Marc has the scoop, but here’s the ultra-quick gist:
- Beta 1: Late July
- Beta 2: November
Marc says beta 2′ll be more interesting:
Beta 1 will not contain any of the UI goodies I and so many others are excited about seeing. This first beta is aimed squarely at the developer community to begin familiarizing themselves with the new OS platform.
Expect serious backlash (again) after beta 1, as people continue to look for GUI enhancements over anything else. Hopefully hardcore developers will be able to dig deep enough into this/next month’s beta to allow them to have launch-ready applications, and to give solid feedback on where Microsoft has gone wrong with this release.
July 6th, 2005 at 11:27 am
From what I have read in the last couple of months, you will need a super computer to run Longhorn with all its beauties.
And I am afraid Longhorn is designed for home users because companies are not going to buy (again) new computers for writing e-mails, hell they still use Windows 98.
July 6th, 2005 at 11:36 am
Longhorn runs just fine on any P3 with 256MB of RAM or more.
It’s a great OS in one respect at least: it downgrades the user experience to the hardware the user has.
So, if you run it on a brand new massive gaming desktop, it’ll look very different than on an older machine. I’ve even seen it running on P2’s.
Longhorn is kind of like Quake: it’s designed for the future computing power of desktops, but it’s also designed for now.
So don’t worry about those old rumours, Longhorn’ll run just fine on older machines (ie: 2-3 years old now, which’ll be 3-5 years old by the time it’s released).
July 6th, 2005 at 12:44 pm
Sorry to burst your bubble but that Longhorn information came from Paul Thurrott and not Marc, which is clearly stated in the first sentence of Marc’s post.
emea.windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthurrott/
Article/ArticleID/46901/windowspaulthurrott_46901.html
” As for Longhorn Beta 1, that milestone release is still on track for “this summer,” although Microsoft officially missed the original internal release date of June 30. My sources say that Microsoft now plans to ship Longhorn Beta 1 in late July. The beta 2 release is still scheduled for November. Internally, most Longhorn product groups have already shipped their beta 1 code to the Windows team, and Microsoft is now prepping various 5200-series builds (post-beta 1) for internal rollout and testing. My sources describe Longhorn Beta 1 as one of the most stable beta 1 OS releases in Microsoft history, although it will lack most of the UI niceties the company plans for future releases. Beta 2, I’m told, is going to be “incredible” and “far more impressive than people now realize.” We shall see.”
July 6th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
“LongDude”, I’m well aware that the original post was from Paul, but Marc was the one in my reading list who brought this to my attention, so he gets the link