Windows Longhorn System Requirements

Neil Jones
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Hymagumba wrote:cwanten - have you ever tried going into Dixons and complaining about widescreen TVs being set up wrong? Now that's always fun.
Talking of this, I've just come back from Currys where they've got loads of widescreen TVs which were showing a football match on Sky Sports. These things are shown widescreen but bugger were any of the TVs showing it properly. Every single TV, I must have looked at a good dozen or so on display and none of them were set up right. Most were in centre cut-out mode and stretched sideways. Others, well, I dunno how they'd been setup but it certainly wasn't how it should be. Did see some nice TVs which were flagged with a Freeview sticker on them so I presume it came as standard.
Jenny
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One of the problems with TV shops displaying things in "widescreen" is that a lot of them don't actually have a widescreen signal to use - they just hook all the TVs in the store up to an analogue terrestrial signal. You'd think the big-name chains might have got wise to this and created a DVD showreel to feed to their TVs instead.

Right, you can get back to the actual topic of the thread now...
cwathen
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Jenny wrote:One of the problems with TV shops displaying things in "widescreen" is that a lot of them don't actually have a widescreen signal to use - they just hook all the TVs in the store up to an analogue terrestrial signal. You'd think the big-name chains might have got wise to this and created a DVD showreel to feed to their TVs instead.

Right, you can get back to the actual topic of the thread now...
In some cases they do - they just don't use them. Back in 1998 I used to work at homeworld we had a video and a DVD from Sony called 'The Widescreen Experience' - almost an hour of various widescreen footage, with the standard marketing explanation about why widescreen is better.

What did we use it for? Umm, for demonstrating VCRs and DVD Players, our entire stock of which (except those sold as packages) was connected to portable 14" TVs! All of our widescreen sets were showing Westcountry TV - which at that time transmitted almost nothing (and afaik, definately nothing at all during the hours the store was open) in widescreen, even though we had a VCR in the aerial feed to the TV sets and so we could have played the widescreen video on the widescreen TVs.

One day I had the dubious pleasure of looking after the widescreens. As well as having to sell a screen format I don't like and don't believe in (although believe me, when money is involved, I can spout that 'widescreen is better because it's a more natural shape' crap as well as the next person lol). At first, I set them all up properly, which meant they were displaying a 4:3 pillarboxed picture with black bands down the side. It was my intention that this would be a strength, showing the extra screen space which true widescreen transmission offered.

Until that is, a couple of pensioners walked past proclaiming 'I would buy that! You pay all that money, and just get a little picture in the centre!'. The problem was compounded when I came back from my break to find that Westcountry were showing their afternoon film in 16:9, leaving my widescreen sets all having a huge black border round all 4 sides of the screen.

Seeing now though the opportunity to actually get the damn things to display something in widescreen, I quickly changed them all to 'movie zoom' which zooms in in a 16:9 shaped portion of the picture, in this case meaning that the widescreen picture filled the screen.

After the film finished of course, the movie zoom setting was no good. Some of the TVs were intelligent enough to realise that a fullscreen picture was now being shown and switched the ratio - but to 'expand' which makes the picture look squashed. Others didn't and stayed zoomed in. So now I had some TVs in the right ratio but with the top and bottom cut off, and others with a squashed pictured. All looked awful, although after people earlier were too stupid to realise that if a program isn't in widescreen, then you need those black bands at the sides to keep the ratio right, I decided to concede and switched them all to the mode I hate the most - the squashed picture.

No sooner did I do that than a number of people commented on how the picture looked squashed.

I couldn't win. But then, that was in 1998 when unless you had a showreel (although of course we did, but just didn't use it) it was all but impossible to get a widescreen set to display a widescreen picture.

Now though, I agree, there is no excuse. All of the big stores sell DTT boxes. If they're in a DTT area, they just need to connect a box into the loop, set it to News 24, and there you have it. If not, then they all sell Sky, so they can connect a Sky box into the loop and set that to News 24.

But no, all the big stores do still seem to just use the analogue tuner with them, and display a squashed picture. Which for some reason, people seem to have become tolerant of. Back in 98, when someone was presented with an incorrectly set up widescreen TV, even if they didn't know the first thing about TV, would still instantly feel that something was wrong with the picture. Now, when widescreen is everywhere, they don't seem to notice that they are watching a squashed picture.
Chris
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One of the problems with TV shops displaying things in "widescreen" is that a lot of them don't actually have a widescreen signal to use - they just hook all the TVs in the store up to an analogue terrestrial signal. You'd think the big-name chains might have got wise to this and created a DVD showreel to feed to their TVs instead.
The last time I went into Dixons and Currys they had some kind of specially made widescreen showreel that looped round and round on their widescreen sets. Not sure whether this was powered off a DVD player hidden in the back room though.

They no longer showed live TV on their sets, although some staff or customers had fiddled with certain sets so they showed Teletext (not really a thing you want to be plugging when you are trying to sell at digital widescreen TV set ?!) or BBC One/Two which on a Saturday was displaying the sport (some of it was in stretchyvision).
Cheese Head
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Anyone know of a launch date? i remember last year in the ol lounge, it was said anywhere between 04-06... any ideas ?
» James »
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Neil Jones
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AFAIK, LongHorn is still scheduled for 2006. The second beta is due, I think, in the summer sometime.
MarkN
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Neil Jones wrote:AFAIK, LongHorn is still scheduled for 2006. The second beta is due, I think, in the summer sometime.
From the front cover of ZDNetweek magazine:
The timing of Longhorn is increasingly uncertain. Microsoft originally said the operating system would ship in 2005 but then withdrew that date and said only that it would ship when it is ready.
The article also talks about new versions of Windows being released before Longhorn.

For some strange reason, I just can't help thinking that "Longhorn" will be another example of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware">this...</a>
cwathen
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I think they are seeing that at present there is no real need for desktop systems to need anything beyond Windows XP. There is no hardware which it doesn't support and can't make full use of (especially since the 64 bit builds were released), there is no current software being written which won't run on it, in short, there is no need to change it.

And after a long period during which Microsoft seemed to be bringing out new versions of Windows every 5 minutes, perhaps they feel it's time once again to let a version have a decent lifetime until a need for a new version is created and people will upgrade at once, rather than at present when the reaction from most people on hearing of a new version of Windows is (oh not again, I've only just upgraded).

We had Windows 98 in 1998, followed by 98SE in 1999, then Windows 2000 and ME in 2000, then then Windows XP in 2001. For businesses, Windows 2000 was only current for 18 months or so. Many businesses were annoyed at replacing their NT system with 2000 only to find that if they held out a few months longer they could have deployed XP instead. Many home users were annoyed at having upgraded their Windows 95/98 systems to ME (aswell as finding out that ME is a heap of crap of course) being told that this was the latest and greatest and this would set them up for the future only to find that something genuinely new and genuinely better was just around the corner (ME's lifetime as the current home version of Windows lasted only 11 months - they might as well not have bothered releasing it).

XP then had a bit of a slow start as people either couldn't justify another upgrade, or were holding out to see if Microsoft were going to replace XP after a couple of years. Now that they've finally talked most people round to the XP route, with most home users having upgraded, and businesses having it in the back of their mind for when they next upgrade their operating system, it wouldn't surprise me if they leave it as it is for the time being. They've released Windows Server 2003 as the 'XP' of server products, it wouldn't surprise me if that will be the last proper release of Windows (I say proper release because I can see an 'XP Second Edition' stopgap coming out over the next year or so - mainly because new installations of XP from the 2001 retail build now need countless patches from Windows Update to make the system up to date and secure - although if they just hurried up and released SP2 - imo something which should allready be out now - it would at least make the process easier) for a good few years.

They're keeping Longhorn going because the publicity would be disasterous if Microsoft weren't seen to be working on the next big version of Windows, but I don't think it's not even vaguely clear what it'll be like yet - it's probably going to be the version of Windows which addresses things which as hardware and software becomes more sophisticated Windows XP won't be able to do, but as I said at present there is nothing which falls into that category.
Cheese Head
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It could be a place name. Chicago, Memphis were some of the others they had.

they also had "Neptune" but that was never released/completed.

I might of mentioned this before, either way, http://www.winhistory.de has a list of the names they used.

Just think to your self, "Longhorn" is better than "Interface Manager"
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Pete
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Longhorn is a codename. XP was Whisler for ages. These IIRC, refer to the mountains around MS's headquarters or something.

When it comes out it'll be called something like XP2, Windows 2006, NT6 or something like that.
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Cheese Head
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Imagine if Microsoft brought out competition with <i>itself</i>. For example, currently having Windows XP released, they release another operating system not to replace XP, but to give customers a choice. Say an upgraded version of ME to be sold side by side with XP ...

(Ok, so in theory, they wouldnt be in competition with them selves, theyd just be richer, and manipulate the market more than they already do)
» James »
I don't know my future after this weekend, and I don't want to
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