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Photo Gallery needs sharpen! Somewhere there is a funny picture of how inconsistent the interface still can be with button and arrows moving around per application, Wish I could find that link again. Are the minimize, maximize, and close buttons still all screwed up in RC2? http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039 D51E3DB!6931.entry

Do translucent windows add anything to the use experience?
User: "Oh look, at the top of my window through a .25" space I can see part of the text of an icon on my desktop! How very useful!"

But I will say it's coming bugs and all so you all might as well get used to it. Just think of how much money you'll make installing and fixing Vista? Just think of how little I'll be paying for Vista thanks to having MSDN via work...Big kisses to MS now!

Try http://local.live.com/ If your house is in a "Bird's Eye" area you can see yourself in the back yard ;)

In general the main cause is the bigger search engines are still not even trying to copy the big selling points of google.

Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".

For further information you are advised to join here.
Microsoft's Hotmail employees are downright LIVE about Vista.

http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true - yeah, I can see why she'd have trouble finding that. (And for the anally retentive, that is the autoredirect when you go to search.msn.com (for one), before you start complaining about the QUERYSTRING).

It's not all sunshine and roses though.

http://hane05.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!908541C1D7A 8E580!3555.entry

If you tell us what this is hiding, will they have to kill you?

As far as I can tell, it's hiding nothing. Does that mean I have to die now?

http://spaces.live.com/

Yeah, it's been rebranded as Windows Live Spaces to fit into the Live Services. They don't allow you to customize the theme like you can on Myspace, which is kind of annoying but at least it prevents people from making those godawful profiles like Myspace has with transparent tables over bright flashing backgrounds.

The interface beats the hell out of any other "space" set up I've seen though. You can add and remove modules, drag/drop to reorganize them, add RSS feeds, animated photo slideshows, etc.

It's a shame they limit their users so. Embedding non-MSN videos is a real pain, you can only use HTML in a special container that's still in beta testing so you can only add one to your space by appending a string to the customization URL to add it to the modules menu (and even then the HTML is sanitized), ... You know what? Never mind. It's irritating but it has a lot of potential. Screw the particulars.

You're dead on with the OS integration.

Doesn't M$ already have a "myspace" type site called "Windows Live Space" http://spaces.live.com/ ?

What do they need two for ? Im not sure how this is a new step for them other than having it under a company who name doesnot contain M$ or windows or hotmail !

Actually it does have everything implemented. There will be no new features in the final RTM build according to Alchin and Valentine. The only difference will be bug fixes and improvements in the WDK and other documentation.

Indcidentally, there is a huge party going on at Microsoft's main campus soccer field today, if you were curious to see how Windows developers act while drunk.

Out of the 109 comments on this story, I am surprised no one tried to access Microsoft's LiveDrive, which you can do here:

http://drive.live.com/

You get the Live.com login page, and it logs you in...but it's a completely blank page, if you view source you get a blank document as well.

OK I'm going to collect all the information I've found on this topic into this post for posterity.

Bugzila bug discussing Firefox MSI installer. Discusses Mozilla's view on things and what different people want in order to deploy Firefox on large scale desktops.

Instructions on how to package official Firefox releases into an MSI.

UK University admin blog talking about Firefox and System Administration. Talks about deployment of Firefox on enterprise desktops, issues with GPO and links to projects and resources and pros and cons with various packaging attempts.

3rd Party Frontmotion Firefox MSI installer. Pros - readily available. Cons - from a 3rd party (trustworthiness, how long will it be supported for, will they start charging...)

This is probably to go head to head with Windows Live Writer

Microsoft is quite capable of this all by themselves.

sigh...

Microsoft related website showing image of wikipedia?? http://labs.live.com/photosynth/images/page_6.jpg

Amazing...

Their website shows wikipedia, not MSN Encarta :)

Only IE7 bug I noticed is that IE7 REFUSES to remove borders on iframes (or maybe it's the body tag inside the iframe). Using CSS or deprecated HTML attributes have no effect. IE6 does not have this problem.

It should be possible, as Live.com does just that (every non-certified gadget runs in an iframe for security purposes). However beta 3 does have an issue with resizing those iframes vertically. If a gadget needs more or less space than the default, it'll resize on IE6. Not so on IE7. It won't resize on Firefox either, but live.com puts scrollbars on the iframes for Firefox to somewhat mitigate the issue. No scrollbars for IE7 makes many gadgets unusable.

Seeing as though both Windows Live Local (JavaScript) and Yahoo! Maps Beta (Flash) already let you view live traffic on the web, I'd guess it's only a matter of time before Google adds traffic as an option to their full-scale mapping app.

There's an add-on to IE6 called the MSN (or Live) Toolbar that gives tabbed browsing capabilities. It's inferior to IE7, or even Firefox out-of-the-box (which is also inferior to IE7), but it sure beats stardard IE6. Of course, 6 is still less secure, far less standards compliant, and has an inferior UI, but for those of us who must use it at work, it is acceptable.

As much as I love to use Google [the search engine mostly] I am sick of this 'Beta' thing.

Everything that comes out of any company is now branded as 'Beta' Software / websites. The new Microsoft Live crap, Yahoo is branding their crap as Beta... I'm sick of it.

Now, perhaps they could hire Tom Cruise to utilize his witchcraft to somehow get Beta as a trademark -- then they could lay on the royalty fee's on any company using it for commerical use -- I'm sure that would quadruple their profits! :-)

By the way -- did I mention how much I hate the word 'Beta'?

I always thought Microsoft was the king of 'BETA' labels. Can anyone confirm this?

I always thought Microsoft was the king of 'BETA' labels. Can anyone confirm this?

Google does not make operating systems or desktop software, they are a freakin' search company, and MS is not a search company. Yet MS identifies them as a competitor, just like they identify every company in existence as their competitor.

Google Desktop

Windows Live Search

And free, just like google.

http://domains.live.com/

A coworker was using Windows Live Local, which is really cool if you live in one of the places that have Bird's Eye (TM) maps. Example: a baseball game seen aerially so close you can make out individual players on the field!

Also cool on Live: traffic, which Google Maps doesn't provide. Ask.com maps is another site that has outdone Google in mapping. Competition is truly good and I thank Google for raising the bar here.

A coworker was using Windows Live Local, which is really cool if you live in one of the places that have Bird's Eye (TM) maps. Example: a baseball game seen aerially so close you can make out individual players on the field!

Also cool on Live: traffic, which Google Maps doesn't provide. Ask.com maps is another site that has outdone Google in mapping. Competition is truly good and I thank Google for raising the bar here.

- Fzz

Someone with serious muscle and money needs to step up and lay the smackdown on Ebay... *cough cough* google *cough* microsoft

Well, they're not auction sites exactly but...

Windows Live Expo Beta
Windows Live Shopping Beta

Someone with serious muscle and money needs to step up and lay the smackdown on Ebay... *cough cough* google *cough* microsoft

Well, they're not auction sites exactly but...

Windows Live Expo Beta
Windows Live Shopping Beta

Update: The beta is now available at http://www.live.com/

Windows Live Safety Center hat momentan technische Schwierigkeiten.
Die von Ihnen gewünschte Website ist momentan nicht verfügbar. Wir möchten uns für den vorübergehenden Ausfall entschuldigen. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.
Windows Live Safety Center-Startseite

Windows Live Safety Center is currently experiencing technical difficulties
Sorry, the web page you requested is not available. We apologize for this temporary outage. Please try again later.

Windows Live Safety Center hat momentan technische Schwierigkeiten.
Die von Ihnen gewünschte Website ist momentan nicht verfügbar. Wir möchten uns für den vorübergehenden Ausfall entschuldigen. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.
Windows Live Safety Center-Startseite

Windows Live Safety Center is currently experiencing technical difficulties
Sorry, the web page you requested is not available. We apologize for this temporary outage. Please try again later.

Windows Live Safety Center hat momentan technische Schwierigkeiten.
Die von Ihnen gewünschte Website ist momentan nicht verfügbar. Wir möchten uns für den vorübergehenden Ausfall entschuldigen. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut.
Windows Live Safety Center-Startseite

Windows Live Safety Center is currently experiencing technical difficulties
Sorry, the web page you requested is not available. We apologize for this temporary outage. Please try again later.

I just googled on

http://www.live.com/

for something I had googled all day on google. The result is highly relevant IMNSHO.

If they could remove the java interface (or whatever slows down showing the result) I would be seriously tempted by live.com

Cheers

Gerry

A new search engine is being built. This will get it's results from Google and display it as an MSN offering, with our ads. Beta for this expected in a week's time!

Sure... But local.live.com (microsoft) does.
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=45.61669 3~-121.189757&style=h&lvl=14&scene=175626

I was admittedly a bit harsh in my previous post... clearly, the argument "some access to google might be better than none" is a defensible position. > My question was, why should the people suffer for whatever the govt is accused of? I would argue that the Chinese people are affected only very little by the presence/absence of google: other companies are more than happy to fill voids left by google (see, for instance, http://academic.live.com/ for an alternative to google scholar) Other companies can deliver facsimile products (by taking advantage of the previous innovations of Google and others) that are functionally similar to anything that Google makes. Are they as high in quality as the Google version of the product? Possibly not, but then any web service used from the Chinese mainland is going to be diminished in quality due to interference by the government of the entire Chinese internet, anyway. The main entities hurt by having Google refuse to censor or otherwise operate inside of China, I would argue, would be Google (by the clear loss of business opportunity) and the Chinese government (in a small way, by being unable to present a face of being a modern, tech friendly environment to foreigners and their own populance)

Well, I was just comparing Google and Microsoft (local.live) maps and the difference around Spokane, WA is AMAZING.

Google offers me a fantastic resolution view of my lot:
http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&hl=en&ll=47.680728 ,-117.144996&spn=0.009564,0.014076&om=1
(It's the stretch in the center beside all those small houses running from the river to the street, not that it matters...)

Now see microsoft's offerings:
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=47.66208 7~-117.152027&style=h&lvl=13

The difference is mind boggling.

It really amazes me when people go off on Google for stuff like the parent--Google can be 50 times better than other offerings (and are in this case!) and yet we'll pick on a slight offset between the photo map and the street map (which isn't going to hurt anyone! The navigation has nothing to do with the photo map, it uses the street map exclusively)

What is it that makes someone reach so far to find problems with Google when it's always been one of the better companies? Maybe not perfect, maybe not even good, but better than any of the others.

I really don't get it.

Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)

I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:

• Can find directions between arbitrary points by right-clicking on the map. I almost never find directions between addresses; usually it's between general areas.
• Traffic overlays for a few US cities.
• You can create your own collections of places and share them.
• Bird's eye view. Check out Bird's Eye Tourist for interesting locations.
• Navigation features: mouse scroll to zoom, middle-click drag to create a zoom box.

Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.

Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)

I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:

• Can find directions between arbitrary points by right-clicking on the map. I almost never find directions between addresses; usually it's between general areas.
• Traffic overlays for a few US cities.
• You can create your own collections of places and share them.
• Bird's eye view. Check out Bird's Eye Tourist for interesting locations.
• Navigation features: mouse scroll to zoom, middle-click drag to create a zoom box.

Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.

Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)

I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:

• Can find directions between arbitrary points by right-clicking on the map. I almost never find directions between addresses; usually it's between general areas.
• Traffic overlays for a few US cities.
• You can create your own collections of places and share them.
• Bird's eye view. Check out Bird's Eye Tourist for interesting locations.
• Navigation features: mouse scroll to zoom, middle-click drag to create a zoom box.

Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.

Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)

I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:

• Can find directions between arbitrary points by right-clicking on the map. I almost never find directions between addresses; usually it's between general areas.
• Traffic overlays for a few US cities.
• You can create your own collections of places and share them.
• Bird's eye view. Check out Bird's Eye Tourist for interesting locations.
• Navigation features: mouse scroll to zoom, middle-click drag to create a zoom box.

Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.

Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)

I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:

• Can find directions between arbitrary points by right-clicking on the map. I almost never find directions between addresses; usually it's between general areas.
• Traffic overlays for a few US cities.
• You can create your own collections of places and share them.
• Bird's eye view. Check out Bird's Eye Tourist for interesting locations.
• Navigation features: mouse scroll to zoom, middle-click drag to create a zoom box.

Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.

The page has the lightweight look of digg and link menus open up like those on the Mac. And it works on firefox.

Looks like they're learning to be sleek.

That sound you hear is a little chuckling coming from Redmond. This is Google...the world's leading brand for search (to consumers) and advertising (to their real customes) entering the world of client side software where they don't have their act together. I seriously doubt MSFT is particularly worried about this and, in fact, they may see this as a good thing. This is (as I mentioned above) the beginning of the deterioration of Google's brand. Google Desktop? Intrusive and annoying. Picasa? Mediocre. Google Pack? An embarassment. Google Earth? Interesting but not particularly innovative and slow as all get-out and inferior to comparable products in many ways. Check out http://local.live.com/ and you'll see that even MSFT is leap-frogging Google in Web-based mapping.

Have you read the title? "Best of the Free Anti-virus Choices?"
NOD32 is an excellent AV, agreed, but definitely not free (neither as speech, nor as beer).

As for jv16 PowerTools, I can say that it is the dumbest registry cleaner with lots of false positives - it mistakenly deletes many entries of MS Office, .NET framework, plus has a bad habit of identifying each entry twice: one in HKCR, and a second one in HKLM\Software\Classes, or one in HKCU and another in HKU\.
Oh, and it's not free, too.

I find Windows Live Safety Center cleanup much better, though it's Microsoft and ActiveX based.

Ok, that's all great and stuff, but it does not answer my question. I asked for objective differences between the two toolkits. The though of you being more likely to use the first toolkit does not offer me any reason why I should also use it. If you were to say to me, what are the differences between Winamp and Windows Media Player, and I'd say I use the latter, would you use it just because?

This is exactly the problem with quick responses that are so common here on Slashdot. Instead of people actually trying to answer the question, they go for a blatant flame war on Java vs .NET... I don't care which one you use, I care about what each of them has to offer me and then I choose the one I NEED AT A GIVEN TIME. It's the same with OS really, or with a development IDE, or with a text editor. I don't care which one people use, I use whatever I feel I need (based on the features).

So yeah, Java is more avaiable, but is it? I mean, mono's been around for a while, and people could use it, the fact that they don't doesn't really say anything except that I attribute it to the hate for MS from Linux users (sorry to be so general, I realize that not all *nix users hate MS, that much).

As far as the client part is concerened. You do realize that what you develop in, for example C#, is compiled into a HTML page, and viewable in, for example, Firefox? Yeah, it's supported by DLLs in the background, but that's none of your concern if you are a visitor. Have you ever visited live.com ? It's built around AJAX... In particular, it's built around Atlas... How about Google's personalized home. Last time I checked I can use Firefox or IE 7 to view them and use their functionallity. The question here is, how simple is it to make, i.e. D&D in C# & Atlas, or in Java & Google's Toolkit. And what I can do with either of them.

For most webusers ( read Mom and Pop ) understanding the structure of a webaddress is completely mad. The first step is to explain why

www.ebay.com is not the same company as www.ebay.com.checkyouraccount.ru because they have to read the address backward and seriously

www.ebay.com.checkyouraccount.ru/~level1/level2/ch ecklogin?user=testuser

becomes really insane !

The problem is that after you ( painfully ) trained them, you notice that a lot of websites use insane url like that and yet perfectly valid one !

Example: Hotmail login
http://login.live.com/login.srf?...
after several loop through passport.com, ...

and I also have to train my parents to use whois ???

And don't forget that I had first to explain what is a 'OS', 'program' and finally what a 'browser' is.

To result of all the lessons is that my father turned into an Internet paranoid. He is convinced his machine crawled under spywares and that every single website is a phishing attempt.
And now, when he needs to access his bank account, I need to connect myself from my machine and tell him the result over the phone. The same when he need to buy something. He never uses his machine for anything remotly personal.

That's real sad.

You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".

So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.

See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=2273 (Search Engine Watch) and http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/22 /483846.aspx (Robert Scoble's video inteview with the guys behind the search engine).

I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chimp anzee&FORM=QBRE

I think we'll see more similar stuff from MSN Search in the future. Also, Microsoft seems to be the only one interested in experimenting with the search interface on a major service, as can bee seen on their live.com site -- see http://www.live.com/#q=what%20is%20chimpanzee&offs et=1 and the image search http://www.live.com/#q=chimpanzee&scope=images&lod =2&page=results for examples.

(Yahoo also has an interesting interface experiment going on an obscure part of an almost forgotten search engine: http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/)

My point is quite simply that what they're doing may be tedious, but this time they're also trying some fresh ideas.

You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".

So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.

See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=2273 (Search Engine Watch) and http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/22 /483846.aspx (Robert Scoble's video inteview with the guys behind the search engine).

I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chimp anzee&FORM=QBRE

I think we'll see more similar stuff from MSN Search in the future. Also, Microsoft seems to be the only one interested in experimenting with the search interface on a major service, as can bee seen on their live.com site -- see http://www.live.com/#q=what%20is%20chimpanzee&offs et=1 and the image search http://www.live.com/#q=chimpanzee&scope=images&lod =2&page=results for examples.

(Yahoo also has an interesting interface experiment going on an obscure part of an almost forgotten search engine: http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/)

My point is quite simply that what they're doing may be tedious, but this time they're also trying some fresh ideas.