SlashNOT

Paul writes: Windows chief Jim Allchin of Microsoft corporation has announced that Microsoft will be officially changing the code name of its upcoming Longhorn operating system development effort to “Shorthorn”.

“This forward-looking name change implements our new emphasis on expectation management.” said Mr. Allchin. “We’ve been ripping announced features out of Longhorn nearly as fast as we’ve been missing development milestones. By changing the name, we’re creating a set of customer expectations that we have a chance of meeting by mid 2007.”

Mr. Allchin took the opportunity to explain the remaining features of Shorthorn.

“People thought that a simple folder hierarchy was hard to understand. So we’ve eliminated that in favor of a file-system meta-data query subsystem that enables virtual folders based on multiple user selected criteria. End users will be able to create virtual folders, for example, that are based on a set of per-node features such as the date-time stamp or the first three letters of the name. This way, files will appear and disappear from virtual folders based on their changing membership in the domains that result from these file system queries.”

“That’s going to be way less confusing.”

Mr. Allchin went on to explain that other than the changes to make the file system harder to understand, Shorthorn would be a set of security patches and will include better support for the never-to-be-implemented second version of the Internet called IPv6, as well as a set of snazzy new graphical features stolen from Mac OS X.

“Of course, getting Shorthorn out on time is more important than actually improving anything, so this list of feature may be shortened if we hit any snags.”