I can now reveal that Microsoft has announced that Longhorn is going to be called Windows Vista, and that Beta 1 will be released to MSDN and Technet subscribers next Wednesday.

"Love at first sight? I don't know about that. More like lust".

- Abi Titmuss last night on CLI

Well, at least she was honest.

Board is currently down due to problems at ForumForFree's datacentre.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.

I have now been notified that the reason for the board's recent downtime was due to the MySQL Database Server having to be moved for maintenance reasons.

However, today the board does not seem to be working either.

Edited @ 1:38PM: The board now workd but is extremely slow and sometimes unresponsive. Sorry!

Yesterday I heard that Microsoft are going to be bringing two of the "Three Pillars" of the next version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn", forward for users running XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003.

Indigo, the Web services code platform, and Avalon, the presentation system are both going to be made available. Which leaves only WinFS, the new "file-system-but-not-a-file-system" fle storage platform built on top of NTFS. And Microsoft said long ago WinFS would not be in the first client release of Longhorn anyway.

So, it would seem, Longhorn is now nothing more than another upgrade, pocketing more money for Microsoft, or at least in the first release.

What do you think? Is Longhorn worth it? Add your comments here and discuss this at the Sweet Technology Board.

On closer inspection, the purpose of Y! Video and Google's beta differ. Yahoo! seem to be offering results of videos found on Web pages, something AllTheWeb have been doing for ages, whereas Google are offering actual recent television items, such as The Jay Leno Show. So I'm not sure we can really compare the two.

Again, let me know what you think.

I am very keen  to be able to test the Longhorn beta when it comes out, supposedly June this year. Is anyone else also looking forward to Longhorn, and why?

For more information on Longhorn, visit Paul Thurrotts's WinSuperSite or search Google.

Post your comments please.

 

This is a screen shot of an early Longhorn alpha:

What do you think?

Google being the largest search engine company in the world, I expected great things from their new Video Search Beta. However, I was sorely disappointed. A search for "Eastenders" resulted in 0 search results. A search for "Coronation Street" was similarly blank. I soon realised Google was indexing only American televsion, so I entered "Jay Leno". Aha! Success! Clicking on the first result, I expected maybe a review or information on the content of that show, and a video clip sample. Information was there, but the message "Video currently not available" once again frustrated me.

I decided to check out Yahoo! UK & Ireland. Entering "Eastenders" and clicking "Video - New" brought up several results in thumbnail format. These were in a variety of formats, such as .ram (Real Format) and .wmv (Windows Media Video). A click on a thumbnail and the page the video was found on loaded, with a frame above with information such as length, format and so on. I clicked on "Play video" and in seconds Windows Media Player launched and - Bob's your Uncle - video!

So, for once, Yahoo! won out over Google. Well done Yahoo!

This may be old news now but I am looking for your comments on Microsoft's new search engine. How does it compare to Google? Do you prefer the search options (Encarta, Web etc)?

This new Walkman phone, expected to debut Summer 2005 looks pretty fantastic to me. It is a true Walkman, with I believe, 4GB memory .

Watch a video here.