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Who modded this tripe informative? What do you call http://support.microsoft.com/ ? The Microsoft knowledge base? Microsoft Services ( http://www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservice s/default.mspx )? Windows Update? Granted, their phone support is expensive, but it exists. Whether Linux is better supported than Windows is an open question, but the quote above is laughable.

Yeah, but when I, as a Linux user look at a fresh Windows install/reinstall I note a lot of things missing...

1) No decent photo editing software. Sorry, gotta pay extra for that, or download it.

You had me at, "Pay extra." Then again, if you're talking GIMP, it runs on Windows anyway. Sure, you have to d/l it, but its hardly a significant issue these days. Not that I really care for GIMP, but that's another debate entirely.

2) No decent office suite. MS Office is an extra, that you have to pay for.

Agreed, you have to pay for it. Its not really that expensive, and it does what it claims to do. I've yet to have a good enough experience with OO to risk using it to create a document I'd send to someone important (ie, sending something to a customer or working on a friend's resume or, well, much over internal documents).

3) No decent web browser. Anyone who says that IE is decent deserves a punch in the mouth.

Quit FUDding yourself. IE works just fine for the majority of people, as long as you don't go clicking "Yes," when it asks you to install randomCrap3.0 - something people could do just as easily on any other browser. Hell, my company creates web-based applications and I run it (and Firefox) and, really, it works pretty well these days.

4) No video editing software. That's another extra you have to pay for with Windows.

Er, How about Windows Movie Maker? Its a free download from MSFT and works well enough for the vacation-dvd crowd. Sure, its not stellar, but I wasn't aware that there was really good free OSS for video editing either. Its not iMovie but, hey, few things are.

5) IRC? Nope...gotta go download it somewhere.

Sure, somewhere like download.com that has a boatload of free IRC clients. If anyone cares which, hey, most people don't. But its not like finding something and downloading it is harder than figuring out which bizarre Linux package you want (ie: both are on the surface "difficult," in reality quite easy).

6) CD/DVD burning software? Nope, gotta pay extra for that too.

CD/DVD data burning has been built into XP from day one. For DVD movies, see the MovieMaker download referenced above.

7) Desktop publishing software. Yeah...gonna have to go to the store again...

Yup. And what you get will be a lot easier for most people to use, too - whether they're newbies who need a lot of hand-holding, or pros who want something great.

8) Personal finance software. Oh great, gotta go to the store again.

At least its an option - I've yet to see any OSS finance software that supported any significant automatic online synchronization, for example, which I would consider mandatory for any personal finance package.

Look, modern Linux distros are really good at server-side work. I use them a lot for just that. You don't have to spread FUD around with a shovel claiming that they do everything better than anything else does - if for no other reason than it helps mask the problems and slows down the fix rate. Mmmkay?

does MS have the authority to ask for a cut of the sales?!!

To include the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on their product if its software it must adhere to http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/software/default. mspx and hardware http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/default.mspx .

It does not mention any money, and from what I remember from 5 years ago, at least the software requirements were rarely if ever met (they used to be required to have a working uninstaller, few if any Windows programs met that criteria 5 years ago).

I'm agnostic about the iPod tax. Apple could be simply going after the bozos that are making crap and people might be complaining to Apple, and Apple wants to protect their brand name.

does MS have the authority to ask for a cut of the sales?!!

To include the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on their product if its software it must adhere to http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/software/default. mspx and hardware http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/default.mspx .

It does not mention any money, and from what I remember from 5 years ago, at least the software requirements were rarely if ever met (they used to be required to have a working uninstaller, few if any Windows programs met that criteria 5 years ago).

I'm agnostic about the iPod tax. Apple could be simply going after the bozos that are making crap and people might be complaining to Apple, and Apple wants to protect their brand name.

If you want to create wireless relay, MSR has more free software on it's website. For example: Mesh Networking toolkit

I'm curious how efficient this process is, as there's bound to be some switching latency

They actually talk about that on the page.

From: http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virt ualwifi/faq.htm

Q: What is the time taken by a card to switch to another wireless network?
A: This number varies across cards. It also varies across networks, and across ad hoc and infrastructure networks. In our experience, switching delays vary from 100 ms to 600 ms across commercial cards. Over special Native WiFi cards, this delay was a few tens of ms. Ideally, as has been pointed out by recent research in solid state circuits, and the values that have been used in our SSCH paper, this switching delay should be of the order of 100 micro seconds.

That's pretty disgustingly low behaviour. Makes you wonder what other identifying information might be written into seemingly random data.
Improve, or something else....? TCP timestamps too. Just use the LSB, and by making it a 1, or a 0, and you can transmit infomation hiddenly..

Did you see why Ranveer's work would be on their research site?

His cv says that he was twice awarded Research Graduate Fellowships from Microsoft covering years 2002 to 2005. And he interned for Microsoft Research the summers of 2002 to 2004. Microsoft supported his work at least partially and maybe wholly. His project was good enough that it landed on the Microsoft research page so it worked out for both parties.

Microsoft releasing tech previews with source code

Why is this such a big deal to everyone all of a sudden? Have a look at their online research lab.

There's a (relative) wealth of information on there (and yes I do know other companies provide online access to their research projects) in the form of reseach papers, technology previews, and yep, you guessed it, source code.

Link to downloads

Microsoft releasing tech previews with source code

Why is this such a big deal to everyone all of a sudden? Have a look at their online research lab.

There's a (relative) wealth of information on there (and yes I do know other companies provide online access to their research projects) in the form of reseach papers, technology previews, and yep, you guessed it, source code.

Link to downloads

I see it's from their research division... They sometimes seem uncorrupted by their marketing machine. ;-) They have other projects going on too, like ConferenceXP (yes indeed, source here too), and Netscan. Kind of interesting projects actually.

I see it's from their research division... They sometimes seem uncorrupted by their marketing machine. ;-) They have other projects going on too, like ConferenceXP (yes indeed, source here too), and Netscan. Kind of interesting projects actually.

Lots of people do this today with broadband and P2P apps.
The smart ones have "personal firewalls" on their
end-nodes. We are testing the MS Vista firewall
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/eval uate/feat/secfeat.mspx#EEAA
and Linux IPChains as IPv6 firewalls. For ave Joe user, an ISP
managed or security admin managed group policy for host firewalls is the way to
keep IPv6 E2E connctions secure.

I am more interested in seeing a workflow solution from FOSS given that topics like "Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer Walkthrough" http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/wo rkflow/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnlong/htm l/WWFGetStart.asp are interesting.

My question: How much of your code is actual code and how much is glue that hooks together the different parts?

In other words, how much of your code is business logic and how much could be done via a workflow engine (i.e, no code)?

but why doesn't it just work that way out of the box?

Obviously no universally available free compiler.

no capability for command-line pipes,

Oh, I see...does Red Hat Enterprise Linux lack meaningful support? Does Novell's SUSE Linux lack meaningful support?

Oh, maybe you mean that "free beer" software lacks meaningful support. After all, Red Hat and Novell only offer support if you pay for it. Maybe you're suggesting that paying a high price for proprietary software entitles the buyer to some support. So, let me check out support offerings for IE6 for Windows for folks who got a heat-sealed box at Best Buy.

Oh! Turns out that Microsoft charges $35 per support request!

Along these lines, beyond hacks used by microprocessors today, there's been work on how best to multi-task, and also related work on how to best spend any idle time. Bob Metcalfe and Eric Horvitz have worked on this:

http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1161/IWD000925opmetc alfe_cto/

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2002/0,4814 ,67156,00.html

http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/ccprinciple s.htm

Funny thing, MS Streets has NONE of these problems ...

There has been a bunch of work on filtering for urgency. See the work on "Priorities" - http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm. This is discussed in a fair amount of detail in the NYT article that started this thread. I'm pretty sure the Priorities ideas have been in applications. For example, the Outlook Mobile Manager (only urgent SMS msgs are sent to phones), which shipped in 2001. The latest version shipped last summer. A download and information is available at: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx? id=1287

There has been a bunch of work on filtering for urgency. See the work on "Priorities" - http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/attend.htm. This is discussed in a fair amount of detail in the NYT article that started this thread. I'm pretty sure the Priorities ideas have been in applications. For example, the Outlook Mobile Manager (only urgent SMS msgs are sent to phones), which shipped in 2001. The latest version shipped last summer. A download and information is available at: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx? id=1287

Media Center Extender already eliminates the "need" for a "silly" Media Center PC in the living room. This is not new.

I'm guessing you haven't been paying any attention to Windows development at all...

all decent C/C++ compilers cost money for Windows

Only as far as you need to pay to get the operating system. The Visual C++ Toolkit from Microsoft is free, optimizes well, and generates native code.

Cygwin doesn't count as it's basically GCC/G++/etc., basically allowing for cross-platform content anyhow

Huh? You can compile to native Windows executables with mingw (minimal cygwin environment), which is far from getting portable code. If you use the Win32 API directly, it's not portable.

Why you would choose to do so rather than using something like SDL is a different question, and has nothing to do with what compiler you use.

* Front Row
* iTunes Video Store
* iPod with video

As usual, Microsoft innovates and Apple copies:

* Windows XP Media Center Edition
* Online Spotlight and Cinemanow
* Portable Media Center

If you didn't get it, I'm making fun of Apple users who constantly make the opposite claim on Slashdot. Posting anonymously because many Apple users will be offended.

* Front Row
* iTunes Video Store
* iPod with video

As usual, Microsoft innovates and Apple copies:

* Windows XP Media Center Edition
* Online Spotlight and Cinemanow
* Portable Media Center

If you didn't get it, I'm making fun of Apple users who constantly make the opposite claim on Slashdot. Posting anonymously because many Apple users will be offended.

* Front Row
* iTunes Video Store
* iPod with video

As usual, Microsoft innovates and Apple copies:

* Windows XP Media Center Edition
* Online Spotlight and Cinemanow
* Portable Media Center

If you didn't get it, I'm making fun of Apple users who constantly make the opposite claim on Slashdot. Posting anonymously because many Apple users will be offended.

Microsoft beat Apple there by over a year: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/portablemed iacenter/default.mspx (Media Center allows for pay-for-download content; some of the service providers provide old tv shows and the like, but it is primarily movies)

They weren't first to market. That said, the 5G iPod appears to be far less bulky than some of the PMCs, but the Samsung Yepp is a pretty sweet little device. The PMCs have larger screens than the iPod (3.5" vs. 2.5") but still are only doing 320x240.

They weren't first to market. That said, the 5G iPod appears to be far less bulky than some of the PMCs, but the Samsung Yepp is a pretty sweet little device. The PMCs have larger screens than the iPod (3.5" vs. 2.5") but still are only doing 320x240.

"and Google's design philosophy is based on end-user loyalty - not money."
Wow, I figured it was all based on dollars..
Next time there is a MS story posted, be sure to note how MS brings clarity into the world
http://www.microsoft.com/

http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ has had such images since 1996, c'mon folks nothing new to see here...

The use of parens with operator sizeof and types is just the required syntax. There is no typecast of any sort going on.

That's as stupid as saying there's no incrementing going on in a for loop, it's just that "i++" is the required syntax. The typecast is precisely how you get operator sizeof to take other than an instance of a type. Parser implementors can adopt whatever approach they need to, but the point is, conceptually, the parens go with the type, not the sizeof operator, which otherwise doesn't require the use of parens.

I was going to say "duh, of course not, 0^0 is undefined, everyone knows that", since that's what I remember being taught all through school and university. However, a Google search tells me apparently it's not necessarily black or white. So I guess you have to go with what's useful for you. Anyway, it seems not even all software agrees; for example, both the built-in Windows calculator and Maple 8 say it's 1, but the PowerToys PowerCalc shows an error.

Um, Microsoft hasn't tried to keep MSN IM closed. They even released the specs for the protocol, if I remember correctly.

If by "released" you mean to anyone willing to pay for a Microsoft Communications Protocol Program License, and then use the specs only accordingly, then why, yes. In the same vein, I also heard Microsoft released the Windows source code.

I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM.

What are you talking about? Microsoft offers a corporate IM server called Live Communications Server. IBM offers Lotus Sametime. Apple even has one built into OS X Server 10.4. There are also other companies that offer corporate/enterprise instant messaging solutions, so the server and clients are run in-house.

~Philly

If the registry were XML files, they'd be easy to locate and destroy. And you can't just write XML to OS X's /Library file and suddenly take over file types, startup items, and so on.

Face it, the registry sucks. MS is abandoning it.

Individual keys and branches in the registry can have permissions applied to them. Its possible to give an account read permissions to some areas of the registry, update permissions to some and none to the rest. With flat files you'd have to split your settings into multiple files to get the same result.

Yet, OS X somehow manages it.

Also, lots of people are bitching about the danger of "registry corruption". I've been using windows before the registry came along (in win 95), and I've never seen a corrupted registry.

Ah, the classic "I've been using so-and-so for this long and never saw this common problem happen." That doesn't change the fact that registry corruption is real. Your computer can even stop booting because of it.

Windows keeps several copies of the registry around to fall back on incase the main copy goes bad, but I can't recall ever even needing that.

Which means Windows is working overtime to nurse the gaping wound that is the registry.

What makes your opinion any more valid than the parent poster? I'm another windows developer who "defends the crumbling Windows architecture". I imagine if you took a survey of windows developers you'd find the majority of people who actually know the system don't condem it.

The majority of developers not only condemn it, but Microsoft does as well. They are recommending the use of XML configuration files and the use of .NET. The registry is a dead idea that will be phased out.

Yes, windows does have its problems. What OS doesn't? Any good developer should be able to see the good and bad side of windows.

All systems have bad things, but boy, Windows' bad things sure can cripple your system.

The Registry was a grand idea, which has some real-world drawbacks. Its hard to move settings from one machine to another, and crap from deleted applications etc builds up over time. And Microsoft is moving on - .Net Apps usually use XML configuration files, not the registry. ...so you're proving my point for me, that even Microsoft is abandoning the crappy registry.

If a developer doesn't want to use the registry, then they don't have to. Its not a requirement, not even for "militant" developers. Some things are best stored in the registry, some things are better in XML files or even flat files.

OS X manages to use XML files for everything. No spyware or registry problems at all.

Firstly, malware can only manipulate the registry and system because its running as admin.

Which Windows accounts almost always are.

The registry isn't the cause of windows insecurity, the fact that everyone runs as Admin is. A normal user account has read-only access to system-wide settings in the registry.

It doesn't matter. A simple IE exploit means a program can easily bury itself in the registry. The flaws in Windows work together to form the perfect delivery medium for malware.

And also when it comes to cleaning out malware etc. then having everything in the registry actually makes things easier.

You have got to be joking.

Rather than looking in dozens of "plugins" directories and/or dozens of seperate configuration files everything is nicely organised in the registry and can be quickly checked.

How is it better and more nicely organized? What "dozens of plugins directories?" In OS X, everything's there in /~Library and /Library in clean XML property lists. In the registry, it's buried in thousands of hierarchy trees.

Applications like Autoruns (from sysinternals) and HijackThis will examine your registry and show you what apps are running on startup or caputring system hooks.


Yep...need for them arose because of all the malware taking advantage of the broken registry. Even Microsoft is abandoning it. OS X never had it. The registry is a dead concept.

Anyone who suggests 'abandoning the use of the registry' has obviously never written Windows software.

Anyone who suggests that there is no valid alternative to the registry has obviously not (properly) written .NET Windows software.

Some people at Microsoft themselves suggest avoiding the registry--as of Windows Vista THE REGISTRY IS ESSENTIALLY DEPRECATED. So what is the alternative? How 'bout a standardised XML .config file for each application? That is what Microsoft advocates. And to all those Registry bigots out there:

* .config files are not centralised and a bad setting won't corrupt a whole system
* you can edit .config files without the aid of a specialised tool like regedit
* Unlike .ini files, there is a standard XML specification established so all .config files are structured the same--also they are always located in the same directory as the application so it is easy to find.
* .NET libraries are provided for the creation and modification of .config files, so there is no need to manually parse the file and no excuse not to comply with the standard specification

Of course, we are talking about Windows here, so the legacy registry will be around for another decade I'm sure...and I'm sure as in the past short-sighted developers (both within Microsoft and outside) will ignore this excellent recommendation and continue to use the brain-damaged registry.

It's pretty annoying how people always suggest blatantly stupid 'solutions' to problems instead of focusing on real fixes like better design and better testing

Well, *I* find it pretty annoying when solutions are dismissed as "stupid" because they are different and people can't take the time to understand them. BTW, eliminating dependency on the registry *is* a "real fix"---the registry is a design flaw and .config files are "better design".

Linked from the page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryIE.mspx ...

In response to the growing public interest in the Internet, Microsoft created an add-on to the operating system called Internet Explorer 1.0.

I think they missed a few people out, there

Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal.

Well, Win2K = NT 5.0 and WinXP = NT 5.1, released only a year and a half later, so what were you expecting?

That said, a lot of the useful features that were supposed to be in Win2K from the start (particularly remote desktop and fast user switching) did get shoved back to WinXP, so I wouldn't want to have stuck with 2K.

XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.

OK, this I don't get. What is wrong with the XP SP2 firewall? It does the job its supposed to do: stop incoming connections to services that you haven't specifically authorised to accept connections from outside. And please don't tell me it's because it doesn't do egress filtering: egress filtering is just about useless. It's trivially easy for any malware that wants to send data outbound to do so using a method that could not possibly be distinguished from legitimate traffic.

And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.

Funnily enough, I've never had a problem with it. And I've never needed a tool to get rid of it off other people's systems, either.
As long as you don't go around installing random software from unknown sources, you won't have a problem. Of course, Linux users don't do this, because unknown sources don't tend to have a Linux version of their software available, so it isn't really an issue there, either.

Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot.

Everything you list is trivially easy to find, completely free and doesn't require reboots to install under Windows these days.

There's even useful shit like strace in the OS.

Similar tools are available for windows as parts of the various SDKs, or for independent download. The rationale for not including it is that it's useless to anyone who isn't a developer, which seems sensible to me. Linux installs are often intimidating to new users, because they get to the software selection screen and see all the packages that are included, and have no idea how to choose what they need and what they don't need. Windows works the other way around: give the user a basic install with some tools that a large proportion of users will find useful (but without asking what they want), and then let them get anything else afterwards. It's a difference in philosophy and there advantages each way. But what it isn't, really, is a big deal.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryIntro.m spx

I wonder how many of you did use those first versions of Windows. From 3.1 on, it was quite common but before 3.1...

Physically ill ?
When my boss (a coder, thankfully) told me MS did support POSIX, I was pleasantly (kind of) surprised, then he told me it did have some bad restruictions, and directed me to a page. I couldn't help but reply to him with some not very flattering words directed at MS.
The page ?
Brace yourself.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;149902
Still makes me want to find an MS manager and puke on him/her.
Bastards.

Softway was acquired by MS in 1999, after the succesful half - POSIX compliant Windows NT release. See here, here, and here.

Since then, we have no evidence of real work towards POSIX compliance in Microsoft operating systems. Just marketing, for now.

Now, can we do something about the other industry cartels?

I always thought it had one or more activex controls lurking around -- because of its other-browser incompatibility.

It depends on how you define ActiveX (pendantically speaking, COM objects are not necessarily ActiveX). XMLHTTP was a part of MSXML (which was not a "part of the browser", nor was it a part of Exchange, or Outlook, as is commonly claimed. MSXML was a isolated COM in-proc XML parsing library, built by another Microsoft team, that you could instantiate to open, parse, create, transform, validate, and save XML documents) - a COM library and object that they attributed it as safe for scripting, so it was accessible by browser JavaScript. Outlook, and many internal web applications, made use of this excellent little component. Among other web applications I made one - a timesheet applications - where all changes (time additions, comments, approvals, deletes) happened locally, and it would call back, using xmlhttp, in the background, changing, retransforming and displaying the local XML if it got a success back from the server. Worked brilliantly.

http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/10/07.html#a102

As the AC says, XMLHttpRequest was in Microsft's Exchange webmail in the late '90s. Note, for example, this September 1999 article that mentions XMLHttpRequest in IE5.

Microsoft even has a link called Get the Beta right on its website. By calling this a "leak" you're trying to knock Microsoft in some strange way.

When will Microsoft learn? You can't keep anything from leaking if you give copies away for free. If you're giving away free beta's, then somebody is going to leak it sooner or later! It's probably a publicity stunt.

Bill Gates: Oh no. Somebody has gotten hold of our newest software that is better than any of our old software and will be available to you soon so that you can make me even richer. Whatever shall I do?http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default. aspx

$2499 is still a whole lot cheaper than Windows Enterprise Server 2003, which actually costs $3999. And that's just the server itself, you also need to pay money for every user using the server, as can be seen on

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu y/licensing/pricing.mspx

Enterprise applications cost money. That's just the way it is. On the other hand, Ubuntu is free as in both beer and speech, same as Fedora Core, Debian, Gentoo and Slackware. Pick whatever works for you.

Regarding the monolithic vs modular approach, I'm of the opinion that an OS should *never* be a monolithic whole. It should be modular, and all parts should be possible to exchange for better ones. Ironically I'm writing this using Opera, but Opera integrates things in a way that allows me for using my own applications if I don't want to use it's built-in newsreader, or feed-aggregator, or whatever.

And to continue on the car analogy, Windows is like a car in which you cannot replace anything. Sure it's all great when it's new and shiny, but a couple of years down the road when everyone else has new shiny parts to their more modular cars you're SoL and needs to buy an entirerly new car in order to get what everyone else got for a much lower price. See the problem?

Sorry, but this is bullshit. You, as pretty much everyone else who I've seen spouting on this issue
  haven't even considered what it means for a format to be open and why it's supposed to solve the interoperability problem.

An open document format is a format described by a freely avaailable published standard. If your software conforms to such an open standard, it guarantees that the documents it reads and writes have the form and meaning described in that standard (as far as form and meaning are described in that standard).

This helps with interoperability because you can now define your format in terms of a particular version of the standard, instead of having to rely on a particular version of a particular set of software tools. So in 2145 when a document is needed the courts will be able to use it with whatever software also conforms to the standard, rather than having to dig up an old computer and a couple of contemporary versions of OpenOffice, hoping to somehow find one that appears to be compatible with the format of the document in question, and pray.

Microsoft's Office formats *are* open: http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
Open Office's are *not*: they do not have a published specification, although work is underway to address that.

Of course open standards only work to the extent that they unambiguously describe all the features needed by the projects that use them, and to the extent that users only rely on features described by the standards. For example, Word documents can contain arbitrary macros and ActiveX controls, which aren't covered by the standard, so don't use them if you need to rely on the standard for interoperability, or write your own standard that does cover them, and then certify the Word you use to conform to it. (And it's really really hard to describe anything of interest unambiguously in a standard.)

Of course OpenOffice has a different advantage: the software itself is free, so it's generally easier to obtain when needed to open a particular document. But that has nothing to do with whether the document format it uses is open.
And it won't make much of a difference in 2145.

Because he went to MIT last year:
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2004/0 2-26MIT.asp

And UIUC, Cornell, CMU, and Harvard.