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

[Mike Williams]

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>Lets just hope you'll still be able to turn that crap off.  You can 
>> barely turn off the MS Office's annoying paperclip, 
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>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.
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Custom install is definitely the way to go, but quite a few don't do 
that.  And if you disable an installed feature, it should stay 
disabled.  I've heard tails of clippy coming back no matter how many 
times you tell him to stay gone.

>>> you can't turn off the little flying pieces of paper when you copy a 
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>winfile.exe!  :)   Honestly, it is a much better file manager anyway. 
>Explorer sucks.
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I'll have to check that out.  I've always known it was theoretically 
possible to replace the the shell program, but I'd never heard of 
anybody actually writing a replacment.  How about one that asks like the 
trusty OS/2 v4 shell, whatever they called it?

>>> 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.
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>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.
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Depends on the age and duties of the server.  Until about a year ago, my 
house server was an ancient P2 350 with 128 megs or less of RAM, if 
memory serves.  At runlevel 3 it was fine, with minimal load.  It could 
barely run Windows 2000, and if you kicked it to runlevel 5 Linux was 
just as bad. 

>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!).
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Can't really argue with that.  I guess it comes down to the origin of 
the OS.  Windows NT borrowed heavily from the VAX VMS architecture, and 
Linux borrowed more from Unix.  I'm not suggesting that there are that 
many similarities remaining, but I don't think it's a coincidence that 
VMS was kind of a mess and so is Windows.

>It has nothing to do with the 'integrated' or not GUI (although I do
>think the Win32 GUI is dumb).
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How would you design it?  As much as I dislike some things about 
Windows, I think the interface is well designed in XP and 2000.  I'd 
dump the active program taskbar for a button that pulls up a menu of 
tasks, and maybe do multiple panes like XWindows, but other than that I 
like Windows better.

>>> 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.
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>My answer: buy a game console to play games.  Computers are for doing
>work.
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Unfortunately that's hardly true any more.  For a long time it's been 
the entertainment industry, not the business or scientific industry 
that's been driving PC hardware.  And too many types of games work much 
better with a mouse, keyboard, and hard drive then a TV set and gamepad.