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why did you just paste the source URL?

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx ...would have saved you some copy and pasting.

Creative Zen.

Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.

First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.

LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the .NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).

VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.

XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.

Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo

Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?

F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.

Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples

TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.

It goes on and on.

Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.

Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.

Info from the JScript coders, on an MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx (Linked in TFA)

Posted in the comments to TFA:

There was an article about IE's string performance in the Jscript team blog on MSDN a while back : http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/10/17/performance-issues-with-string-concatenation-in-jscript.aspx
Aaargh! on December 20, 2007 11:34 AM

Microsoft would like to keep the power of the local machine strong.
Actually, no we don't, at least, not necessarily.

While, for a majority of situations, it may well be more economical to just do it locally, the reality is, we're pushing a lot into both system level and app-level virtualization, breaking the user/kernel ties, and other efforts in order to make it possible to build decentralized processing well on windows, even to the app level that traditionally, would have been client-only (I'm looking at you, MYOB).

It's not the same approach as google, by any means, but it's certainly a valid thin-client direction, and one that's likely to be highly competetive, since it's much more flexible.

(That interview with Mark Russinovich is built on silverlight so you'll need to install it if you want to watch it online. There are download links further down however, so it's not essential.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

This is a great step in the right direction. Maybe one day in the future I will end my 5+ year boycott of Internet Explorer! Probably not... but it will still be healthy for the web.

It's worth pointing out that this announcement is in direct contrast to IE7 announcements. Microsoft employees claimed IE7 not complying with ACID2 was a "design choice" rather than a bug. Wow... what a pathetic way to say "we don't care about web standards."

This is the way IE7 *should* have been. They're continuing support of "past evolving web standards" -- also known as Microsoft's proprietary standards -- while adding current (and hopefully future) standard support. This will enable web developers to be able to create less hacky pages using simpler CSS+HTML code rather than supporting only a subset of browsers.

+5 points for MS supporting healthy open web standards
-10 points for being about a decade late

It's a feature, Not a bug! http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx

Also, according to this Microsoft blog entry, Word 2007 still uses VML for drawings...

XHTML V2 and related modules are officially supported by the W3C, and the related modules are becoming key ingredients for other XML specifications that the W3C maintains. Unfortunately, official W3C approval is no guarantee of support by major Web browsers.

It wouldn't be the first time browser vendors were ahead of official recommendations.

The FAQ doesn't even try to give a serious answer about the expected date of approval

Current browsers support both HTML V4 and XHTML V1.

Similarly, future browsers might support both HTML V5 and XHTML V2.

• Safari: For a long time, the HTML standards process has been moribund; the W3C's HTML Working Group has focused almost exclusively on XHTML2, a new standard that was highly incompatible with existing practice. The people working on the major browsers have largely abandoned the HTML Working Group.
• Opera: So, I don't think XHTML is a realistic option for the masses. HTML5 is it.
• Mozilla: In the near term, only Mozilla-based browsers come close to having all the integrated infrastructure needed by XHTML 2, and not all bundled by default. There is no sign of XHTML 2 support from Microsoft, Apple, and Opera.

SO has anyone actually USED Vista? What am I doing right/wrong that I have NOTHING to complain about it?

You are using it in a 100% Windows walled garden. I bought by wife (i know, geek, wife, wtf?) a new laptop with Vista for her schoolwork. I had just a couple simple tasks to perform to finish up the setup.

1 connect to the backup NAS and copy her files.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
2 Connect to our networked printers.
http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=21&FamID=42&ProdID=223

The first task took over 2 hours and a massive Google search. The second task took a little over an hour to connect the first printer. The second went a lot faster.

Vista by default has changed the security level (a feature) but it isn't well docummented, so when connecting to a Simple Share NAS box I couldn't log in. It requires a registry tweak to back down the security level to enable logging in and transferring files.
http://blogs.msdn.com/chkdsk/archive/2006/03/10/548787.aspx
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746

The second was a 5 minute task in Ubuntu for a complete noob. I used a stand alone printserver hanging on the back of my inkjet and laserjet printers to provide CUPS networking for my printers. In Ubuntu, it was easy to put in the IP address \\192.168.1.102\lp1 and pick a printer. It was intuitive to pick network printing and put in the printer address. In Windows it took quite a while to figure out how to do internet printing without a directory services server.

It was far from easy for a Vista noob.

Explained by Raymond Chen: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx
"The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it's forced to guess."

Microsoft used similar opt-in monitoring in Office 2003 to help make Office 2007. There's a decent blog post on the most used commands in Office which explains the influence on the design of Office 2007. The Office UI team were interested in things like whether toolbar buttons were used or keyboard shortcuts and frequency of use of individual items.

The monitoring is not too different from packages installed being monitored by the optin 'popularity-contest' in Debian/Ubuntu which help somewhat to get the most used packages in earlier disks.

Microsoft used similar opt-in monitoring in Office 2003 to help make Office 2007. There's a decent blog post on the most used commands in Office which explains the influence on the design of Office 2007. The Office UI team were interested in things like whether toolbar buttons were used or keyboard shortcuts and frequency of use of individual items.

The monitoring is not too different from packages installed being monitored by the optin 'popularity-contest' in Debian/Ubuntu which help somewhat to get the most used packages in earlier disks.

Make sure you know of what you speak:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx

The registry is better than text files in many ways, all of which are outlined in that post.

I saw this blog from one of the current chairs of the ODF committee in OASIS: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/12/bait-and-switch.html

So, ODF was adopted as an ISO standard about a year ago, and since then there has already been a new version of ODF (1.1) released by OASIS, and they are supposedly close on version 1.2. I believe 1.2 is supposed to be significant as they've promised it will include a formula definition for spreadsheets (although the working group hasn't seen much activity lately if you look at the mailing list archives: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-formula/). So, the maintenance of ODF right now is being handled solely by OASIS, and I'm not sure what their plans are for bringing new drafts to the ISO.

Now, one of the Chairs of the ODF committee (IBM and Sun are now co-chairs of the ODF committee) has a blog post saying that Microsoft is somehow pulling a "bait and switch" because Ecma has proposed to ISO that a joint maintenance agreement be set up once DIS 29500 is approved. We're still months away from approval, but TC45 has already reached out and tried to start a discussion around maintenance.

So it's been a year since Rob's committee had its ISO approval and has since then maintained sole control; and TC45's DIS 29500 still has a few months before approval and they are already trying to establish a maintenance agreement. And this is now called a "bait and switch"?

That's my Weird Moment of the Day.

Seemingly to combat the hate, Dean Hachamovitch (GM for IE) has posted on the IE blog an announcement for IE8. The big news ? that IE8 will be called... Internet Explorer 8 !!! huzzah!

This will probably help. the filenames are all for windows, but the idea is the same. Just go to "Show package contents" int he contextual menu to get to the folders he is talking about. Makes acrobat run much faster. I also prefer some of the features of acrobat.

I've been hearing the "I want real books" argument since the early 80s, which was when people first started to talk about ebooks. Always made by somebody who hadn't really tried the alternatives.

There's a surprising amount of luddite-ism in the tech industry. I think that's one of the appeal of Linux, honestly. (Look! My Unix program from 1977 still runs!) Just yesterday, Raymond Chen at Microsoft posted a list of reasons the Registry in Windows is superior to storing settings in .ini files, and the vast majority of replies were programmers arguing the merits of .ini files-- while utterly ignoring the initial list of reasons they aren't ideal. (Post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx if you care.)

I was struck by the number of people whose argument basically summed to, "we like .ini files better because it's always been done that way!" You'd think that an industry so new would be more flexible, but apparently not.

So taking your logic further, the OS should be responsible for all of this, so it's not even Firefox's problem. ^_^

Trick with this, even if they get the libraries to run on XP, the behind the scenes aspects of the WDDM in Vista will be missing for DX10 and Games.

Many DX10 games assume that the OS (WDDM/Vista) is managing GPU Scheduling, handling GPU RAM Virtualization, multi-tasking calls from a single game between scene rendering and GPU Physics, etc.

So there is no doubt you can get DX10 libraries to probably run on XP, but the games will run really horribly if the Game designer is targeting DX10 specifically and expecting the WDDM and Vista to be picking up aspects of GPU management that XP has no clue about.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/02/14/why-dx10-wasnt-created-on-xp-and-why-it-isnt-in-xp.aspx

Hey, this particular problem was their own fault. They allowed an already fixed bug ("the bug was fixed on more recent Vista builds than the one they were using for the demo") to affect a public demonstration of a new feature; they deserve to take all the flak they got for it.

Here is a blog entry from Jason Matusow where he responds to some of Bob Sutor's recent comments and in the process explains that the purpose of the upcoming Ballot Resolution Meeting is the change the specification.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2007/11/20/open-xml-brm-a-response-to-bob-sutor-s-assertions.aspx

I think there is general acceptance from all involved that there are still changes to come.

I've seen these adds pop up, and they start by informing me that they're scanning C:\system32 for data... that would mean more if such a file existed. A quick call to ps shows that wine is not running, so there is no file on my system possibly identifiable as 'C:'. While it's fictionally scanning,

Just to be sure, I grepped my entire hard drive for some keywords I noticed in these ads and it came up nothing. So I'm pretty sure that I haven't been infected.

But had I been on Windows...

Also, this blog entry shows that Silverlight has a better security model... don't know whether the implementation is airtight, but at least they want it to be.

All technology aside, replacing the entire look'n'feel for our user base (office 2007 + Vista) would be a huge productivity killer for months, with no benefit whatsoever.

Can you back that up with data?

I mean, Microsoft has done real world studies with actual users, and shown that the learning curve is quite managable, and productivity goes up when it's over: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/05/655119.aspx

Unless you can prove what you're saying in some fashion, I'd be more inclined to believe Microsoft's study.

I think I know what he means. Most of the code I write is for embedded platforms, but I've always liked writing Win32 or Windows driver code. They tend to be rather complex, but the complexity is usually there for a reason.

Try reading http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ for a while. I like all the voodoo Microsoft do to keep old third party binaries working too - it's another example of complexity for a reason.

All Apple did was glamorize it with pretty effects and give it a cool name

And publicize it, so people would know it's there and use it, and make it easy to use, so you can watch the one-minute video demo and know everything you need to know about it. How many Windows users know about, or use, shadow copy? Not very many.

It's like a movie: a lot of good movies have special effects, but just having lots of special effects doesn't make a movie good, and just because lots of bad movies have special effects, doesn't mean all movies with special effects are bad. Same thing with Apple: yeah, they take basic features and make them shiny, but a) just making things shiny doesn't make them good, and b) just because there's lots of bad shiny crap out there, doesn't mean that what Apple does is bad just because it's shiny. It's possible to be good and shiny, and that's what Apple does: make it good first, and shiny second.

And before you get another raging hardon over backups, just remember that Microsoft didn't invent them either. VMS's file system has had this since the 1980s (if what I've read in every other Time Machine thread is true.) You MS apologists (and employees) are such jealous little whiners. All you can ever say is "Wah. We did it first. Why isn't anyone paying attention to us?" Do you really want to get into a contest to see who came up with how many things first?

IHBT. I will HAND.

"2. Good speed. I shouldn't need 4 Gigs of RAM just to get halfway decent performance out of my operating system, 512 MB should be fast enough and at 2 gigs it should have all the power needed for anything other then heavy gaming and major video editing"

I honestly don't care that much. I find 2 gigs is plenty for everything except heavy gaming and major video editing (and even then serviceable). I'm not buying something with less than 2 gigs anyway. We are different targets, I know, and my point is that there are lots of people who don't draw an arbitrary line at 512 MB or want to run on old hardware (2 GB RAM isn't a huge price differential over 512 MB, so the money toward my operating system might be better spent elsewhere).

"3. Non-Fragmenting filesystem, Seriously, when there is file systems on Linux that never have to be de-fragmented that have been there since at least 2000, why can't Windows in 2006 not have it?"

Seems like a non-issue to me.

"4. ...When Windows can't open up simple, free open standards by default such as .ogg, .tar and .pdf without the aid of third-party software that is just stupidity..."

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx

If MS Office isn't allowed to use pdf out-of-the-box (they can provide a free first-party download, however) I doubt that Windows can legally do so. I don't know whether ogg and tar suffer the same restrictions of the proprietary, non-"free and open" pdf standard.

When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition.


This hasn't been necessary for several years now, NT usually creates a non-fragmented pagefile.

Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Whichever is larger. I do not want fragmentation in the swap file. I'd prefer not to need one, but that's another story.

Again it hasn't since Win98, default is system managed and this means the OS picks the size, and it stays the same. Although with system managed if your HD does run out of room, it can automatically decrease the fixed size.

And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile.

Because for security reasons, the IE temp files are the 'users'. If a co worker was sharing a system with you, and looking at kiddie porn, would you like for his temp files to be in a public folder?

And I'm tired of seeing C:\WINDOWS\Temp
Temp directories do not belong in the OS directory.

Again, only old applications use this, Windows and any application made by a credible developer uses the TEMP variable, which points to the users Temp folder.

Yeah, I'm whining. But I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine.

Sounds like you are doing extra work, and gaining nothing in the process. You should take a look at how Windows works today, it is far different from your assumptions. Some of the stuff you are talking about is from the Win9x OS, which was completely different than the NT based OSes like 2K,XP,Vista.

PS Even if you have a lot of settings or changes you like to make to a default installation, take a look at the install and deployment tools and policies for Windows, you can slipstream your install so that all the settings you want are done by default.

Deployment tools and easy customization of the Windows installation is one of the things that makes it popular in the business world, and you can use these tools at home or in the field as well.

Here are a couple of links you might find of interest, they come from an article talking about how Windows IT people shouldn't ever be using DVDs or stock Windows images to install Windows.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/desktopdeployment/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2007/04/03/partner-tv-adam-shepherd-and-richard-smith-on-deployment.aspx

Good luck to you, and I hope this makes your life a bit easier.

I have one as well, going on my second week with it. I like it a lot. Still trying to get used to it though (previous phone was a Treo 650). I think the biggest thing people are missing with this phone is the NEO interface http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2007/11/01/shadow-homescreen.aspx that is exclusive to this phone. This interface actually hides most of the Windows Mobile interface from the average user.

To extend my previous remarks, go watch some videos at http://channel9.msdn.com./ You'll see many people very happy with their jobs working on very interesting things (much more interesting than ad/search stuff that Google wastes PhDs on, IMO), and no hint of any of them lacking ethics and morality.

I thought the poster exaggerate very much. Come on, I code that much just playing around and I am just a hobbyist. That is until I googled "1,000 lines of code a year" Windows and this shows up:
The ultimate and final monolithic operating system? which points to an ex-Softie's blog.

That puts the number at 1000 lines/yr*1 yr/wk*5 days/wk = 3.85 lines per working day per developer. All I can say is, Holy Cow! No wonder...

His discussion of running untrusted code in "prisons" is interesting, and I wonder what, if any, accomodation for this type of programming Windows has.

Windows Vista introduced Protected Mode for IE, which presumably does this sort of thing. I assume this sort of sandboxing can be applied to other processes too, but I've not looked into it.

I know that i'm not a "Heavy Hitter" like Dare, but I tried out OpenSocial this weekend and I saw something very interesting. I am also a Microsoft employee and I am paid to blog: Silverlight in OpenSocial!
I thought that Dare wrote a very thoughtful analysis of OpenSocial but I wanted to get my hands dirty with it and see what I could do.

I know that i'm not a "Heavy Hitter" like Dare, but I tried out OpenSocial this weekend and I saw something very interesting. I am also a Microsoft employee and I am paid to blog: Silverlight in OpenSocial!
I thought that Dare wrote a very thoughtful analysis of OpenSocial but I wanted to get my hands dirty with it and see what I could do.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2007/10/31/what-i-think-about-es4.aspx

A less-corporate-speak version of the MS executive's side here.

There are some things like incorrect PowerPoint versions, forgotten files, mysteriously appearing pornography, corrupt PowerPoint files, PowerPoint unavailable, etc, that would actually be better if there was a piece of online presentation software.

Online applications are in their infancy, but it's definitely a worthwhile area to be exploring. I think it'll take a change in JavaScript or some kind of better online scripting platform before it becomes a serious contender, and that'll always be stifled while IE holds a large share, but definitely worth the trouble.

I think (or would like to think) uncertainty about whether or not you'll remain online and have a stable connection will become a thing of the past.


On using Keynote: I've never used Keynote, but I do know that PowerPoint 2007 is a big step ahead of PowerPoint 2003 for easily creating very attractive presentations. No more blue screens with that weird comet thing at the top, no more weird and irrelevant little stick figure clip art. The best new thing in PowerPoint is SmartArt, which can make bullet points so much clearer if not over-used. Also Excel's tables and charts now look much better by default, which makes PowerPoint slides also look much better.

Keynote presentations also look good, I'm just pointing out that there's not that much between them in terms of style and flash as there used to be. Also if you're into XML and (relatively) open standards, Office 2007 has iWork covered there.

Choice is good, competition is good, summaries that use the word "kill " usually aren't good.

The GNOME Foundation does not support ISO standardisation of OOXML. But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else. Should we let Microsoft shove OOXML through ECMA without challenge? Hell no. That's why we have one of our best hackers in there, holding their feet to the fire.

But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else.

The GNOME Foundation does not support ISO standardisation of OOXML. But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else. Should we let Microsoft shove OOXML through ECMA without challenge? Hell no. That's why we have one of our best hackers in there, holding their feet to the fire.

But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else.

I looked at the gnumeric developpement version and nothing is done to support ODF but everything is done to support Microsoft OpenXML. It's a shame this software was a great one!

I looked at the gnumeric developpement version and nothing is done to support ODF but everything is done to support Microsoft OpenXML. It's a shame this software was a great one!

I liken ajax to any other browser markup... it's nothing fancier than knowing how to use a <div> tag or knowing how to create new DOM elements dynamically. We don't see articles about how to use divs, so why do we keep getting articles on how to use XMLHttpRequest? XHR is just another tool we can use; there is no big mystery or learning curve to using it. It's simple, has limited functionality, and takes -- at maximum -- a couple of hours to master.

Learn to use XMLHttpRequest. Learn how to manipulate the DOM with JavaScript. That's all there is to it. If you can't figure out how to put together your own slideshow without having to refer to others' markup and code, you obviously haven't got the slightest clue as to what you're doing. Perhaps saying it so bluntly is somewhat rude, but it really is true... XHR is _not_ a difficult object to manipulate.

It's bad enough that people depend on the prototype library as their crutch to use JS and XHR. For Internet Explorer, prototype doesn't even invoke the proper ActiveX objects (for anyone interested, read up from the source). I mean come on, prototype doesn't even support adding a timeout callback to the XHRequest.

As for the linked article itself, the writer writes non-validating HTML (what's with the <script> tags sans attributes?), and his PHP is worse than atrocious (not to mention he's not outputting an opening <?xml ?>). Whatever happened to posting quality work on /.?

"I am honestly not sure where the Win2K misperception comes from, but Xbox runs a custom operating system built from the ground up."

Source: XBox team official MSDN Blog.

Try this.