Originally posted by: CQuinn
I'm finding it hard to believe you.
My uncle has only told me the info that he is allowed to leak.
As a project manager, he should know better than to leak anything that is not already common knowledge
to the press.
Yes he has said it will require more power then any previous OS, but by the time it is released, it is not gonna seem out of the world in requiring so much power.
An historic mistake often made on Microsoft's part. There are still a lot of people on the net (and
in business) making do with older technology. You will only just see the start of a major migration
from NT 4 in 2004, since MS is dropping support for it soon, and the cost of a system to run 2000 on
is now so cheap.
It is good that MS is trying to figure out what people want in a future OS, but they sometimes provide
for those desires at the expense of the power that people want to apply for themselves.
He doesnt even know himself exactly how much power it will need to run.
Right... They must be running the alpha versions on something!? And he wouldn't be a project manager
without having gone thru many. many design meetings to establish a target for system requirements for
any programs he is working on. He knows (or has a fair idea of) exactly how much power they
want the average system to have before Longhorn is ready; but he can't tell you because that
would start the rumor mills running, and have people unfairly comparing the alpha against already
established and released versions of the OS.
He should have just said that he can't tell you without compromising the project.
Half the people here can give you a better idea, just based on the directions MS is trying to go
in new PC specifications and technologies they seem excited about.
As for the info thing. Im pretty sure that what it will do is search the harddrive, then ask you if you want to search the internet for what you searched for, i dont think it will do it without permission.
You mean like the Office 2003 beta did? Its help system would try to connect to microsoft.com first, and
you actually had to force it to install the help files locally. I understand that was fixed in the release version?
(probably due to negative feedback from beta users who did not have an on demand broadband connection
for every machine).
But think about it this way. If the OS is fully aware all the time of what is going on within itself, that would make it very hard for viruses to do anything because it would detect it in a snap and inform you about it.
Windows 2000/XP/2003 already have lockdowns on system files that
should be preventing virus
exploits. What they need is to finish the work of plugging the obvious security holes that allow the
viruses entry in the first place. Otherwise what you are proposing sounds just like what a decent
virus scanner and firewall should be doing in the first place.