Slashdot Mirror

then invent their own alternative and leverage everything they have to make it succeed, then (step 3) profit

And 'leverage' apparently means constantly nag users on every single Microsoft web property about wanting to 'enhance' their experience with Silverlight.

STOP FUCKING ASKING ME IF I WANT TO INSTALL SILVERLIGHT DAMNIT!

Someone needs to invent a firefox extension that responds to every single silverlight install question by submitting a form post with a naughty word to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight-sucks-ass/

The notion of a common runtime that supports different languages is bogus.

What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?

The difference is, things like Silverlight are designed to be more portable. Or at least, are designed with technologies which should make them more portable -- I'm not at all sure Microsoft intends to do that.

They are all .Net languages...

IronPython, IronRuby, Windows PowerShell, JScript...

Another approach is to implement a language on top of .Net, like IronPython, but that's not the same thing.

Erm, WTF?

By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of .Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a .Net language.

Or would you care to tell me in what way it is "not the same thing"?

Uh. You mean these cross platform files? Don't know what you're seeing, but there's a MacOSX link there. Admittedly, the Linux version is a ways off yet, but it's getting there, and is getting help from microsoft, so it'll get there eventually. (patent issues nonwithstanding)

So... evaluating it yet? Or do you have another excuse?

Must be all the desperate people taking Vista quiz to win a polo shirt...
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/vistafacts/fact.aspx

I'm still a bit concerned about the supposed cross-platform-ness. Is the Javascript file Silverlight.js still used to initialize the Silverlight object in Silverlight 2? If that is the case it will never be truly cross-platform.

If you aren't running one of the platforms supported by Microsoft (Windows (IE, Firefox) and Mac OS X (Firefox, Safari)) you will get redirected to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92800 (or similar), regardless if you have a Silverlight compatible plugin installed. Using the Silverlight.js file is the defacto standard way of initializing Silverlight, at least in previous releases.

It will be the responsibility to each web-developer to update their copy of Silverlight.js in order to get Silverlight to run on other platforms than the ones directly supported by Microsoft. This will never happen, except perhaps for a small portion that are Moonlight enthusiasts.

It also doesn't help that Silverlight is BARELY just making it onto peoples machines and they are already releasing betas of Silverlight 2.0

You can't expect people to jump onboard if your product is a moving target. No one wants to be left in the dust.

On my EEEPC I trimmed my XP disk right down to 250MB~ with nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/), the thing could run with 128MB RAM and a couple of hundred MHz processor speed. The EEE has 512 RAM and a 900Mhz Celeron M (P4 1.8 equiv), so excellent performance.

What about http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/benefits/fundamentals.mspx?

My point is, you wouldn't try and run KDE and OpenOffice on a less-than optimal hardware-wise machine, so why would you try and run the vanilla XP disk?

There is a new eBay alternative called Bidtopia which appears to making incredible progress. Sure it is brand new (only 3 months old) and relatively unknown, but a couple of things make it very unique. First, they seem to hand select their sellers and they are building a very small but elite group including many Titanium and Platinum sellers that I recognize from eBay. To be a seller you have to be approved through an on line application process, and you must have previous online auction or e-tail experience (they actually turned me down). Secondly, buyers/bidders have to go through an application process also and they even have to complete a 99 cent online transaction to verify they are capable of online payment and confirm their true identity. This means that you cant simply open a fictitious account with a free e-mail and bogus name. The last thing I find fascinating is that the require all their auctions to be won at fair market value where the buyer sets the price. All Bidtopia auctions start at 99 cents with no reserve, so no wading through a list of overpriced merchandise. While they do have a reverse auction format, these items continue to drop in price until someone buys them or they eventually fall to 99 cents as well. While you would think that this would create a site full of low end junk, I actually found sellers listing $18,000 bijon men's suits, brand new HP G5 Proliant servers, iphones and even women's fashion from St. John. All in all Bidtopia seem to be taking a different approach than all the other auction sites. Rather than throwing out a wide net with a "catch all - we accept everyone" mentality, they seem to be custom grooming their site to their own peculiar standard. While a google search will tell you a ton of information on them, I first discovered Bidtopia when reading a case study that Microsoft did on their technology platform which I found really interesting. Apparently they seem to have no qualms about hosting their production site on beta Microsoft product http://www.microsoft.com/industry/retail/casestudylibrary.mspx?casestudyid=4000001488

You forget there's still this - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/WinXPStarterFS.mspx

If low-cost Linux machines become more & more popular, I'd expect to see Microsoft broaden the market for the cheapest Windows editions.

So is this just Apple trying to lock in content, or are there real reasons behind this?

I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid. I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.

I think this is pretty much a non-issue. Apple and iPhone fans will do what Jobs tells them to do and will abandon Flash aspirations if told to do so.

The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.

I know the iPhone multi-touch interface is interesting in concept, but not as practical as people would like to believe. This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/smartphone/details.mspx?id=e03c4483-a898-4ebb-a0e8-5f58c7547269&backUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindowsmobile%2Fsmartphone%2Fdefault.mspx&WT.mc_ID=wmhome_attTilt

Which makes the iPhone look like a toy...

IE 8 Beta 1 gets 17/100. Download of IE Beta 1: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Actually you can download Beta 1 and here is an actual link

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

like the fixed interface of the right click on the task bar for just one example? Fixed. unchanging. complies with Microsoft standards. any applcation, right click the icon and the bottom option on the menu is "Close" ANY application. . Standards. everyone abides.
    Everyone except...Microsoft that is..
    Right click the icon for say Active Directory or Computer Managment. or other MS apps
    What is the bottom selection here?
    "Help topics".

You seem to be confusing the word "standard" with "default". There is no standard that says the bottom option of the window menu must be Close. It just so happens that the default window menu for resizable windows contains the Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, and Close items. In fact, since Microsoft has not committed to this particular set of defaults via documentation, it's just an implementation detail and may be changed at will for any past, current, or future version of Windows.

It's true that most applications have no need to modify this default set of options (suggesting it is a good default), but the documentation explicitly allows ANY application (written by Microsoft or not) to modify the set of items in the Window menu:

"The GetSystemMenu function allows the application to access the window menu (also known as the system menu or the control menu) for copying and modifying."

That API and functionality go back over a decade to Windows 95. If you want to argue about standards support, at least pick an example demonstrative of your point.

A large number of people are missing the point. Singularity is not meant to replace any version of Windows. Singularity is not meant to be competition for Linux. Singularity is not meant to be open source in any useful sense of the term.

Singularity is a research project. It's meant as a testing ground for new and interesting ideas about operating systems. It's especially a project to see what you can do with an OS if you control the entire software stack, particularly the compiler and runtime system. It's not meant to be an OS anyone would actually use for anything; instead it's meant to give people an idea of what's possible in such a setting, and what problems you can solve in new and interesting ways.

So, why are they releasing it? Probably for a few reasons. The first is that Microsoft Research is a research lab, and Singularity is an academic research project. MSR is interested in advancing the state of the art in computer science, and operating system design is one of the things that they particularly care about. Singularity is part of this effort, and so MSR wants people to see it, understand how it works, and use that understanding to push forward new ideas about how operating systems could someday be written. Go to http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/#publications ; you'll find a dozen or so technical academic papers describing the workings of Singularity, so that other researchers in the field can know about the advances made by MSR.

Another reason is that, as MSR is mostly unconnected from the commercial sections of Microsoft, they have no reason to hide their work from competitors. I'm sure the people involved in Singularity are happy that the project is now in a place where they can show others all of the details of the awesome stuff they've been working on for a few years.

I'm also sure they have little interest in building a community of developers. They have that; dozens of people at MSR work on singularity. They don't care about receiving patches from the community, or other people pushing the project in new directions. It's their project, and they want to continue working on it themselves. They are more interested in showing off their work than in recieving contributions to it. There's no intention for it to be "open source," as /. understands the term.

Finally, all the Microsoft bashing going on in this discussion is entirely missing the point. MSR has little connection the rest of the company. They have no interest in producing commercially viable projects or crushing competition. Their job is to push forward the state of the art. Remember Xerox PARC and Bell labs? It's the same idea. They give Microsoft ideas about future projects, generally increase the amount of knowledge in the world and give the company some academic prestige (as someone pointed somewhere in the discussion earlier).

So all of the MS bashing and confusion over whether this is intended on being true open source or a product is misplaced. It's neither. It's an experiment, to see what can be done.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

The technical side of Activities and WebSlices does not suck! They've used a pretty straightforward and not-very-IE-specific XML file + JS call for adding Activities, and WebSlices are based on hAtom Microformat.

These links apparently work.

Windows XP SP2: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110324

Windows Vista: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110325

These links apparently work.

Windows XP SP2: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110324

Windows Vista: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=110325

Why don't you look for yourself? http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/csstestpages/default.htm/

Read this PDF: http://www.research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/publications/OSR2007_RethinkingSoftwareStack.pdf

What's cool isn't that it's C# or managed code, it's that they've established some fairly rigorous design principles that gain you a lot of security and reliability guarantees that you don't get just by writing an OS on .NET. Performance doesn't seem to be a huge problem given the ground up implementation.

It's actually not written in C#, it's written in Sing#, an extension of C# that supports the principles they're trying to implement: full process isolation in software, communication by contract, and full memory management.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=c3c6e8c1-bd91-490b-86f5-f3652dd691de&displayLang=en

download link to Vista IE8 Beta 1 download

Looking at the developer guide, I noticed that the activities require the website designer to program this IE only feature into their sites. As it is XML, I suppose it would be fairly easy for others to catch up, but this does sound like something developers will have to do just for IE... unless I'm looking at this one wrong. Anyone care to clarify?

The scenario they seem to be enabling for SVG is inline SVG with HTML content (not XHTML). This means that you can install the Adobe SVG Viewer and have it render the inline SVG within the HTML page. Unfortunately it seems like there may be some implementation issues with it (possibly preventing the xlink namespace within the SVG). See the now-available whitepaper and the discussion here

If you read the article, you'd have noticed the linking page, Everything a developer needs to know, which explains IE8's CSS2.1 compliance (with provisional CSS3 compliance), among other developer-related information. It's hard to be indignant and informed, I know.

Would you happen to know how Singularity does multiprocessing?

RTFM.

It sounds like a very interesting project. The idea that screams out from the wiki summary is static analysis and verification. There is a really good rundown in one of the wiki links. The really big difference from previous work is not just the use of managed code, but splitting the entire system into either trusted, or verified code. The trusted component is a tiny core, which they are working on verifying. The design of the rest of the kernel and the SIPs is a good one: instead of doing arbitrary verification, change the language design so that you can only write verifiable code. Then see how much of an O/S you can write. The progress is astounding.

For the IPC they have made some strange choices, receiving is synchronous (as in process calculi) but sending is asynchronous. As they are writing the lowest level parts (such as the schedular) in this code it may be an implementation difficulty with synchronous sends. The cheapness of the IPC seems to be routed in the transfer of ownership that communication implies. In essence you can't alias, you can only pass by value - but the low-level runtime can modify this to pass more efficiently by reference because it can verify there are no dangling references. This would (if it works over a large enough code base) solve the performance issue with IPC in a microkernel. It is (as another reply pointed out) similar to providing the semantics of heavy-weight communication to the programmer in a way that can be implemented with cheap co-routines.

Having done some (well, little) work in this area I'm really impressed by what they've achieved already.

The licence only allows non-commercial use, and therefore does not meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition.

Given MS's propensity for muddying (or FUDdying?) the waters as regards open-source/free software (with terminology like "shared source"), a site like /. really shouldn't be doing their work for them...

I use Sync. I've seen a lot of problems with FAT file system corruption.

My understanding is that it is better to use a TrueCrypt file rather than a TrueCrypt volume. That makes it easier to make encrypted backups; just copy the file. For some reason, using a file does not seem noticeably slower.

The last thing I want in a production enviroment is some runtime optimiser fiddling away under the bonnet. I want the binary to be consistant in its operation with no extranious BS going on other than the OS VM system itself.

The thing is, it's very likely that this optimizer is better than you are.

It took me a very long time to understand and embrace this concept. It finally clicked when I read this paper about spamfiltering. Specifically:

The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam. You look at spams and you think, the gall of these guys to try sending me mail that begins "Dear Friend" or has a subject line that's all uppercase and ends in eight exclamation points. I can filter out that stuff with about one line of code....

When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been. It discovered, of course, that terms like "virtumundo" and "teens" were good indicators of spam. But it also discovered that "per" and "FL" and "ff0000" are good indicators of spam. In fact, "ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.

I've tried a statistical spamfilter myself, and it works. It's that old principle of, at a certain point, the computer is better at it than you are -- or, at the very least, more reliably better and with so much less effort that you'd have to be insane to do it manually.

A simple example: C code. It compiles to some fairly ugly assembly, yet there are compiler optimization flags that will make it, on average, pretty decent. It's theoretically possible you could write better assembly, but it would take so obscenely much time, and the compiler is already doing it for you, so why bother? You wait until the performance is actually hurting you, and then you find a tight loop, take the smallest part of your program which the compiler didn't do quite as good a job with as you could -- and there, you write assembly.

Besides which the optimiser is not going to be able to 2nd guess what the OS is going to do - it might try and optimise some pipeline calc on the fly just for the VM to be swapped out halfway through.

It might be swapped out anyway. And by the time you're being swapped out, it doesn't really matter how fast you were running. Those few extra cycles spent in runtime optimizations aren't going to be the final straw.

The existence of swap also creates problems for having your program be entirely deterministic in its performance. If you want that, you write in C, probably mostly ASM, and you put it on a Real-Time OS.

Most people don't need things to be that consistent -- it's good enough if it is fast on average. Even things like a game -- computers are fast enough that a garbage collection cycle or a bit of runtime optimization will take place in much less than a single frame or tick.

And you're also assuming that such a VM won't communicate with the OS, or be a part of the OS. Take a look at Microsoft's Singularity for an idea of where that might go.

Because I don't see any good reason for having an extra layer between my program and the OS if its not required.

But you give no reason for that preference, other than not liking runtime optimizations.

I see no reason to have an OS at all if it's not required -- let's all write x86 assembly while we're at it! -- but it's certainly a nice thing to have.

Scratch that, found this forum post asking the same question: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=938970&SiteID=17
Which says that ClamAV and BitDefender are both free for Server 2003.

At the bottom of the linked article, there is another link: Gmer -- MBR. At the end of that long technical article it says: "Rootkit removal: To remove rootkit from infected machine you can simply use "Recovery Console" command: fixmbr."

To use it, you first go into the Windows XP Recovery Console. Then run FixMBR /? for parameters. Save the MBR (Master Boot Record) first.

Here is a discussion on the Microsoft web site about tools for fixing the MBR without the Recovery Console. I've never tried them; I've always used the FixMBR utility that comes with the Recovery Console.

At the bottom of the linked article, there is another link: Gmer -- MBR. At the end of that long technical article it says: "Rootkit removal: To remove rootkit from infected machine you can simply use "Recovery Console" command: fixmbr."

To use it, you first go into the Windows XP Recovery Console. Then run FixMBR /? for parameters. Save the MBR (Master Boot Record) first.

Here is a discussion on the Microsoft web site about tools for fixing the MBR without the Recovery Console. I've never tried them; I've always used the FixMBR utility that comes with the Recovery Console.

You must not have read the press release!

They aren't putting their neck on the line... it's already there. :)

"So, why then is Vista so much slower then XP even with all the extra eye-candy and features turned off?"

Not sure, but I found the following, from Microsoft themselves, astounding:

From the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Release Notes:

Installation Issues - Windows Vista

Setup dialog box fails to appear:
The verification that occurs under User Account Control (UAC) with all installations delays the appearance of the initial setup dialog box. Delays of more than one hour have been reported.

Microsoft recently released KB940510. Here is what it does. I've read it detects the Paradox BIOS emulator and the timerstop crack.

MS has posted an update, and it's not even patch Tuesday yet!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940510

That's quite interesting, as Microsoft used to have their own caching server system. Apple are a major client of Akamai. Hmmm...

Also, because the EULA came into existence, product warranties effectively vanished, as well as actions the consumer could take via product liability claims, in court..

After all, liability plays a large part in defining QA policies. If software companies were held to the same liability standards most product manufacturers face, I'd bet software development would be more of the engineering practice it should be.

To quote part of Microsoft's EULA for Windows XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx
ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE.

Ironically, a Windows Mobile phone is pretty darn close to what you're describing here. There's a really good chance that such a phone will already come application-unlocked, and if not, Microsoft provides a simple tool to break any locks your telco may add. There's piles of software for WM (that you download with your PC, so no data charge), both free and otherwise, and you can set whatever wav or mp3 you want as a ringtone.

Android will most likely provide some healthy competition, but Google is far from forging a new market here.

this has been in design at microsoft since 2002. read the paper yourself anti-microsoft-boy: http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-2002-75