quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
Of what I've been seeing and reading about it, it seems that more and more things are getting integrated within eachother. This can be a good thing and a bad thing.
Although it is userfriendly to the _absolute_ beginner, it can (and even is, atm) a real pain in the *beep* for more advanced users. Also the "friendlyness" and "integration" keeps the user in the dark about what really is going on, in their computer. This makes that people will not have the slightest clue anymore of what they are exactly doing.
This happens even now, today. Look at the questions on the net and other helpdesks, IRC-channels, etc. Nowadays, if you say "download that file and open it", many people don't have a clue of what the difference is between downloading, storing something on the HD and opening it. I see this everyday when I look at peoples computers: random files everywhere, and yet they say they don't have something: "I've downloaded it, but can't find it"....
Now you can say: that's something which always has happend, and we all where "noobs" once. Well, no, there is a significant difference. The whole "integration" and "keep the user in the dark" is partially (well, more then partially) to be blamed for that:
There is no learning curve anymore, and that is a bad thing. A PC is a machine; a tool. You need to learn the basics to know how to handle it (what is a folder? what is a file? What is a directory-structure?). But when even the basics are thrown out, the new beginner will not have a clue anymore when something is wrong ("I cant find that downloaded file").
Is Longhorn going to be revolutionary? Yes
Will it be a benefit for the knowledge of people about PC's? No (heck even todays Windows OS's are already slowing down the needed "learning-curve".)
Another bad thing about integreation is that the various integrated components are so much integrated that they can't function when program "x" is not working properly. So, when a user *beep*'s up program "x", and then he can't use program "y" anymore, because it relies on program "x". Or, a virus exploiting a bug in program "x", may also be able to destroy program "y"'s data.
I don't like the way MS integrates their stuff. First of all, their stuff is crap, so you don't want them to be stuck in the OS (Opera/Firefox are far superior to IE, Thunderbird works like a charm
(dunno if it's actually better, since I haven't used Outlook for ages))
Longhorn revolutionary? Maybe.. but you are looking at it's features
now, and there might be more features scrapped, and even if they are all going to make it through, it's going to be a loooong time before Longhorn releases, and we don't know what the competition has to offer for Longhorn by that time.
Longhorn insecure? I don't know. Win9x was very unstable, and I must admit that WinXP doesn't crash that often (still crashes too often, though). Microsofts' focus on security didn't influence WinXP, but it'll influence Longhorn. Will it be enough? I don't think so. MS still wants to be compatible with the past. They should be compatible with the future!
If people mean that Longhorn will be revolutionary if you upgrade from it's predecessor, XP, well probably yes. But XP was made in 2001, with some crappy[1] "security center" SP2 update in 2004, and Longhorn isn't going to be released until '05 '06. 4-5 years is a long time in the computer industry!
If you are talking about revolutionary, you should be talking about the competition in 2005-2006. Mac OS X is already full of eye-candy, and the noob-friendly GNU/linux distributions seem to have hired some graphics artists too!
(I've got this beatifull water+green grass+blue sky picture with SUSE 9.1!)
[1]If a virus turns off the security center+the virus scanner, people won't notice, because when the security center is turned off, it won't warn you that virus scanner is broken, and when the security center is turned off, you won't notice!! Therefore, I refer to it as "crappy".
