The long march to Longhorn

Grok Headline matches for The long march to Longhorn

Longhorn - a long way off

Longhorn - a long way off 08/13/2004 03:51 PM
Notable Windows journalist, Paul Thurrott, has been on the Microsoft Campus this week.

"...based on some unrelated bits of information I gleaned this week, I'm now convinced that Longhorn, the next major Windows release, will be delayed beyond even the dates that speculators have been throwing around. This news raises the specter, once again, of a possible Windows XP Second Edition release as a buffer between XP and Longhorn. Don't scoff. Contrary to official denials, Microsoft has indeed investigated an interim XP release and is now looking into it again."

Truth be told, what Paul is saying is not that unbelievable. Microsoft took a lot of techies off the Longhorn program, and put them onto Service Pack 2 for Windows XP development; they wanted a good SP to ship which was going to set them (and Windows XP) in good stead for the next few years. However, at the cost of building a bit more redunancy into the Windows life cycle, they pushed back further the Longhorn release - as little as 6 months, easily as long as a year.

A SE edition of XP isn't that hard to concieve. Microsoft have done it before (Windows ME - halfway house between 98 and 2000), and wouldn't be afraid to do it again. One could see Microsoft for example putting in various features that are completed - e.g. aim to implement WinFS - and ship this as interim build; they'd have to work hard however to turn it into more than just a pay-for service pack.

The company makes a fair amount of its revenue from the Windows product line - they need to keep selling copies to keep the business as profitable as it is. An intermediary release would be a solution to a distant next edition of Windows, and would also act as a indicator of just that- a Longhorn release as far away perhaps as 2010.

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Longhorn long time off

Longhorn long time off 08/28/2004 06:11 AM
USA Today Aug 28 2004 9:21AM GMT

The long view on Longhorn

The long view on Longhorn 07/22/2004 11:07 AM
In its first preview at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference last year, Windows XP successor Longhorn was shown running a 20-year-old copy of Visicalc. Ancient DOS software won't be the lone occupant of the Longhorn compatibility box. Win32, the Web, and even WinForms -- the .Net era's first GUI framework -- are all legacy APIs from Longhorn's perspective. Their replacements, Microsoft says, will jointly deliver "the best of Windows and the best of the Web."

The proof is still years away. But given the ambitious scope of the project, it's not too soon to consider how Longhorn will affect the vast majority of enterprises deeply invested in both Windows and the Web. How will the transition to Longhorn affect these twin legacies? Which aspects of the new system will embrace open standards, and which will entail lock-in? Will the benefits of the proprietary features outweigh cost? The answers differ for Longhorn's several subsystems; we'll consider each in turn.

Long March IV to launch two satellites
next month

Long March IV to launch two satellites
next month 08/08/2004 01:42 AM
Content.sina.com - Fri Aug 6, 08:54 pm GMT

Bristol-Myers: A Long March Back?

Bristol-Myers: A Long March Back? 08/06/2004 04:29 AM
Business Week Aug 6 2004 8:21AM GMT

Longhorn and the Linux long-game

Longhorn and the Linux long-game 03/14/2005 05:31 PM

Microsoft gives developers long-term
Longhorn details

Microsoft gives developers long-term
Longhorn details 11/01/2003 03:02 AM
ITBusiness.ca Nov 1 2003 2:16AM ET

State of the Blogosphere March 2005,
Part 3: The A-List and the Long Tail

State of the Blogosphere March 2005,
Part 3: The A-List and the Long Tail 03/19/2005 03:15 AM
Today I'll discuss the impact of weblogs on traditional media, the impact of the A-List, and the power of the long tail. First off, some terminology and an understanding of what we're measuring. This graph is a measure of...

"Dazzling, full-color shots of people
long since dead, landscapes long since
paved, and an empire long since
overthrown."

"Dazzling, full-color shots of people
long since dead, landscapes long since
paved, and an empire long since
overthrown." 01/17/2004 11:07 PM

Finally .. after long long long time ..
Sonique 2 beta released

Finally .. after long long long time ..
Sonique 2 beta released 12/21/2003 03:42 PM

"Virtual Online" Work at Home Job Fair
Saturday, March 19th & Sunday, March
20th, 2005 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Central/Each Day

"Virtual Online" Work at Home Job Fair
Saturday, March 19th & Sunday, March
20th, 2005 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Central/Each Day 03/17/2005 03:02 AM
Via live online voice conferencing booths, this first ever Virtual Work at Home Job Fair offers individuals in the home based business industry a unique opportunity to represent their company's products and services to a global audience. [PRWEB Mar 16, 2005]

Introducing "Longhorn" for Developers:
Create Mobility-Aware "Longhorn"
Applications

Introducing "Longhorn" for Developers:
Create Mobility-Aware "Longhorn"
Applications 04/16/2004 11:41 PM
In this final chapter of Introducing "Longhorn" for Developers, you'll learn about the key "Longhorn" mobility scenarios you will want to be aware of as you design "Longhorn"-compatible software.

This Fortnight in Perl 6, March 7 -
March 21, 2005

This Fortnight in Perl 6, March 7 -
March 21, 2005 03/24/2005 07:47 PM
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with the resurgence of Perl 6 language questions, implementation decisions galore, and a new Parrot chief architect.

Longhorn Foghorn: Another Step Down the
Longhorn Road

Longhorn Foghorn: Another Step Down the
Longhorn Road 04/16/2004 11:41 PM
Chris Sells explores the five major element families of Avalon as he builds the next piece of his Longhorn based Solitaire application.

Long Live the Elephants, Long Dead

Long Live the Elephants, Long Dead 06/04/2004 01:01 AM
Elephants at the American Museum of Natural History are undergoing cutting-edge, high-definition digital radiography.

So Long, Long Distance (The Motley Fool)

So Long, Long Distance (The Motley Fool) 09/07/2004 02:07 PM
The Motley Fool - The Olympic Games are now history, but not AT&T's (NYSE: T - News) $25 million ad campaign to redefine its image. After years of getting clobbered by the regional Bell companies such as BellSouth (NYSE: BLS - News), Verizon (NYSE: VZ - News), Sprint (NYSE: FON - News), and MCI (Nasdaq: MCIP - News), the company has turned its business focus from traditional phone service to networking.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: March 20, 2005 - March 26,
2005 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: March 20, 2005 - March 26,
2005 Archives 03/27/2005 08:04 AM
sending his thug squad .. Amazing. Just out .. Talking Points Memo

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_03_20.php#005249
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Long Tale of Long Tail

Long Tale of Long Tail 03/17/2005 03:58 AM

This recent post by Joe Krause about the i mportance of catching long tails in business is the best post I've read in recent weeks.

The long tail's long lead

The long tail's long lead 12/22/2004 01:45 AM
Chris Anderson has signed with Random House to do a book about The Long Tail, and has started a blog devoted to it. (The long tail is the social effect of the Web apart from the hit-heavy, glamorous side of it.)...

The Long, Long Arm of SGML

The Long, Long Arm of SGML 11/05/2003 08:20 PM
Commenting on Tim Bray's "UTF-8+names" proposal for creating memorable shortcuts for some Unicode code points, Kendall Clark sees the effort as part of XML's continuing struggle against the legacy of its SGML ancestry.

So Long, Long Distance

So Long, Long Distance 09/07/2004 02:04 PM
AT&T turns its business focus away from traditional phone service.

The long tail is fractal. Why I buy the
long tail, having been a skeptic

The long tail is fractal. Why I buy the
long tail, having been a skeptic 03/29/2005 03:01 PM
The long tail is jagged, fractal – perhaps as any market achieves maximum efficiency it starts to look like everything...

"March 2002"

"March 2002" 06/04/2004 05:03 PM

March 02, 2005

March 02, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Gadzooks, we've been busier than ever here at Fog Creek World HQ. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to sell Mike Gunderloy's (excellent) FogBugz book alongside FogBugz itself, but since we've never shipped any physical products before, that meant a whole lot of new code in the online store for package tracking, shipping addresses, choose a shipping method, inventory stuff, etc. etc., and I'm now spending too much time trying to figure out shipping and debugging the packing slip code... the joke is on us, because the reason we wrote our own store code in the first place was because all of the off-the-shelf ecommerce packages were too focused on physical delivery and didn't have any kind of mechanism for selling downloads and licenses.

It's ok. I complain a lot but what I love about a software startup is that when you're bored writing code, you can fool around with stuff like the USPS web site and ordering padded envelopes.

Watch this site for a new five-part series on the process of creating FogBugz 4.0, coming soon!

On the right, the result of yesterday's snowstorm as seen from my living room.

March 30, 2005

March 30, 2005 03/30/2005 11:20 AM
To make FogBugz work on Unix as well as Windows, we needed a PHP version. Rather than do a one-time port, we built a compiler that automatically generates a PHP version from the ASP source code. Read all about it in today's part III of The Road to FogBugz 4.0.

March 09, 2005

March 09, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM
I was quoted in an eWeek story about the VB6 petition today: “And this is how Microsoft will lose their desktop monopoly: because some bright bulb at Microsoft thought Boolean operations should really short-circuit, no matter what millions of BASIC developers had been doing since the 1960s.”

Correction! This is a bad example, since the boolean operators I was thinking of (And and Or) were not changed to short circuit in VB.Net. I have no idea why I've been thinking that they were for so long. There are other, real examples of incompatibilities between VB and VB.NET, but short circuiting was not one of them.

March 14, 2005

March 14, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Apparently, the reason I was misinformed about And and Or shortcircuiting is that it was changed during the beta after a lot of people screamed.

A better example would have been the elimination of Set and default properties.

Understand, please, that it's not that people mind the changes.

Change is good.

Nobody thinks the Set statement was a good thing.

I once spent a whole day in Mark Igra's office (in 1992 Mark was the program manager for Object Basic which became VBA) begging him to get rid of default properties and the Set statement, kicking and screaming and using every rhetorical device at my disposal, but the Basic team absolutely refused to do anything that would break working code, and in those days, there was a tiny amount of working code from Access 1.0 that already used default properties and the Set statement, and it could not be broken. Mark was right and I was wrong and Set remained. By the way, I'm pretty sure default properties were Adam Bosworth's fault; I'll have to ask him this week at the O'Reilly conference. Adam was the designer of Access 1.0. They wanted to be able to say recordset("fieldname") to get the value out of a column, not recordset("fieldname").value.

But here's the thing. If you have a million line code base that's mission critical, as many companies do, and VB suddenly changes, as it did, you have a choice: keep using VB 6 or spend a lot of time (=money) upgrading to VB.NET. If you keep using VB 6, eventually new things will come out that will not be supported  from VB 6, and you'll be stuck using the yucky old VB 6 IDE until the end of time. Already most of the big component vendors are doing all the new components as .NET components, not OCXes.

If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform.

I'm heading off to California now. Remember, pizza and beer reception on March 18th from 6:00 to 7:30 pm in Berkeley, at the Studio Rasa Gallery, 933 Parker Street.

March 31, 2005

March 31, 2005 03/31/2005 06:58 PM
Part Four: Out of every 100 calories expended by the Fog Creek team, just 2 calories are spent on actually writing new lines of code that ship to a customer.

15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job

15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job 03/15/2003 09:42 AM
F@ck That Job -- "my answer to employers taking advantage of folks having a hard time finding a job in...

ides of march

ides of march 03/15/2003 05:14 PM
Today is the Ides of March. What is the Ides of March? It is March 15th in the ancient Roman calender, the first day of the Roman New Year and the first day of spring. The Roman calender refered to days by names not numbers, thus each month has an Ide day, although not always on the 15th. The Ides of March is best known as the day Julius Caesar was assasinated in the Senate (44 BC) and made famous by the Shakespeare line "Beware the Ides of March". It modern times it has come to symbolize foreboding and bad luck. Iggy Pop sang about it prophetically with todays current events, and in Rome where it all started it's a good day to Toga Party.

Worst March Ever

Worst March Ever 04/01/2005 01:21 AM
I’ve been living here intermittently since 1983 and I haven’t seen a springtime like it. Sad...

Ides of March

Ides of March 03/15/2003 04:03 PM
Why do we say "Beware the Ides of March"? .. go learn something .. today's date .. Beware .. Ides

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PSP May Not Make March

PSP May Not Make March 01/06/2005 02:56 PM

A day after Sony said that they would probably launch the Playstation Portable in March, an analyst tells Kotaku that he still thinks it is 50/50. PJ McNealy says that a lack of stock and problems getting the necessary semiconductor parts could push the handheld back to a June launch. I'm sure Nintendo's sad.

PSP Might Not Make March [Kotaku]

The march towards next generation Net

The march towards next generation Net 09/13/2004 08:29 PM
CNET Asia Sep 14 2004 0:45AM GMT

"March 2000"

"March 2000" 01/03/2004 07:07 PM

March 14, 2003

March 14, 2003 03/14/2003 06:10 PM

AngryCoder: “FogBUGZ is very well designed, and virtually bug free. Frankly, if you are in the market for a defect tracking solution, you can’t do much better than FogBUGZ. It is by far the best solution on the market right now, and is also very attractively priced.” Thanks!

Joseph Jones, who wrote the review, didn’t like the perceived lack of customizability in FogBUGZ. I hear ya. This was one of those agonizing decisions for us. It’s a tradeoff between implementing features that make the sale, versus implementing features that, we think, will make people who use our software love it, which helps in the long term. At the time it was discussed in depth here on Joel on Software.

Take, for example, a typical report a bug tracking package gives you that shows you the number of bugs generated per day per programmer. Typical bad managers will use that tool to punish programmers with high bug counts or reward programmers with low bug counts. As a result, every time a tester tries to enter a bug, the programmer will argue about it. “That's not really a bug.” “Please don't enter it, I'll fix it on the side for you.” Eventually the bug tracking system subverts itself. That's not FogBUGZ's fault, but there you have it. Nobody wants to use it, they never upgrade, they don't buy more licenses when they get more programmers, and we lose the potential word of mouth.

The current system, in which we expect FogBUGZ users to have enlightened development processes, makes us miss out on initial sales but it makes our existing customers happier. And they tell friends, and they buy more and more licences, and all is good. We've found that anyone who has been using FogBUGZ and moves on to a new job that doesn't have bug tracking will recommend FogBUGZ at their new job, which is one reason our sales are up by about 200% since last year.

But this is all, to some extent, speculation. I can't prove anything here. Design decisions are hard that way.

New PlayStation by March

New PlayStation by March 07/13/2004 06:56 AM
National Post Jul 13 2004 11:49AM GMT

PS3 due in March 2006

PS3 due in March 2006 05/28/2004 09:31 PM

The March Towards Micropayments

The March Towards Micropayments 06/28/2004 11:16 PM

Grok Description matches for The long march to Longhorn
GrokA matches for The long march to Longhorn

The long march to Longhorn

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