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Assembly will only be used for small, high-cost operations. These pieces are small enough that if they malfunction, it's in a way that will be immediately visible.

Nonsense. Here's one counterexample. There is the assembly routine in Excel 2007 that formats numbers for display; it had a subtle bug with some input values. Bug description from Microsoft, Technical explanation (PDF).

The Xbox and Xbox 360 do not run Windows derivatives. They run a custom operating system which implements a portion of Win32 and DirectX API's. See Xbox developers post.

Sure, IE8 will help, but there is still the problem of penetration. IE7 was released over two years ago, and still has less than 30% penetration. IE6 is still being used by around one in five users, and it has outright horrifying CSS rendering. Unless there have been drastic changes since the release of IE7, this is what can be predicted for the next few years of browser usage:
- IE6 usage will continue to decrease at a rate of 1-2% per month, putting it between 5-8% by the end of next year.
- IE7 will continue to increase for 4-6 months until the release of IE8. At a rate of 0.5-1% per month, that would put it at about 30-31% when IE8 is released. IE8 release will cause of decrease in usage of 10-15% in the first two months, and 1-2% per month afterward. This will put IE7 at about 12-18% by the end of next year.
- IE8 will be released between April and July. It will immediately gain 10-15% in the first two month. Usage will then increase at a rate of 0.5-1% per month, mostly at the expense of IE7 usage.This will put IE8 at about 18-22% by the end of next year.
- FF will continue to grow steadily at a rate of 0.75% per month. FF will be around 55% by the end of next year. Chrome poses the biggest threat to FF growth should a final version be released in the next year. This could affect from 2-10% of FF usage stats, depending on Google marketing and 'geek cred'.
- Safari growth will continue at 0.1%/month, leading it to 4-4.5% by the end of next year.
- Opera growth will continue around 0.1%/month, leading it to 3.3-3.5% at the end of next year.
- Chrome will remain around 2.5-4% until a release or increased advertising causes it to gain visibility, after which growth is unpredictable.

Do you get Cashback for the purchase of your UID?

I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.

Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.

And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.

None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.

An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis

An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly

http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm

Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.

At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz

Opteron systems were much cheaper

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium

and they tended to win on real world benchmarks

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html

Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.

The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.

Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html

it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.

Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html

It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.

How do you know you haven't gotten a virus if you don't have antivirus software?

When I was experimenting with Limited User Accounts on XP, I kept anti-virus and anti-spyware products on my machine and scanned on an occasional basis. The AV program (AVG Free) found nothing after months of use (and didn't detect any live threats whilst browsing). The Anti-Spyware programs would alert me to things like tracking cookies (woooooh, scary !) and Most Recently Used document lists for various apps. I even kept a third-party firewall (Zone Alarm) going to trap anything that tried to 'phone home' without my authorisation. Zip. Nada.

Find out the benefits of LUA's here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/pages/TOC.aspx

The weakest security link in any current OS is the user. Having a list of signatures for possible trojans, keyloggers, etc. is a good way to flag up potential problems to non-techie users before they click on something dangerous. In that sense, an AV scanner might be worthwhile for Macs.

I'm not bashing Microsoft. If Microsoft could find a way to force all third party software developers to make their programs run from non-admin users, I'm sure they would have made users non-admin by default by now.

That's what they tried with Vista. I've been running my XP box for the past two years without any AV software by making sure all users have Limited Accounts and the Admin account is only ever used for installing software or drivers. If a particular application still requires Admin privs, it simply doesn't get to run on my machine and I might even let the writers know, if I feel it's an important program.

Lots of good stuff about Limited User Accounts here - http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/pages/TOC.aspx

He complains the distribution differences make life hard for people selling software. Well, tough, if they want money maybe they should work for it?

Yes, but right now it's HARDER to write software for Linux than Windows, and your reward for going through this extra effort is a tiny market of open source believers who wouldn't buy your software anyway. (They'll just use the buggy, incomplete open source implementation some 14-year-old made during his break from World of Warcraft. Because it's free.)

At least make Linux distribution "as easy as" Windows, it not easier. Companies still won't do it, but at least they'll need to come up with some more clever reasons.

I know! Let's recreate the windows registry, but this time better!. Yawn.

The registry solves a lot of problems that text-based configurations don't, many of them relating to remote administration features Linux has barely gotten around to replicating:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx

Unstable Kernel ABI. FUD.

Attention: every difference of opinion is now "FUD." It's not possible for two people to believe different things without one of them spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." That is all.

He wants a versioning filesystem. Like Windows has. (Does it?) I want a poney.

Yes, it does. For Active Directory on Windows 2000+, and now for everybody in Vista. While you sit on your ass waiting for your "poney", Windows and OS X users enjoy the benefits of versioning filesystems.

The real irony is that OS X's version was made using hacked-together technologies that all exist in Linux, and you're still sitting here asking for "poneys" instead of replicating their effort.

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/10/20/483110.aspx

"Nowadays, adding an easter egg to a Microsoft OS is immediate grounds for termination, so it's highly unlikely you'll ever see another."

This happened as a result of the antitrust trial.

If anyone is interested, Microsoft had a pretty interesting presentation at MIX that they posted on the web. They talk about all the usability and UI research that they did on Office 2003 that caused them to develop the ribbon for 2007, and then they spend some time talking about how they came up with the idea and worked out the details of the ribbon.

It's an interesting presentation if you work on UI design and have some time, or are curious as to why the hell they went to the ribbon.

I've been running my windows XP laptop as non-admin for over 2 years. It's not as bad as you say. Two things keep me going. Superior SU, found here: http://www.stefan-kuhr.de/supsu/main.php3 and make me admin, found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/07/24/193721.aspx. Between the two, running non-admin is quite comfortable with a bit of practice.

This comment doesn't seem to take account of the facts:

- IE 7 has been released for over two years, and has been pushed on Windows Update for almost all of that time. I see no evidence that MS is in any way trying to keep people on IE 6. Do you?

- The supported platforms for IE 8 have been described as XP, Server 2003 and Vista, as well as {presumably}, Win 7. Every beta so far has worked on all these platforms. This is all discussed on the IE blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/IE.

- I think how quickly IE 8 gets pushed through auto-update is dependent mainly on how quickly websites adapt to the newer standards-compliant behavior. I think the change IE 8 will make to be in standards-compliant mode by default is a huge win, but it will have a big impact on the rest of the web. The chorus of people complaining that IE isn't standards-compliant will be replaced by another chorus of people complaining that their web sites don't work in IE 8 and demanding that Microsoft revert to the old non-standards behavior. If you don't believe me, just wait ... :-) . But again, every other release of IE has been promptly pushed through Windows Update, I don't see the evidence that this one wouldn't.

- The IE team has been fairly clear on their blog that the goals for IE 8 are standards-compliance including full support for CSS 2.1, Acid 2, and some parts of CSS 3 and HTML 5. These decision were made ages ago, in the early stages of the project. Things like SVG and Acid 3 complaince aren't going to be in this release, which some people complain about, but IE 8 is still a massive step forwards. It's not sensible to cram new features in right at the end of a software project - the IE team should focus on getting IE 8 out of the door and leave these additional standards for later releases.

- We're talking about a few weeks or months delay here, this is not like the browser's been cancelled. IE 8 was roughly scheduled for the end of 2008 {MS generally don't release specific dates}, and now it's been pushed to early 2009. I hardly see this as an earth-shattering change, just the typical delays that most large projects suffer from.

In other words, chill out, sky not falling :-).

Yes.

Microsoft also has the template Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) for native C++.

I enjoyed Kennedy's reference to the "mythical MinWin". It's clueless fools like him that are perpetuating this myth. MinWin exists today, it just isn't what the overwhelming majority of journos think and say it is.

Mark Russinovish explains what MinWin really is on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/. The relevant section starts 29 minutes in.

The dark title bar for maximized windows is a feature which is supposed to make it clear that the window is maximized and thus can not be resized or moved. Apparently you're not the only one who has a problem with the feature, so they're addressing this issue for W7. Here's the relevant MS blog post

This is what twitter has been doing to Slashdot for most of the year:

http://slashdot.org/~SockDisclosure/journal/214377

Advocacy in action:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1014837&cid=25591469

Disagree with the troll and find yourself in his troll list, where
he also documents death threats for the win.

Bragging with buddies about how "M$" monitors the way he creates accounts on Slashdot:

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/08/irc-log-07112008/#tNov%2007%2021:19:07

Treatment of people who revealed what he was doing:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=993447&cid=25494651

Trascending Slashdot and bringing everyone down by association:

http://www.osnews.com/conversation/483454a1/Do_you_get_tired_of_the_Web_Hype_
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2008-August/154926.html
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2933313#post347878554
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/06/5924058.aspx#6051569

Original submission, with original puerile style:

"Analysts at Bloomberg noticed the tumble in M$'s traditional software sales last quarter and blamed it on netbooks:

The devices, which usually cost less than $500, are the fastest-growing segment of the personal-computer industry -- a trend that's eating into Microsoft's revenue. Windows sales fell short of forecasts last quarter and the company cut growth projections for the year, citing the lower revenue it gets from netbooks. When makers of the computers do use Windows, they typically opt for older and cheaper versions of the software.

Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50 for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai, a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd.

This is why, M$ declared war on the segment last year and palm top computers in previous years. While they may have successfully tamed the Asus EEE PC but, they can't hold back everyone who wants to make a buck on cheap hardware and free software. Analysts have predicted the fall of M$'s business model when computers break below $250/unit retail. We are there now, and it has shown in the bottom line."

Welcome to the trolled by twitter club, timothy.

"urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release" - Translation: Get on the ball and do our work for us.

How is it MS' job to write drivers for 3rd party hardware?

"'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them." - Translation: We have you by the balls. Don't make us squeeze. We want you to do things for our benefit, and we're unwilling to wait, or even to ask nicely.

This is just ignorant. Do you have any idea how much money and effort it takes to put on something like PDC or WinHEC?

Do you have any idea how much it drastically disrupts those same people that are building windows 7 to have these? The same people doing preso's workshops and support during winhec are the same ones building windows 7. The more winhec's you have, the slow the development happens.

Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.

Yeah. Thats pretty much exactly what they said.

And wow, wouldnt it be nice if they made all the session from winhec available online for you.

Your comment shows a gross ignorance of actually running a business of this nature.

"urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release" - Translation: Get on the ball and do our work for us.

How is it MS' job to write drivers for 3rd party hardware?

"'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them." - Translation: We have you by the balls. Don't make us squeeze. We want you to do things for our benefit, and we're unwilling to wait, or even to ask nicely.

This is just ignorant. Do you have any idea how much money and effort it takes to put on something like PDC or WinHEC?

Do you have any idea how much it drastically disrupts those same people that are building windows 7 to have these? The same people doing preso's workshops and support during winhec are the same ones building windows 7. The more winhec's you have, the slow the development happens.

Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.

Yeah. Thats pretty much exactly what they said.

And wow, wouldnt it be nice if they made all the session from winhec available online for you.

Your comment shows a gross ignorance of actually running a business of this nature.

I think this is it for me. I will search out programs that support it (lftp over any other ftp program as 1 example) and I get very bleak when I hit some project or other that does not. Command line learning curve is supposed to be much steeper (and this is hysterical btw) but tab-completion makes it stacks easier to learn and faster once you are an advanced user.

Sounds like what you're saying is that Linq is just the language that goes along with an ORM mapper. Something like what HQL is capable of doing.

No, no, no!

LINQ is not an "ORM language" Is map an element of an "ORM language"? Is fold? Of course not!

LINQ can be used to build an ORM. It can also be used for many other things entirely unrelated to ORM or databases (in contrast, HQL is very specifically an ORM query language, not immediately usable outside that domain).

Even if we were...you've essentially *possibly* invalidated point #5. What about the other 4? Those don't actually have anything to do with ORM, but actually deal with using Linq as a language (vs using HQL as a language).

No, your points don't deal with "LINQ as a language" at all, because "LINQ as a language" is absolutely orthogonal to databases in general, kinds of relations (belongs-to / has-a) in particular, caching, and so on. What you were describing is LINQ to SQL - which, I agree, is rather crappy, especially when compared to proper ORM such as Hibernate (this is what your #1, #2, #3 and #5 are about). Entity Framework is supposed to alleviate that, though I still do not consider it as mature as Hibernate. Even so, it has its nice sides (I believe that they're right on track with the idea that plain objects with decorators/attributes are not the best way to initially model entities - you really need a dedicated ERD modelling language for that, the one where relations are also first-class, named, and explicit).

Some functions that work in BOTH the database and the VM don't work with Linq, or don't work reliably (examples I've found: shift operator, bitwise and when used with ulong).

This is not true. In plain LINQ to Objects, every single operator is supported, and any function call works. Without any limitations whatsoever. Because it actually, you know, just calls those functions?

Once again, what you describe here is a LINQ to SQL limitation, not applicable to LINQ in general.

If you actually have to make a new language variant for every single database

You don't make a "new language variant". You have to make a "provider", which is entirely the same as NHibernate driver or (on a lower level) ADO.NET/JDBC driver. Microsoft has made a provider for their own database, now other vendors are delivering providers for their databases. Entity Framework infrastructure is designed to be extensible, so there's no difference between MSSQL provider supplied out-of-the-box, and third-party providers. LINQ-the-language is exactly the same in all those cases (just as it is exactly the same between LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, and EF). C# compiler does not know nor care, and it's the one that defines LINQ syntax.

You can do almost everything you need to using standard, compatible-with-every-server SQL most of the time

Yeah? Try calling a stored procedure in a server-agnostic way. Or work with dates. Or concatenate two strings. Or get a substring of a string. Or limit the output of a query to the first N rows. Or create an autoincrementing field.

If you think you know the answers for all of the above, then have a look at this comparison of different SQL implementations, and check yourself.

And that's without even mentioning the subtle behavioral differences between locking (DB2, MSSQL) and MVCC (Oracle, Postgres, Interbase) database engin

Sounds like what you're saying is that Linq is just the language that goes along with an ORM mapper. Something like what HQL is capable of doing.

No, no, no!

LINQ is not an "ORM language" Is map an element of an "ORM language"? Is fold? Of course not!

LINQ can be used to build an ORM. It can also be used for many other things entirely unrelated to ORM or databases (in contrast, HQL is very specifically an ORM query language, not immediately usable outside that domain).

Even if we were...you've essentially *possibly* invalidated point #5. What about the other 4? Those don't actually have anything to do with ORM, but actually deal with using Linq as a language (vs using HQL as a language).

No, your points don't deal with "LINQ as a language" at all, because "LINQ as a language" is absolutely orthogonal to databases in general, kinds of relations (belongs-to / has-a) in particular, caching, and so on. What you were describing is LINQ to SQL - which, I agree, is rather crappy, especially when compared to proper ORM such as Hibernate (this is what your #1, #2, #3 and #5 are about). Entity Framework is supposed to alleviate that, though I still do not consider it as mature as Hibernate. Even so, it has its nice sides (I believe that they're right on track with the idea that plain objects with decorators/attributes are not the best way to initially model entities - you really need a dedicated ERD modelling language for that, the one where relations are also first-class, named, and explicit).

Some functions that work in BOTH the database and the VM don't work with Linq, or don't work reliably (examples I've found: shift operator, bitwise and when used with ulong).

This is not true. In plain LINQ to Objects, every single operator is supported, and any function call works. Without any limitations whatsoever. Because it actually, you know, just calls those functions?

Once again, what you describe here is a LINQ to SQL limitation, not applicable to LINQ in general.

If you actually have to make a new language variant for every single database

You don't make a "new language variant". You have to make a "provider", which is entirely the same as NHibernate driver or (on a lower level) ADO.NET/JDBC driver. Microsoft has made a provider for their own database, now other vendors are delivering providers for their databases. Entity Framework infrastructure is designed to be extensible, so there's no difference between MSSQL provider supplied out-of-the-box, and third-party providers. LINQ-the-language is exactly the same in all those cases (just as it is exactly the same between LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, and EF). C# compiler does not know nor care, and it's the one that defines LINQ syntax.

You can do almost everything you need to using standard, compatible-with-every-server SQL most of the time

Yeah? Try calling a stored procedure in a server-agnostic way. Or work with dates. Or concatenate two strings. Or get a substring of a string. Or limit the output of a query to the first N rows. Or create an autoincrementing field.

If you think you know the answers for all of the above, then have a look at this comparison of different SQL implementations, and check yourself.

And that's without even mentioning the subtle behavioral differences between locking (DB2, MSSQL) and MVCC (Oracle, Postgres, Interbase) database engin

Like I said, Python is inherently constrained as far as optimizations go due to its dynamic semantics. It's stuff like this.

What kind of shit-site is linked to?

"Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system. "

When going to that site http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

it suggests Install Silverlight !

then when coming to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform

So those claiming that Silverlight were only needing JavaScript (Ajax) on the client-side were lying!

Kepp your shitty site!

Well, except that they are offering Java and Ruby SDKs for the whole thing. So, no, it's not just .NET, and not just about Microsoft.

DreamSpark and MSDNAA are not quite the same thing. DreamSpark is a web based service which allows qualifying college students to download full copies of VS2005, VS2008, SqlServer 2005, Windows Server 2003 and the full suite of their "Interwebz 4 dummiez" (AKA Expression Studio, etc).

MSDNAA is something that colleges sign up for. They pay for site licenses and qualifying students (at my university, only CS majors) can get copies of a huge range of Microsoft software, depending on what the college paid for.

Raymond Chen has clearly rejected the "system tray" terminology.

Office Web will run on Silverlight (with some Ajax), so will be supported on Linux via Moonlight. "An Extension" is meant in a service orientated way, not something that you install beside office on your windows desktop. Watch for yourself (requires Silverlight) how the live collaboration works between the desktop app and browser hosted app.

Given that / support has only been present in recent Windows versions, I have to say

It has not. It has been present since the very first DOS version that supported directories. If you don't believe me, try it in DOSemu and see it for yourself.

Or you can read the story here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/24/484129.aspx

Once again, airplane manufacturers have been giving serious consideration to offering Internet access in the skies. Back in 1994, Boeing considered equipping each seat with a serial modem. Laptop users could hook up to the modem and dial out. (Dial-up was the primary means of connecting to the Internet back in those days.)

We chuckled at the though of attaching the serial cable and getting a Plug-and-Play pop-up message:

New device detected: Boeing 747

In the 'not credible' sense. Pure back-slapping.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2008/10/22/ms08-067.aspx

"Over the last year or so I've noticed that the security vulnerabilities across Microsoft, but most noticeably in Windows have become bugs of a class I call "onesey - twosies" in other words, one-off bugs."

"The $64,000 question we ask ourselves when we issue any bulletin is "did SDL fail?" and the answer in this case is categorically "No!""

"The bad news is, we'll continue to have vulnerabilities because you cannot train a developer to hunt for unique bugs, and creating tools to find such bugs is also hard to do without incurring an incredible volume of false positives. With all that said, I will add detail about one-off bugs to our internal education; I think it's important to make people aware that even with great tools and great security-savvy engineers, there are still bugs that are very hard to find."

FAIL.

Look, if you're getting a constant FLOW of 'one-off' bugs being found by third parties -- no matter how theoretically 'hard' it is to find these bugs, and no matter how sophisticated your methods, there's something very, very wrong with your methods, BECAUSE THE BLACK HATS ARE ABLE TO DO IT SO WHY CAN'T YOU?

The chance of the black hats finding this bug turned out to be 100%.

If you scored less than that, I don't care your reasons, you lose, thanks for playing, try again.

Explanation of how the exploit slipped through

One clear assumption in their ribbon design -- screen sizes. MS apparently thought that everyone has big screens. If you've got a small monitor, the unchangeably huge size of the ribbon crowds the screen and reduces your effective working area.

Actually, the ribbon takes up the same or fewer pixels than the default configuration of older Office versions. And you can set it to auto-hide if even that's too much for you. But, again, Microsoft *does* consider things like this when they design features, take a look at this blog post on your exact concern:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx

Another assumption -- that folks don't mind losing all the time they put into learning the old UI (which also happens to be standard to all other non-MSO-2007 apps).

If you phrase the question slightly differently, though, it doesn't have the negative spin you're attaching to it:

"Does the increased productivity with the new interface outweigh the time taken to learn it?"

You said yourself that the lessons learned in older versions of Office still apply to the vast majority of applications, so it seems to me that even when Office changes, it's still time well-spent, yes?

Though admittedly anecdotal, my example was of a school full of teachers and office staff, who use tech to get other things done. They don't take kindly to that tech suddenly changing and making it harder to get those exact same tasks done. Change alone is not disliked -- rather, pointless unannounced change that increases the complexity of previously known processes is disliked, with a passion.

But you're making a tacit assumption: that Office 2007 "makes it harder" to get their tasks done. Have you done any studies or measurements to show that is the case? Or is it just people complaining about change with no factual basis? (My guess: the latter.)

The old adage "if it ain't broke..." comes to mind. :)

Their attitude isn't: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Their attitude is closer to: "if it ain't broke, there's no possible way to ever made it better so you shouldn't even try"

The key here though is that all this change *is on my own terms*. *I* choose when to switch interfaces in terms of OSes / apps / keyboards / languages. *I* choose what I'm going to spend my time learning. And I choose not to spend my time learning an inconsistent and confusing system that is effectively being forced on me (making me resent it), and that gets in my way (moving, hiding, and sometimes even completely removing, functionality that I have relied on in the past), and that doesn't come across, to me personally, as useful, intuitive, rewarding, or interesting.

That's fine, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy it. I just want to avoid knee-jerk complaints made by wags with zero practical experience with the technology, and zero data to back-up their claims. (Yes, things like "Office 2007 is more usable" are testable in a lab.)

It's no surprise that the majority of Slashdotters hate Office 2007's new UI, considering that they seem to loathe the entire concept of "usability" and "talking to end-users" in the first place. But until they can *prove* it's worse, at least to the extent Microsoft has *proved* it's better, I put zero credibility in their claims. (Jensen Harris' blog, linked above, has a lot of articles about results from Microsoft's usability labs and studies.)

It feels like the .NET koolaid is coming even to the IE team. Microsoft's .NET push now borders on maniacal, standardizing on .NET and in places where it should not be standardized.

There's not a single bit of .NET code in IE7/8 (as evidenced by the fact that it happily works on XP with no .NET installed).

At the same time, the OSS community is actually slogging through and solving some of the difficult problems of making large projects in C++ that perform - getting better experience with the STL, when to use and when not to use, changing compilers to respond, developing automated testing methodologies to overcome what the compilers can't detect, and so on.

In practice, VC++ and g++ are pretty close when it comes to raw C++ performance. In my experience, VC++ was consistently better at deep inlining (which occurs particularly often when you use template metaprogamming tricks and libraries built on them, such as, in part, STL, and mostly, Boost) - it can actually inline (and then constant-fold, loop-unroll, and otherwise optimize) a recursive template invocation several thousand calls deep.

At the same time, there's no C++ IDE (OSS or otherwise) that gets close to the convenience of VC++ when it comes to debugging C++ code that uses STL heavily. I mean stuff such as STL container visualizers and Edit-and-Continue. Checked iterators enabled by default in debug builds are also handy, though not unique as such (does g++ have them out of the box these days, by the way? or do you still have to configure STLport to get them?).

Performance matters, particularly when processors aren't getting any faster, just more parallel. Microsoft's has left C++ to languish, has all but abandoned C, and as such has no real performance tool in their own arsenal.

In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft has rolled out TR1 support for VC++ this year. They have also announced that they will have PPL, which is essentially an STL-like algorithm and container library for parallel programming similar to what PLINQ is on .NET (but fully native, of course). It also heavily uses C++0x features such as lambdas, which implies that Microsoft is going to have C++0x compiler by the time VS2010 is released - which would put it less than a year after C++0x draft is finalized. I'd say that it's pretty impressive, and certainly not at all "abandoning C++".

All the new display stuff in Windows requires .NET.

Does it? All new functionality in Vista, (compositing, DX10 etc) is fully available through native APIs. In fact, a lot of stuff is not available for .NET unless you use P/Invoke to call native methods (e.g. transactional filesystem and registry). WPF is managed-only, true, but it's a high-level library build on top of WinAPI, not a replacement for the latter.

In short, you do not know what you're talking about.

C and C++ is not the same. And actually as I see it Microsoft has officially "abandoned" their C compiler, they will not add C99 support and not do much development at all for all I know (unless they changed their mind recently).

True, but there's only one MSVC compiler .exe to do both and I expect the backend code generation path is virtually the same for both (if not actually the same). In the context of this thread I meant "native code compiler" as opposed to .NET compiler anyway.

Microsoft say they haven't done full C99 because of lack of user interest, although they note that much of C99 is required for compatibility with the next C++ standard. Mind you if you want C99 with an MSVC backend you can always use Comeau C.

Unfortunately not, though I'll see if the link is in my work browser history.. but I did find this which does cover some of the topics mentioned. (the link I referred to was a webcast/ video powerpoint so you can imagine how easy it is to find the damn thing using google).

This link seems to cover some of the same things that I recall- especially the issues of re-hashing strong named assemblies.

> WGA is not malware, it's totally retarded to even suggest it.

http://politech.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/microsofts-wga-malware-in-sheeps-clothing/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/03/wga_worm/
http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/05/11/malware-posing-as-windows-product-activation.aspx

> And give me one example of a copy of windows from a ms genuine partner that contained real malware

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/10/08/new-asus-eee-box-pcs-loaded-with-virus/
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/asus-ships-new-eee-pcs-with-live-virus-474622

> i can think of 2 - 3 examples of OSS repositories being infected with virus code in the last couple of years, most notably debian.

You had better tell this person then ... who was unable to find any Debian viruses at all.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080926175039AAANYlO

Seriously ... a Debian virus? Are you nuts?

Debian servers have been "hacked" a couple of times ... meaning that someone guessed a password and managed to log on. The servers maintainers watched what they were doing for a few minutes to see if there really was an exploit in use ... but they cut the connection as soon as it became clear that it was a simple case of a guessed password, and the hacker was vainly trying a few well-out-of-date methods to try to elevate privileges. No files were modified.

You really need to try to find out what a computer virus is, and while you are researching it, you might think how immensely improbable it is to be able to put a virus into open source code.

Ian Piumarta and the VPRI [http://vpri.org] are doing some amazing work related to this story.

COLAs: Combined Object Lambda Architectures - A Complete System in 20,000 Lines of Code.
http://piumarta.com/software/cola
The system is slowly evolving towards version 1.0 which
        * is completely self-describing (from the metal, or even FPGA gates, up) exposing all aspects of its implementation for inspection and incremental modification;
        * treats state and behaviour as orthogonal but mutually-completing descriptions of computation;
        * treats static and dynamic compilation as two extremes of a continuum;
        * treats static and dynamic typing as two extremes of a continuum; and
        * late-binds absolutely everything: programming (parsing through codegen to runtime and ABI), applications (libraries, communications facilities), interaction (graphics frameworks, rendering algorithms), and so on.

http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf
http://piumarta.com/papers/EE380-2007-slides.pdf
http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf
http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf

Allen Wirfs-Brock and Dan Ingalls are currently working on bringing notions like Colas to the browser so that we can use any programming language WE choose to for our browser based applications. Check out their interview here.
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Dan-Ingalls-and-Allen-Wirfs-Brock-On-Smalltalk-Lively-Kernel-Javascript-and-Programming-the-Inter/

Did it elope with DirectX 4?

Question to Mr Nash: exactly what's wrong with the Windows 5.x kernel? (2K / 2K3 / XP / Vista)? Really, I'm still pretty happy with my 2K Pro install. What's wrong with me, Mr Nash?

MS don't know anything about Ethex, so they held this in Thuthex:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukschools/archive/2008/04/01/east-sussex-harnessing-whole-school-technology-conference.aspx

silverlight 1.0 had not XAML controls for the simple datagrid control. OMG what a stuff up! You had to go to xceed to get one and pay for it. That little detail made me so mad that I have sworn off silverlight. The message was clear, if your a small development shop, you cannot afford silverlight.

Silverlight 1.0 development was a pain, most people opted to wait for 2. Silverlight 2 includes a datagrid for free.

Oh by the way, where is the automated testing framework for writting automated UI tests against it? anyone?... anyone?...

http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/09/30/unit-testing-with-silverlight.aspx
Written by the PM in charge of most of the control development to date.

Your message was FUD. Any more that I can dispel?
-ds

What's slow here is your perception. I guess you should read up on the subject...

Here is a link from microsoft network

currently performance is basically leap-frogging between j2ee and dotnet currently.
A choice cannot be made based on performance only

Oslo and M appear to be taking a page out of the research Charles Simonyi has been doing at Microsoft, before leading to develop and advanced form of the technology at his own company Intentional Software.

The basic idea here is that any bigger project can be made more maintainable and flexible at the same time, if the deveopers create a domain specific model for the given task, and let the end-users (for example accountants, drug store chemists, biologists, business owners) model the concrete behaviour of the application by manipulating that simplified and specialized language, often visually, the way an UML diagram or a spreadsheet works.

Unfortunately the linked article offers a little more than the usual "LOL, Microsoft sucks!" rant, which is somewhat expected from a blog where the iMac keyboard and iPhone are used as "design elements".

Anyway, I'd say this should be watched as it can mean model languages will finally enter mainstream, something that's been years in the making.

Related articles:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2008/09/07/net-4-0-wf-wcf-and-oslo.aspx

"By mentioning model-driven programming, you will see a general modeling platform to be unveiled at PDC: Oslo. As Doug said, Oslo contains three simple things: a visual tool helps building models, a new textual DSL language helps defining models, and a relational repository that stores models. XAML represented workflows and services are special models in this domain. Check for more details in the postings from Doug and Don."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1430

"'Schemas in the repository can be defined using this language, but they dont have to be,' Chappell said. Developers can still use any other tools with which theyd be comfortable to create schemas instead. Because the new language will generate SQL, and the repository can be accessed using standard SQL, no special languages will be required."

If you're trying to get permissions correct to eliminate these type of prompts in a corporate environment (or make an app work in a locked down pre-Vista environment) I can't recommend LUA Buglight highly enough. Basically it provides a way to record exactly what rights an application is requesting as you run it. I've used it mostly to get temperamental programs running as locked down users under Citrix but it should work fine to help reduce the amount of UAC messages under Vista.

Hey I'll have you know the windows error message sound was mastered by King Crimsons Robert Fripp! ;)

Syntactic sugar for LINQ methods in C# is not any different from syntactic sugar for monads in Haskell. It makes sense, it is convenient, therefore, it is there. Not to mention that some of LINQ syntactic sugar is in fact about monads.

Until you've seen in real life a compiler error telling you that you accidentally tried to add a variable holding a distance in meters to one with a distance in feet, you don't know what you're talking about. Although people can find a way to break any language, some programming languages indeed are much more resistant to bugs than others.

In fact, the latest version of F# not only gives a compiler error, but Visual Studio shows the error in real time when units of measure don't match up. And it comes with a full set of SI units.

Your comment was a lot more true for versions of Office prior to 2007:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2006/10/04/Equations-in-Word-2007.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Editor

One popularization of this was from the British series "Yes Minister". Also related - the Politician's Apology. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/26/1763692.aspx

Well. Isn't that spatial.

Nope, it's VerySpatial! ;-)

Joking aside, Microsoft is *very serious* about the geospatial involvement. Here's a list of their recent geospatial products and services. But more to the point, this week, Microsoft launched Virtual Earth 6.2. Make no mistake, it's a huge improvement and offers elements Google Earth and virtual globes competitors (such as the open source NASA World Wind) don't yet.

Just take a look at the new 3D clouds in Virtual Earth which are real-time weather based, this is impressive.

Learn more here, and my summary:
"Microsoft just released Virtual Earth 6.2 and Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0. The quantity of new features is huge and are worth taking a look at, here's the highlights but follow the link for the details: " # Maps for Mobile Devices. # Birdâ(TM)s Eye Views and Birdâ(TM)s Eye Hybrid. # Aerial Imagery. # 3D Imagery. # Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding. # International Geocoding. # Localized Directions. # Localized Maps. # Extended International Parsing Capabilities. # Expanded Number of Rooftop Views. # Near-Matching Capabilities. # Imagery Metadata. # New Virtual Earth Web Services. # One-Click Directions. # Shapes and Shape Layers. # Pushpin Clustering. # Landmark-Based Routing. # Driving Directions with Traffic-Based Routing. # Walking Directions. # Multipoint Routing. # Traffic Reports. # GeoRSS Feeds. " I expect geoblog reactions in the coming days and will share them with our users. See also related stories below, Microsoft has been very busy lately with their geoservices."