Gadgetopia

Windows Longhorn Aero Gallery: The latest screenshots from Longhorn. Cute lookin'.

It's Official: No Longhorn Until 2006: It's a full two years out now. "Microsoft execs at last have admitted publicly, at last, that Longhorn will not ship in 2005. [...] At Microsoft's worldwide partner conference this week, Microsoft finally admitted that Longhorn won't see the light of day until 2006."

Seven Things To Keep In Mind About Longhorn "Rather than take the easy way out, why not help folks get a better handle on exactly what Longhorn is/isn't, especially as the PDC hype-o-meter really gets in gear? In that spirit, here is a list of the key subsystems around which ...

Updated: Longhorn PDC Build 4051 Leaked: New Longhorn screenshots are in the wild. "The moment nearly every Windows enthusiast has been waiting for has all but nearly arrived. Windows Code-Named Longhorn 4051 has leaked onto the internet. As Paul Thurrott correctly confirmed late last evening. The select few who have ...

Asian Pirates Sell Microsoft's Next Windows System: Longhorn is in the wild in Asia already. Underscoring the scale of U.S. companies' copyright problems in Asia, CDs containing software Microsoft has code named "Longhorn" are on sale for six ringgit ($1.58) in southern Malaysia. Microsoft's current version of Windows, XP, sells ...

Five myths about 'Wronghorn': Tony McCune "translates" Microsoft's announcements on Longhorn from PDC (I still haven't figured out what "PDC" stands for). Microsoft served up another dose of rhetoric that inevitably encourages locking developers and customers into Microsoft products. As far as I can tell, Longhorn is yet another Windows ...

The long road to Longhorn: Salon has an extremely intelligent article about Longhorn and what it's going to mean for Microsoft and the computing world in general. ...if Longhorn is too radical a break with the past there's always a chance that Microsoft's two key constituencies "end users" like ...

Longhorn goes to pieces: WinFS is out of Longhorn. That's gotta hurt. They've been talking about this as the centerpiece of the release. Advanced search features that Gates has termed the "Holy Grail" of Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, won't be fully in place until 2009, Bob Muglia, ...

Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame made some interesting observations regarding Microsoft's recent decision to release certain Longhorn technologies (mainly Avalon, the new UI framework) for Windows XP. My prediction is that Avalon v1 will be a throw-away: it is not really the foundation on which you will build applications: ...

Microsoft's Latest Take on the Desktop: "....a Word document is not just a stand-alone document. Rather, it can stay linked to all the people to whom you've sent it or who have worked on it by keeping a record of what's been done to it and by whom. Longhorn will ...

Microsoft's Longhorn 3D UI: Apparently, the next generation of Windows will move away from standard, 2D, bit-mapped interfaces. Instead, all the windows will be vectored, 3D objects. This article is a look into a seminar on the subject at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this year. It's all very dry ...

USATODAY.com - Gates on a future version of Windows: This is from the Bill Gates interview with USA Today. He's talking about the information storage capabilities of Longhorn: "Say you keep lists. Anytime that you've mentioned a restaurant, it automatically goes onto this list of restaurants, and your system would ...

If the details in a CNet article are correct, Microsoft's Longhorn will include tools needed(?) by IT managers to put the clamps on people using various gadgets to their work PC's. Flash drives, iPods, and other doodads both wired and wireless that are able to store large amounts ...

A preview version of Longhorn — the next Windows release — has been leaked. The biggest change is the use of the new file system, WinFS. It has a database architecture where each file has a key which doesn't change regardless of where the file is on the file system. ...

The WinFS File System For Windows Longhorn: Faster & Smarter: Some good information on the upcoming WinFS for Longhorn: Microsoft is breaking new ground with Longhorn, successor to XP. The upcoming WinFS file system will be the first to be context-dependent, and promises to make long search times and wasted ...

Windows Vista Will Be an Important Measure: The next version of Windows has an official name. Microsoft announced Friday that it would replace the code-name Longhorn with the proper name Windows Vista.

Is Microsoft preparing a flying car?: Read this quote, then visit the link for the punchline. No future is complete without a flying car, but it's the invention that, like Longhorn, never arrives. However, many readers write in with evidence from Microsoft Norway that such a vehicle may be in ...

How Does Apple's 'Panther' Stack Up?: Here's a very detailed look at the new Apple OS Panther. It's from Microsoft Watch, of all places, under the guise of comparing Panther to Longhorn, but they don't seem to do any comparison. It's just page after page of information about Panther ...

Microsoft Codenames: Here's a list of Microsoft software project codenames. EVeryone knows about "Longhorn," there days. And a lot of people know that Windows XP was called "Whistler." Goign further back, a handful know that Windows 95 was code-named "Chicago." But "Impala"? "Starfighter"? "Airstream"? As anyone who had worked with ...

ongoing - The Door Is Ajar: Tim Bray is anti-Microsoft and anti-Internet Explorer. One good point he makes here is this: "...even though his customers are in IE-land, he keeps up on Mozilla not only because he likes it but because Mozilla may outpace IE in the corporate world: most ...

Building on it's planned technologies for Longhorn, Microsoft is developing a new technology called 'Triage' to manage digital photos. It appears they're tagging photos with metadata ala Photoshop Album, but check out this ZDNet Video and take a look at how they're presenting the user interface. Very slick looking, but ...

Code Name WinFS: Revolutionary File Storage System Lets Users Search and Manage Files Based on Content: Here's a really in-depth article that peeks behind the curtain at the upcoming WinFS in Longhorn (It's so in-depth, I don't even know what to quote.) This is going to be very cool, essentially ...

I was in the middle of writing my love letter to IE when a SharpReader update popped up. IE7 is on the way. Joy. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced plans to launch a test version of Internet Explorer 7.0 this summer. The company had said that it would not ...

So you thought the upcoming enhancements to iChat AV sounded cool? Wait until you see Facetop: Facetop superimposes transparent images of a computer's desktop over video images of the user to allow the user to look at the video and desktop at the same time. The video shows a ghostly ...

Google ready for clash with Microsoft: Google is planning to release a client search tool for indexing files and such on your machine. Google's software, which is expected to be introduced soon, according to several people with knowledge of the company's plans, is the clearest indication to date that the ...

Microsoft to Automate 'Avalon' Coding With 'Sparkle': What a lot of people don't remember is that when Flash came out, back when it was called FutreSplash, Microsoft saw the writing on the wall and tried to shut down Flash before it started with something called LiquidMotion. It died hard and ...

X.Org is set to release a new version of their X11 server tomorrow (X11 is the system that drives the GUI desktop on Linux and other UNIX systems). The notable part of this release will be extensions to the X protocol that will allow more flexibility in the compositing of ...

MSN Search MSNBOT: This is new. MSNBOT is a prototype Web crawler robot developed by MSN Search... More good information over at Scripting News: They [MSN] currently outsource all their searches to Inktomi and LookSmart, with ads embedded through a partnership with Overture. Now that Inktomi is owned by ...

Yeah, I know. What's new about that? MS lawyers jumped all over the administrators of digital.forest demanding that they immediately shut down the MacSlash site because someone posted what appeared to be a valid Longhorn serial number in a comment to a post there. (Story here.) From the logs, the ...

640KB ought to be enough for anyone: This was published a few weeks ago, and although I was beaten over the head with references to it in my aggregator, I just got around to reading it. I don't know what to think. The first part of the article is Ray ...

A little while ago, I made a short post on Miguel de Icaza s comments on Avalon, Longhorn s new UI API (which obsoletes WinForms, which obsoletes the unmanaged API s). Miguel, one of the driving forces behind mono and Gnome, pointed out what he considered to be problems with Avalon. Well, Chris ...

Microsoft talks Longhorn, XNA, and Xbox 2: Microsoft's Dean Lester expresses an interesting concept here. He envisions kind of a "certification authority" for hardware. I think it's a good idea, so long as everyone agrees on the authority that maintains the definitions. According to Lester, the plan is to simplify ...