msft

today i got a sneak peek at the next build of windows code-named longhorn. it looks like there is some pretty cool stuff and of course, some stuff that i'm sure i will hate. there's a new bar on the right side of the screen in addition to the normal taskbar on the bottom. and it's larger and more intrusive than the normal taskbar. this new sidebar is for "cool" (or annoying) stuff like an analog clock, newsfeeds, and a slideshow of your own images. the microsoft guy claimed that "once you turn it on, you'll never turn it off". yea. i'm sure i want random pictures in a slideshow going on throughout my entire computing experience. the sad thing is, i'm sure the majority of users will either love this feature or be unable to figure out how to turn it off.

another big thing with this new OS is that ¿everything? is vector drawn, allowing for the scaling of pretty much everything. kinda interesting concept. the idea behind this is that high DPI monitors will be able to display things without the pixelation resulting from simply magnifying icons, images, and even text! the OS is also inherently able to do a lot of other cool graphics stuff too. no crappy graphics cards allowed. there is more integration between media and text type of documents and you can insert playing movies into your (formerly) text documents. and they came up with some special new markup language XAML or something.

all of this will require quite a computer. current boxes are probably going to be at the middle to low end of the spectrum for being able to take advantage of all these newly integrated graphical interfaces. certainly not something my computer would be able to handle.

the verdict: i think longhorn will appeal to the masses and refute the notion that computers are already powerful enough (what craig barrett giveth, bill gates taketh away), but with each new windows incarnation, i feel like i'm losing more and more control over my computer (anyone care to clean out my registry?). perhaps it's time for me to take a look at linux. no games, but it won't highlight text that it thinks i'm trying to highlight or otherwise take over my computer when it feels like it can do a better job than me.