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And you'll be back faster than a Google search result. Weeding out the crap?

Just for a sample, try this one: getfirefox. If the first link on that search goes to a Mozilla mirror you will win one Internet. Try Linux. Hey, this is fun. Spoiler: the first link there is always "www.Microsoft.com/Windows : Special Offers from Windows Vista® w/ the Purchase of Select Laptops." The first time I tried this I was looking for Open Office and wound up misdirected to a members only site where you had to register to download a probably spyware infested Open Office and signing up for unlimited pharma spam. The scary part is that the text of the link misled me to believe I was headed for "OpenOffice.org". Try it and see. Let's find more horrifically inappropriate ad placements and query results, shall we? I'll bet you could come up with a really funny one.

Note: Please don't go to any of the sites linked to those search results through live.com. Bad things might happen to your Windows box and there's nothing there of interest for your powerbook.

Yeah, that's a good search result ad, don't you think? No wonder Google is becoming a verb.

And you'll be back faster than a Google search result. Weeding out the crap?

Just for a sample, try this one: getfirefox. If the first link on that search goes to a Mozilla mirror you will win one Internet. Try Linux. Hey, this is fun. Spoiler: the first link there is always "www.Microsoft.com/Windows : Special Offers from Windows Vista® w/ the Purchase of Select Laptops." The first time I tried this I was looking for Open Office and wound up misdirected to a members only site where you had to register to download a probably spyware infested Open Office and signing up for unlimited pharma spam. The scary part is that the text of the link misled me to believe I was headed for "OpenOffice.org". Try it and see. Let's find more horrifically inappropriate ad placements and query results, shall we? I'll bet you could come up with a really funny one.

Note: Please don't go to any of the sites linked to those search results through live.com. Bad things might happen to your Windows box and there's nothing there of interest for your powerbook.

Yeah, that's a good search result ad, don't you think? No wonder Google is becoming a verb.

And you'll be back faster than a Google search result. Weeding out the crap?

Just for a sample, try this one: getfirefox. If the first link on that search goes to a Mozilla mirror you will win one Internet. Try Linux. Hey, this is fun. Spoiler: the first link there is always "www.Microsoft.com/Windows : Special Offers from Windows Vista® w/ the Purchase of Select Laptops." The first time I tried this I was looking for Open Office and wound up misdirected to a members only site where you had to register to download a probably spyware infested Open Office and signing up for unlimited pharma spam. The scary part is that the text of the link misled me to believe I was headed for "OpenOffice.org". Try it and see. Let's find more horrifically inappropriate ad placements and query results, shall we? I'll bet you could come up with a really funny one.

Note: Please don't go to any of the sites linked to those search results through live.com. Bad things might happen to your Windows box and there's nothing there of interest for your powerbook.

Yeah, that's a good search result ad, don't you think? No wonder Google is becoming a verb.

There's a house in Washington that's turned them into a UFO landing site in the front yard (you can see them in bird's eye view). Very fun to see in winter when they're lit up with blue Christmas lights.

Neil

I might be totally off the mark here, but is anyone forgetting about Seadragon - http://labs.live.com/seadragon.aspx? I mean, I know it's developed as part of Live, but the idea of Seadragon (or similar) working in an Windows OS is enough to stick it up Mac's Expose, no? Certainly Microsoft did not acquire Seadragon so that they can screw it up, right? Oh wait...

Thank goodness no one seems interested in aggregating and geolocating all those random photos and combining them into a cohesive image.

Yep, if we just shut down Google Street view we'll be guaranteed privacy in any public location, yes-sir.

Seriously, Google Street View is basically useless in terms of "evil government surveillance". Even if we had Star Trek technology capable of identifying any citizen in a country of 300 million from a bad photo, the chances of catching someone in some recognizably suspicious activity from a single photo taken on a random date from a public street is downright infinitesimal. We're not talking about 24/7 video cameras on every street corner here.

The only real "privacy" concern is a social one: A few people caught by Google Street View will be doing something embarrassing or indiscreet. Someone may find an embarrassing photo, post it on teh internets for the subject's friends/coworkers/family to find, and ignominy ensues. But there are lots of other places to find photos on the Internet; anyone doing something embarrassing in public view runs a risk of public humiliation, Google Street View or not.

Of course, you could try to mitigate the risk by enacting laws which criminalize showing photos of an individual without their consent. But trying to enforce such such laws would, ironically, require a complete lack of anonymity — at least for anyone with a camera — and move the nation several notches towards "police state". Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

It's heavily templatized generation of language based on the automatically extracted sentiment data. The important difference here is that the language of the summary does not include phrases from the original user reviews. While this is a new twist on the old problem, automatic extraction of evaluation criteria and sentiment analysis in product reviews are not new. Heck, even Microsoft has a working system for that (electronics only):

http://search.live.com/products/?q=nuvi%20350%20GPS%20-%20Asian%20American%20(City%2FVehicle%2C%203.5%22%20LCD)&p1=%5BCommerceService+scenario%3D%22reviews%22+docid%3D%222BECBBF6F17C98618C2E%22+p%3D%2220df8fe62a9b4e9490993ff7b91032af%22%5D&wf=Commerce&FORM=ENCA

See the bars on the left, and be sure to click through to the individual sentences. It's spooky how accurate that thing seems to be.

The problem with all these systems is that they're heavily domain dependent. You will use different language to write a review of a book than for kitchen appliance. In fact, you may even use different language from different kinds of books or different kinds of kitchen appliances. Worse yet, some things are notoriously difficult to accurately measure sentiment on. Once innuendo and sarcasm become frequent, all hope is lost - you need strong AI to figure that out.

This is not to say these systems are useless - to the contrary, they are very useful in their respective domains. This is just to say that the only new thing I see here is the generated blurb.

Unfortunately most people see "QoS" in a home router webconfig and think this is how QoS can be enabled. Or they see the feature in an OS/app pkg and think that configuration of same will solve their QoS problems. This is mostly not the case. Those suggesting DD-WRT, ipcop etc are doing so out of ignorance of the issues surrounding effective QoS. I have experience with provider networks and business implementations of traffic management which has provided me with an understanding of the issues involved. Without an essay, the root of the issue of effective QoS is queueing. Simply marking packets or applying a queuing strategy will usually not provide effective control. In a situation where a link is a simple, as-designed ptp situation with no re-encapsulation QoS can be effectively implemented using in-box configuration. Home routers and OS-based control will work provided QoS is configured at each endpoint. Unfortunately few people have the kind of service which out-of-box QoS can be used effectively. Have a read of my blog entry on the subject for further detail: http://benryanau.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E55F3F5F75B5A7BB!126.entry There are three options available: implement artificial queuing on a traffic-shaped interface at each end, use software or a router that can 'poison' and manage non-realtime traffic when realtime traffic is present, or the practical solution: buy more bandwidth. Until the ISP industry gets it together and develops a mechanism for large-scale access networks to provide customer interface queueing at each end of the link, this is the situation we're in. Hope this sheds some light on the topic.

meh, live search does the same thing: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=moviemaker+download&go=&form=QBLH your joke would have been funnier if you had of found a search term that went to the right place for google and camel sex on microsoft's version.

Oh, that's nothing. Imagine transparent client-to-server remoting on top of that (i.e., part of the code just runs on the server, and other part is compiled to JS which runs on the client) - now that is insanity.

There is a Windows Sidebar gadget you can get that tells you the current threat level. I used to use it, but I got tired of it always telling me the threat level was "Elevated."

This is solved, if you enter from this link: http://home.live.com/?mkt=es-es ...so perhaps, more M$ faults.

Try this link:

I was able to sign in with both after using it

The account management page doesn't work either, the sections just sit on loading forever (why do they use scripting for this anyway?). Thus giving no way to, say, change your password.
Billing still works. Still no way to remove a credit card without adding another, though.

Yea apple spent most of the 90s with poor products and incompetent management. I never said anything about the older OS 7/8/9.

For what its worth Microsoft did the same thing before they started using NT for all their operating systems.

As bad as Windows 95 and Windows 98 were, they were still superior to the Mac OS versions out at the time. Not only did they offer preemptive multitasking but also protected memory, TCP/IP networking and full backwards compatibility.

I know you'd like to believe you have a point but you really don't even with the free downloads stuff, Microsoft hasn't really improved XP since SP2 came out and that was only because they had to. The stuff you can download from MS.com is minor insignificant crap like powertoys and Windows destkop search (which is horrible).

Microsoft created C# (IMO, one of the nicest programming languages ever made) and .NET. These opened up a whole world of new software developments.

Windows Media Player, Windows Media Encoder, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Defender, Internet Explorer, Visual C++ Express, Visual Basic Express, Microsoft Reader, Paint.NET and Virtual PC, among many more, are available for free. You can find even more if you visit the Microsoft Research site also. Clearly there is no shortage of free software being offered by Microsoft.

It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable...

I don't suppose Google or Sony has got the memo? Or Apple, for that matter?

Google had, and still has, a good search engine whereas MS didn't. I recall from years ago how people complained about how they couldn't tell the difference between search results and ads when using MSN, the few tymes I used it myself I didn't find any relevant results. Now, if you look at MS's Live.com it has a clean interface, like Google. Sony was in game consoles before MS so had an advantage there. And Apple has been around as long as MS, MS even writes software for Macs. I'm typing this on a Mac I got less than 10 months ago, after switching from Windows. It came with a trialware version of Office 2004 for Mac. Switching because I don't like it that MS treats it's users like criminals, which is what Activation is about, I was not about to use it. Instead I use NeoOffice the native Mac port of OpenOffice.

Silverlight's MultiScaleImage control (aka deep zoom) is a version of the SeaDragon renderer. The image format it uses is a custom tree structure that contains pixel details relevant to both it's position in the tree and relative to it's peers. Essentially, it's a hierarchical image with very smooth transitions.

Silverlight: silverlight.net
SeaDragon: http://labs.live.com/seadragon.aspx

What's the gap between this and the existing Virtual Earth 3D plugin? http://www.google.com/earth/plugin/examples/samples/index.html vs. http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk.

Two quick queries - Ayn Rand and Science - yield no results.

It's always a shame when anything book-related goes away. :(

Two quick queries - Ayn Rand and Science - yield no results.

It's always a shame when anything book-related goes away. :(

Didn't they try this with the Live Search Club?

I didn't know that there were only two search engines in the U.S. market...

Refer to Microsoft maps about this. This has always been an issue. You will not get the same maps on http://maps.live.com/ as you will on http://ditu.live.com./ Satellite imagery has been a problem as well with Chinese map sites. Check out http://www.ditu.net/ to see how they got around that.

Here is a brief explination: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/12/live-maps-in-china-an-intervie.html
Was the data allowed to leave China? What other restrictions were placed on the data and its use? [vt] The map data is not allowed to leave the border. Some other countries also have the same regulations (Korea for example). In China, maps can only be provided by the licensed map data providers. Also the on-line publishing maps need to go through a âencryptionâ(TM) process whereby map coordinates are transformed to an unknown coordinate system (not in Lat/Long). This is mainly for the national security reason as far as I know.

Refer to Microsoft maps about this. This has always been an issue. You will not get the same maps on http://maps.live.com/ as you will on http://ditu.live.com./ Satellite imagery has been a problem as well with Chinese map sites. Check out http://www.ditu.net/ to see how they got around that.

Here is a brief explination: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/12/live-maps-in-china-an-intervie.html
Was the data allowed to leave China? What other restrictions were placed on the data and its use? [vt] The map data is not allowed to leave the border. Some other countries also have the same regulations (Korea for example). In China, maps can only be provided by the licensed map data providers. Also the on-line publishing maps need to go through a âencryptionâ(TM) process whereby map coordinates are transformed to an unknown coordinate system (not in Lat/Long). This is mainly for the national security reason as far as I know.

Google: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=...

f*cking microsoft agents

There are a number of companies that do media conversion. They can read old floppies, 9-track tapes, tape cartridges and other obsolete media.

Try:
http://computer-convert.com/index.htm
http://www.vintagetech.com/?section=conversion (they also do 7-track tape, paper tape and punch cards!)

Google: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=media+conversion+floppy+tape+&src=IE-SearchBox

However, you may find looking on ebay is cheaper and more fun.

when it comes to maps, MS seem to have the cash to purchase better imaging. http://maps.live.com/ has a worse interface but the data is so
Google maps was the best (better than MS virtualearth) when it was first released
but now its starting to show its age with its images

Microsoft Live Labs is working on a similar project to translate CIL (.NET bytecode) to JavaScript as part of their Volta project. It's part of a larger effort to allow you to write both the client-side and the server-side code in the same project and then have a post-processor split the resulting assemblies and generate all of the boilerplate RPC code to make the client-side bits run on the client and the server-side bits run on the server.

Going by present form it'll be one subscription per computer and not easily transferable.

I think the chances are reasonable.

TFA also says the subscription bundles OneCare, which seperately costs $50 per year for up to 3 PCs. The typical Slashdot reader would probably find little or no value in OneCare, but novices might like it (especially the included phone/chat/email support).

So for most of us, we're comparing a small recurring subscription to a larger $120 purchase that doesn't expire (but newer versions cost another $120).

I would agree, though, that most of the type safety that Ada packages in the language itself can be done in C++ on library level, and indeed even more impressive things are being done - boost::units, for example. C++ templates are rather brittle by themselves though, with all the duck typing for template parameters. C++0x concepts should fix this, and hopefully, this time it won't take implementations 5+ years to catch up with the standard (g++ is implementing C++0x features steadily, and there are hints on MSVC developers' blogs that they are also tracking the draft); still, it's not here just yet.

The nature of social apps is that they are, well, social.

Meaning that the biggest draw will always be the sites and services that are most inclusive and with the farthest reach.

The tech isn't going to be decisive, but Windows is by no means poorly positioned here,Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks to Put Users at the Center of their Data [March 25, 2008]

A great design/UX blog I read has a post on good use of font/text and contrast in digital display:

http://idvux.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2EB6AAF6C3AC1EBE!599.entry

http://silverlight.live.com/

Just sayin'.

Have you tried Live Search recently? Google still give better results more often, but I find better results on Live around 20% of the time.

the problem with the "let's break up Microsoft into its various components" argument is that the Windows and Office divisions make so much money that they prop up the other divisions. It was aaaaages before the Hardware division made money, but now I wouldn't give up my MS keyboard and mouse if you paid me to. The XBox and XBox360 are proven money sinks too, for the time being. This is not to mention really cool shit like Live Labs and Microsoft Research...

Here's an interesting one off of Microsoft's own live.com A blog entry with pictures

IE gets up to 250MB and then doesn't render the page. Yet Firefox works fine. Interestingly though if you save the Firefox content and then load it in IE is also works fine, so maybe not a fair comparison as it seems to be serving up different material to each browser.

Microsoft has already been testing there HealthVault system at http://health.live.com. There's a clear battleground here: ultimately, with an ageing population and an increasingly technological population, the market for health record keeping is huge money making opportunity. Google's goal of organizing the world's information doesn't stop at public data; the most important data to each of us is our own personal data, and of that, our health data if the most valuable. People are willing to spend their life-savings just to stay a little. The drug industry already knows that.

So when we point out the inadequacies of current email clients, our criticisms of Outlook Express should be updated to criticisms of Windows Live Mail.

http://search.yahoo.com/ (yahoo clean searc page)
http://www.live.com/ (msn clean search page)

All 3 of the big players, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, have pretty good search algorithms in place. If you ran a Yahoo or MSN Live search and put it in the google template you wouldn't notice any major difference.

Seriously...

and 2) is relatively uncluttered and straightforward when compared to MSN.

Check out Live.com, Microsoft's new search engine.

Yahoo is actually IMHO better than Google in a lot of areas

Except as a portal and the Yahoo! Groups, I'm a member of some groups, I think Yahoo! isn't as good as Google. Of course I don't know about Gmail. But for search and as a directory I think Google is better.

Can they do this against Google? From a customer stand-point I'm not sure. I'm not just going to use Microsoft Search(tm) over Google so long as Google remains free and provides decent results. So Microsoft can't really win there. But they can steal ad revenue from Google by making their business/web-ads side more appealing to businesses. Get that, control the ad market and you'll be able to embrace and extend Google...

However to beat Google in ads a competitor has to deliver more eyeballs. Many people use Google because it's clean and returns relevant search results. MS may have a viable competitor with Live.com but until Google no longer provides decent results I won't switch and I don't think too many others will either. Even when Google doesn't return good results though I still won't use Live, as it is now when Google doesn't return what I'm looking for I use Teoma (now Ask.com), Mooter, or About.com. Once in a while I use Alta Vista.

Mod parent down for comparing apples with oranges.

Let us compare properly:

• search page: http://google.com/ http://search.yahoo.com/ http://live.com/
• portal/personalised page: http://google.com/ig http://my.yahoo.com/ http://msn.com/

Not so different anymore, is it? Especially the search pages are cloned off Google's look&feel, and have been since years.

While you've got a point, you're not comparing the right things. MSN seems to intentionally be a portal site. And yes, it's cluttered and ugly, and we both hate it, but some people don't. It's there for them. However, it doesn't seem fair to compare it to www.google.com, because it's not the competitor. The actual competitor for www.google.com is www.live.com. And that is relatively clean and simple.

They've done it before. Hotmail as we knew it is gone, replaced by the bloated / unpopular Microsoft Windows Live Mail. There has been some complaints about the forced 'upgrade.' Many users have switched to Yahoo's email system to escape the M$ running theme of acquiring and destroying decent product. Guess they didn't run to the right place. Once they try forcing Yahoo users into Live Mail, where will they go?

Hello, Gmail!

They've done it before. Hotmail as we knew it is gone, replaced by the bloated / unpopular Microsoft Windows Live Mail. There has been some complaints about the forced 'upgrade.' Many users have switched to Yahoo's email system to escape the M$ running theme of acquiring and destroying decent product. Guess they didn't run to the right place. Once they try forcing Yahoo users into Live Mail, where will they go?

Hello, Gmail!

Just thought I would test your theory. Live.com search for Python Google search for Python. Google shows no bad results, Live.com has Python.com $40 signup that links to a porn site. That has been my typical experience. I don't know what tech terms you've been searching for, but Google has always had relevant links for me on the first page.

Is here, strait from Steve lombardi, the Virtual Earth program manager. See also other pertinent answers here.