a much better file manager anyway. 
Explorer sucks.

> large file, etc. etc.  
> At least with the current versions you can turn off the "transitions" 
> from the task bar menus.  This is why Linux or Unix is a much more 
> efficient server platform than Windows: you can turn off the GUI, which 
> a server doesn't need anyway.

Although repeated often enough to qualify as a manta I don't buy this at
all.  An idle GUI (in OS/X, Linux, AIX, or Win32) isn't consuming any
significant resources.   I've got X running on most of my servers,  all
X's crap gets pushed out to swap if something else needs the RAM (and
this is a server, so that means you need more RAM).  Switching from
runlevel 5 to runlevel 3 releases like 64Mb, that doesn't mean anything
on a server class machine.  And X never even makes it onto the "top"
screen it is burning so little CPU,  and on my Windows 2000/2003 servers
explorer.exe (which paints most of the desktop GUI) and other GDI
components never make it into the task manager's statistics they are so
absolutely trivial in terms of resource consumption.

Linux is a superior server solution because (A) it is simply a better
implementation, (B) it has a more-or-less consistent conception model
(streams of I/O [pipes], everything is a file, etc...) verses the warty
Win32 (and Microsoft admits this as part of their rationale for creating
.NET) and (C) it has a heck of a lot more developers (recent stats show
on average ~2.5 patches going into the 2.6.x kernel tree EVERY HOUR,
Holy crap!).

It has nothing to do with the 'integrated' or not GUI (although I do
think the Win32 GUI is dumb).

> >I like the bit that says, "Longhorn will require 3D video hardware..."
> >This is an IMPROVEMENT? Bad enough Red Hat's configuration tools demand
> >both a running X Server and Gnome. SuSE does it right by automatically
> >dropping back to ncurses for text-only terminals (okay, maybe it doesn't
> >work well on print-only consoles). An 'improvement' that demands the
> >latest, greatest, and most superfluous hardware ain't THAT much of an
> >improvement, I say.
> I've heard some who actually like the idea.  Something about replacing 
> the task bar of open programs with a stack of semi-transparent ones that 
> seem to angle into the screen so you can look between them and see the 
> one you want.  I still think it's a silly idea, though.  

Yep.

> A monitor is a 2-dimensional display medium, and any attempt to pretend it's a 
> 3-dimensional one is likely to confuse more than it will help.  

Preach it brother!

> The only "advantage" that I believe will actually be an advantage is that you 
> will have a 3-d API to the desktop, so you'll be able to run a 3-d game 
> windowed without the huge performance hit this currently involves.

My answer: buy a game console to play games.  Computers are for doing
work.
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