On 23 May 2004 at 8:16, Philip Aker wrote: > On Saturday, May 22, 2004, at 13:35 America/Vancouver, David W. Fenton > wrote: > > >> Longhorn (MS ripoff of OS X) won't be out until 2007. > > > Er, Windows XP was the one that was a cheap and poorly done ripoff > > of OS X. > > But, as you will observe later on in this post David, most likely not > the last.
All seem cosmetic, at the shell level. These are the kinds of things that Microsoft always screws up, because they tend to copy only the look and not the underlying information architecture. > What's happening is that although the integration of Unix, Carbon, > Cocoa, and other technologies into a single new MacOS has not been > without growing pains, facts are that it's solid and very usable right > now. But more importantly, it's adaptable, malleable, and scalable. > Because Longhorn has been taking so long, one must conclude that it > does not possess the kind of flexible OS design necessary for a modern > operating system. . . . This is to laugh. What was the time frame between the announcement of a successor to the MacOS and the first non-beta release of OS X? Copland was discarded, and then OS X eventually replaced it. A version of Copland was featured onscreen in Independence Day, which was released in 1996. As to OS X, before Jaguar, it was not terribly usable for the vast majority of users. So, that means something like from 1996 to 2002, Apple was working on it. Longhorn will be released about four years after WinXP. Win2K, the last major rewrite of Windows, was released just under 4 years after NT 4. I don't remember how long NT took to develop. It wasn't in existence in 1987, but it was available about 1992, so maybe Microsoft took five years to release it. Of course, it was another year before there was a truly usable version of it, so maybe it would count 5 or 6 years for a version 1 that everyone could use. Funny how that works -- first releases of OS's take a long time to develop. > . . . Instead, it appears to be an awkward kluge of ideas > stolen from other operating systems. . . . Again, I'm all ears. Other than trying to copy the non-essential aspects of the Aqua UI, what exactly is Microsoft copying from other OS's? > . . . It doesn't seem to have a design > concept of its own. That is to say, it's _reactionary_ rather than > innovative. . . . Er, it's an upgrade to an existing OS. Of *course* it's not going to be hugely innovative. > . . . Most telling is that perhaps the supposed "killer feature" > (SQL-like file system) has been dropped. It hasn't been dropped, but the feature set available in the first release has been scaled back: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2004/04/13/112822.aspx http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5212077.html?tag=cd.lede > > But, in case you want to defend your stance on Longhorn and OS X, > > I'd prefer to use the word "illustrate". > > > do tell exactly which features of Longhorn (i.e., features that were > > absent in any previous version of Windows) are ripped off from OS X. > > Here's a few: > > <http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/longhorn/Image15.jpg> > > Sidebar is an out and out rip-off of MacOS X 'Dock' and 'Get Info' > features. Um, you need to get out more. This is an OS-level implementation of a feature that's been present in MS's Office applications since the release of Office XP as "Task Panes", and they represent a migration and enhancement of the functionality of the hated Office Assistant into a UI that most people find more user-friendly. So, while some of the functionality may be copied from the Dock (so far as I can tell, only the application preview icons are copied from the Dock), the basic idea is quite consistent with features of MS products going back to 1996 (and, arguably, even further), long before the release of OS X. In any event, the Dock was itself pretty clearly a ripoff of the Windows TaskBar (with added functionality, of course, and used in a rather different manner because of the fundamental differences between the two OS's). > <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109165,00.asp> > > > A new theme, called Plex, offers a more rounded window style, while > > a revamped, as-yet-nonfunctional Display Settings dialog box looks > > like something right out of Apple's OS X Aqua interface. Appearance at that level is pretty trivial. It's also a pre-beta, so there's no guarantee that any of these things will end up in the shipping product. > <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113631,00.asp> > > > Also new: Speech, a Windows XP Control Panel applet with no apparent > > purpose, in Longhorn contains an actual speech-recognition engine > > complete with training text. > > = MacOS technology since about System 7. MS has had speech recognition technology in the works for years, since long before the release of OS X. > <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116005,00.asp>? > > > SEATTLE -- In the future, all of your personal and business > > communications--from e-mail and instant messages to phone calls and > > faxes--will reside in a single central location. Or so says > > Microsoft, disclosing some of the features it plans for its next > > generation of Windows. > > = MacOS: "Digital Hub". This is not an idea invented by Apple. > > Once Longhorn has gathered multiple contact points for a person, you > > can easily access them all, Erickson notes. For example, if you get > > an e-mail message from someone whose information is already stored > > in the system, you can dial them up or send them an instant message > > with a single mouse click. > > = MacOS: Address Book/iCal/Sync Er, to a certain extent, this has been available on MS OS's since 1995. > ### > > <http://www.longhornblogs.com/rholloway/archive/2003/10/29/945.aspx> > > = MacOS: WebKit Er, isn't Avalon a way of truly integrating .NET and XML into the OS? Isn't this something MS has been working on since before 1999, when they release Office 2K with XML as a supported file format for all the major applications? Many of these things that you say are stolen from OS X actually represent the latest iteration of technologies that MS has been working for many, many years. Yes, they've often borrowed little bits and pieces and presentation aspects from Mac OS X, but the underlying technologies involved have been under development in many cases since long before OS X was released. The fact that two clocks may agree with each other about the time does not mean that one is copying from the other -- it may indicate that both have independently arrived at the same piece of correct information. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
