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First, Whistler != XP, and Longhorn != Vista. Whistler and Longhorn were pre-release code names.
Second, Feisty Fawn *is* Ubuntu 7.04.

"In contrast, the Microsoft OSes contain no official mention of their codenames after public release"
Just go to http://www.msdn.com/ and search for "longhorn".

Wait, MSDN is part of the OS? Fine, then go to wiki.ubuntu.com and search for "feisty fawn".

Is this a ridiculous argument? Sure. I'm not against having silly names for Ubuntu releases, even more so because they're not given by a marketing team intending to boost sales or PR. Nor am I against any of the MS code names; I would've been happy as a clam if they had kept the Whistler name.

"The Ubuntu names are branded and visible in the OS after release,"

I challenge your assertion. Please go to http://www.ubuntu.com/ and tell where do you see the "feisty fauns and friends". All I can see is "Ubuntu Desktop Edition" and "Ubuntu Server Edition". The "Download Now!" button friendly explains me I'll go for "Ubuntu 7.04 The power of free software. On your laptop, desktop and server. Smart. Secure. Easy". They go further and explain me how long Ubuntu 7.04 and/or Ubuntu 6.06 LTS will be supported.

But then, they have a "search" box. If I explicitly intro "feisty" on it all references are about test releases or clearly indicate it as a nickname after the release number (just like you'll find Microsoft Windows XP "Whistler" or Microsoft Windows Vista "Longhorn").

On the other hand, I don't remember seing the codename neither on Ubuntu's installer nor on the default desktop.

"In contrast, the Microsoft OSes contain no official mention of their codenames after public release"

Just go to http://www.msdn.com/ and search for "longhorn".

The truth is that Ubuntu makes no more "official mention" to their distribution's codenames nor they are any more "intended to be used in any official capacity" than Microsoft's.

Why don't I just let this article do the talking for me, since you seem to persist in believing that DateTime in .NET is just perfect (here's a hint, they're planning to *write a replacement* because of the limitations in the current implementation, and why? Because the *underlying representation was insufficient*).

Check out this series of posts. They highlight many of the problems you are likely to see when making the transition. Becoming a Lead Learning to Trust Delegating We Not I

Check out this series of posts. They highlight many of the problems you are likely to see when making the transition. Becoming a Lead Learning to Trust Delegating We Not I

Check out this series of posts. They highlight many of the problems you are likely to see when making the transition. Becoming a Lead Learning to Trust Delegating We Not I

Check out this series of posts. They highlight many of the problems you are likely to see when making the transition. Becoming a Lead Learning to Trust Delegating We Not I

No, the bias is how much weight is given to those arguments. The exact same issues, for the most part, exist in ODF, yet you don't see those people complaining about those issues there.

For example, OpenOffice creates ODF documents with more than 100 application defined tags. See http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02/ 20/beyond-the-basics.aspx

The only difference here is that Microsoft defines the application defined tags as deprecated, rather than letting implementors find out about them on their own. In other words, it's Sun lying by omission.

The tags you mention are deprecated, and will never be used by any version of Office to create OOXML documents, other than when converting legacy documents. They're a non-issue. They're simply defined for completeness, because apps will HAVE to deal with them whether the standard defines them or not, just like apps have to deal with OpenOffice's crud... they just don't tell anyone about it.

This is the first believable explanation I've seen for why this behavior doesn't occur on XP (brushing it off as 'XP doesn't have MMCSS' is stupid, as it doesn't have any audio glitches in periods of heavy network I/O either).

The new Windows Vista audio architecture is a massive beast compared to the simple architecture of XP. See this thread on Creative's forums for comparisons to XP, pretty pictures and explanations, or skip straight to the blog of the developer responsible for an overview of how the new audio sub-system works.

While I don't see any encryption layers, the XP diagram ends in "hardware" but the Vista diagram ends with "Audio Driver" .. anyone know what happens after that? What does does the Audio Driver have to do get the samples into the sound card's memory space?

This seems by design, at least in WinXPSP2.

Since the windows audio service runs in the same process as the networking services..."

There is this sort of undercurrent in a lot of Microsoft literature on MSDN, Channel9 and other sources (see this in particular); many units in MS seem to take it for granted that "computing" is essentially an activity of programmers, and that end users need not be bothered with it. Sure, end users use computers, but really all they do with them is stuff they could've done without them, just faster (according to MS).

Since an operating system is a "computing" product par excellence and really has no relation to a practical end-user process (by their reckoning), Microsoft only indifferently supports its operating system for end users, and primarily targets its attention on getting developers to make the switch. They believe, for good reason, that if they get the devs to build on Vista, then the end-users will just follow the applications, and that they won't really need to market the OS. Or, for that matter, even spend too much energy supporting it, since performance and reliability are always secondary to compatibility, which the developers lock the end users in to.

This is not proof of OOXML being defective by design. It only shows that apparently MS's software isn't able to handle OOXML properly.

If Office can't read OOXML files produced by other tools, and other tools can't read Office OOXML files, where do you suppose end users will place the blame?

And what do you suppose users will do when faced with incompatibilities?

but Office can read OOXML files produced by other tools; You just have to generate proper files.

As its pointed out in this thread:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/ 15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx

Stephane basically wanted a shortcut, and gets upset that he can not use a shortcut. This is equivalent to complaining that a web browser wont display things properly when you feed it invalid CSS.

In addition, Excel happens to recover nicely from the lack of data that Stephane complains so loudly about, you just happen to get a warning if the file you feed it happens to be incorrectly formed and even offers you an option to "repair" it.

Stephane has for a long time presented a weak case against OpenOffice XML.

"1) Self-exploding spreadsheets"

His top issue "1) Self-exploding spreadsheets" has been discussed on Brian Jones' weblog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/ 15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx

It boils down to: the fact that is XML does not mean that you can modify it in any way you want; There are rules for modifying the schema and Mr Stephane is not happy with that. Had he followed the actual rules he would have had no issue.

This is a case where two locations must be updated per the spec; He can avoid updating the two locations by removing the chainCalc.xml file (which is optional, and Excel will reconstruct). He later gets upset because if he does that, he claims performance on load will be slower.

"2) Entered versus stored values"

His second point in "2) Entered versus stored values" in an interesting distinction between entered values and stored values. It reflects the way that Excel works (and so does Gnumeric) by storing the values instead of the data that was entered by the user. This responds to the need of the spreadsheet to do something interesting with the data, for example when you enter a date, it is stored as a number with a format applied not as a string. This allows computations on dates to happen based on the underlying numeric value. The featured is used extensively by spreadsheets.

In the Excel/gnumeric case you have to generate a single value, in the ODF case you must generate and update the two values (which just a point before, Stephane was having a seizure about).

The precision issue that he brings up, I suspect is merely an issue with double format precision. He claims that the data is unusable and there is a loss of precision, but handing that out to a C compiler will produce the expected result with no loss of precision. I do not know how "atof" or the compiler work internally to cope with this issue, but at least my libc/gcc combo does not have this problem.

I would not be surprised if this is an artifact of floating point, someone with more background on doubles and floating point math could probably answer the question with more authority, but a cursory read of "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating Point" seems to validate that there is no error in the floating point representation for the values that he uses: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h tml

3) Optimization artefacts become a feature instead of an embarrasment

His 3rd point is open for debate, like the 1st case, we have a case where he has to handle things differently. Stephane sells a commercial product to handle Excel files and I suspect that his product has to cope with the same patterns in different ways, which has naturally upset him. OOXML might be inspired by Excel's needs, but it does not mean that it has to be a 1-to-1 match.

4) VML isn't XML

VML is labeled as "deprecated" in the OOXML documentation (Section 8.6.2, page 25) and it states: "The VML format is a legacy format originally introduced with Office 2000 and is included and fully defined in this Standard for backwards compatibility reasons. The DrawingML format is a newer and richer format created with the goal of eventually replacing any uses of VML in the Office Open XML formats. VML should be considered a deprecated format included in Office Open XML for legacy reasons only and new applications that need a file format for drawings are strongly encouraged to use preferentially DrawingML."

So the standard basically says "VML is still in use, but its better to use DrawingML". Stephane misconstrues the above statement and tries to portray this as evil

http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/08/25/valid ation-issue-fix.aspx

I think the "It's fixed" page kdawson posted is talking about one of the other WGA outages, since it's from 2006. Link quoted here, note timestamp: http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2006/10/05/WGA-s ervice-outage.aspx

This is the correct answer. More details are available here; http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2314 38

http://developers.developers.developers.developers .msdn.com/

It is however. Even people with dual cores where having problems with skipping audio and network drivers (such as Realtek's). See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx. I have problems with skipping audio due to heavy cpu usage when my Wifi (ipw2100) is working. I have to specifically disable the wifi driver to get around this issue. It is however the AudioDG.exe process that eats up my cycles.

It more or less is actually. The design of the new audio infrastructure is indeed partially done because of DRM

See http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/0 1/31/what-is-audiodg-exe.aspx

Thanks for the pointer, appreciated (for others looking, it's in this comment). That's actually how the ODF plug-in achieves the addition to the format subsystem. It works as well as any of the other import/export capabilities that use this mechanism do (read: all of them). I struggle to understand why this level of interoperability hasn't been added directly to MS Office rather than Sun having to create a plug-in.

Extending the format system using this approach achieves the goal our team was trying to achieve, which was to ensure that users of assistive devices would be able to access ODF as part of their work flow within Word. They would be unable to switch immediately to OpenOffice.org because of the tight-coupling of the assistive devices to MS-Office by their manufacturers. Brian's goal (importing ODF directly into OOXML in order to encourage use of OOXML) is different and he's probably right that it's harder to achieve - sadly their chosen mechanism is more of a barrier to disabled customers.

Brian Jones, the Microsoft Office manager, talks about it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/05/ 11/german-standards-body-creates-new-working-group -to-focus-on-interoperability.aspx

It seems pretty awful. The way they've had to do it themselves with OOXML is save as RTF, then in the background load the RTF file and save that as OOXML.

It seems their code base really is not designed for such changes.

// Example #1

#define MAX (50)
char *pszDest = malloc(sizeof(pszSrc));
strncpy(pszDest,pszSrc,MA X);

// Example #2

#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);

// Example #3

#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);
pszDest [MAX] = '\0';

// Example #4

#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);
strnc at(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);

// Example #5

char szDest[50];
_snprintf(szDest, strlen(szDest), "%s",szSrc);

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Does this mean they've given up on CardSpace, which is built into Vista right now? I thought it was a much better solution to the need for single sign-on. Check out thechannel9 video.

I assume it's easy to boot checked builds into a mode that accepts unsigned drivers, since that is what the build is designed to test.

I assume it's easy to boot checked builds into a mode that accepts unsigned drivers, since that is what the build is designed to test.

For large heavy use production sites, you'll probably want to pay for the standard or enterprise version of MS SQL. But for most uses, including the all important developer work, you can just use sql 2005 express for free. IIS & .Net are no additional cost.

Which are limited either technically or legally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Stud io_Express
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx

Maybe you can get away with developing for free on the express stack, but as soon as you need to start scaling because your app does get popular, you have to start paying the MS tax AND you have limited access to the code when scaling problems start happening. IANAE but i imagine that if you have the expectation of building a large site, you would stay away from the MS stack as far as possible just to retain as much flexibility as possible in the long term.

The only time this is a real problem is if you're trying to do something that isnt possible on Windows, but thats pretty rare. Just like most people dont require modification to the JVM to create a framework on the java stack, the vast majority of people dont need to be able to modify windows, or .net to be able to go outside the norm there.

Umm, that's true. I guess that most engineers will understand the MS stack. Warts and all. However, I like being able to go outside the box. But me and other people here aren't like other users. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.


I'm not saying that its the same, its just different. There are costs on both sides. For alot of mainstream business apps, the windows stack is fast and productive for many corporate shops, as you just follow the recipe. Dont have to choose between Struts, Struts Shale, JSF, Tapestry, a templating language, or raw JSP+Servlets. This is both good and bad. If what you need can fit within the mainstream practices (which applies to a very large percentage of the people out there), then its very straightforward.

Ummm, seems like a lot of shops are jumping on the RoR or Django bandwagons because it's more productive then .Net. I mean .Netv3 is going to get features to try to copy ruby but I have my doubts as to if it's good enough. time will tell. I just would trust MS enough to allow them to dictate the direction and future of my company. Just see what they did to all of their VB developers as soon as they latched onto .Net. (VB.net doesn't count. You can't port directly from VB6 to VB.net and the concepts are 100% different.)

cheers
ben

There is a technical reason for this.

A lot of the time, modification of a file... isn't a modification of a file. Instead, the program will delete the existing file and create a new one in its place. (There is sometimes other operations in there, like saving to a temp file, deleting the original, then renaming the temp file to the original file name.)

This means that storing the real creation time of a file means that it won't be what you expect, because the file that you think is the same file actually isn't.

(MS-DOS/Windows have something called filesystem tunneling to attempt to get around this problem. If a file is deleted and a new one created in its place (see the MSDN article linked to from there for details) within a default 15 seconds, the creation time of the old file is carried over. This technique exchanges purity and absolute correctness (not that metadata times are reliable against tamper anyway) for utility.)

a certain browser vendor that has 90% of the market is notably absent from this venture.

That's not really true, since Microsoft is present in the HTML WG which is now working on HTML 5, and Chris Wilson is a co-chair of the group. They have been extremely quiet in the group so far, though.

Right, because you can't change the default language of any MS operating systems... OH WAIT

http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Techoff/30633 2-Change-Vista-Language/

> Actually there is a JPEG successor: JPEG2000
who are you talking to? JPeg2000 is in the SUMMARY of the article! In any case..

to understand why you'd need HD Photo over standard JPEG, you need to know the
that HDR imaging is the future, not 8-bit images.

For performance, it seems hazy, but you can read comments on the MSU report that compares Jpeg 2000 to HD Photo here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/default.aspx

They pulled back from a previous licence they were going to release it under, which would have specifically prohibited, for example, a Gimp interface. You can see the old licence details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2006/06/30/ 651898.aspx

The current licence is *much* more liberal, and I think Microsoft deserve credit for the move. I still don't trust them, but they did make a move in the right direction in this case.

While it's true that many copies of pirated software are of low quality and sell for very little, equivalent of a few dollars, the software produced by this group was of very high quality and was intended to fool everyone including the resellers and customers. This product typically sells for the price of genuine product or just a few dollars under both to maximize the profit and because it tends to reduce suspicion that it's fake. There's an image on my blog of an acutal counterfeit DVD from the case that was announced. http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/ [msdn.com] Also, the counterfeits produced by this group were intended for sale in the US as well as in Europe, the Middle East, other countries in Asia, Australia and Canada.

While it's true that many copies of pirated software are of low quality and sell for very little, equivalent of a few dollars, the software produced by this group was of very high quality and was intended to fool everyone including the resellers and customers. This product typically sells for the price of genuine product or just a few dollars under both to maximize the profit and because it tends to reduce suspicion that it's fake. There's an image on my blog of an acutal counterfeit DVD from the case that was announced. http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/

Games are one of the few things that would work well in VMs. Raymond Chen explains why VMs aren't a simple cure-all.

Microsoft has several people participating in the HTML Working Group, and Chris Wilson, the leader of the IE team, is the chair of the group. So you don't have to worry about Microsoft being left out.

How about when the document tries to patent mathematical formulae and then put it under "reaasonable and non-discriminatory" licenses that conflict with the GPL (yes I know they backed down to BSD compliance but how hard did we have to fight!)?

How about when they use binary formats within the XML for "backwards compatibility"?

How about when they have deliberate bugs in the standard so that "converters" don't work?

How about when they don't include ODF by standard in the possible file formats to save in?

If you want to complain, the guy directly responsible is a Micro$hill scumbag called Brian Jones who pontificates at great length on his blog about supposedly technical aspects but strangely doesn't mention the politicians they've bought and the committees they've conveniently stuffed full of cronies and shills and the honest men and women (like the IT manager in Massachussetts) who have lost their livelihoods and have suffered such great stress because of him.

Why don't we let him know what we think of his morals here?

> gcc does thread-safe initialization of local static variables -- Visual C++ does not.
  VC++ does do threadsafe static initialization.

You're dead wrong and grandparent is dead-right. References follow.

GCC: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-08/msg02293 .html
MSVC: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/ 08/85901.aspx

Microsoft's position is that the standard requires their (undesirable) behavior. I guess GCC either disagrees or is providing a language extension. For what it's worth, MSVC doesn't have a great track record on correct standard interpretation. (C++ header file naming bug, for one example...)

> And in any case, gcc runs on windows so it's not exactly a windows issue is it?

gcc runs on everything. Consider it a comparison of the "native" compilers of both OSes.

> Windows has better support for multithreaded apps, it has a far richer set of thread/process synchronisation objects (mutexs, critical sections, semaphores, alertable wait states, events) than unix does.

Now you're just throwing out random terms for multithreaded programming concepts, all of which can be implemented in any OS that provides an API for multithreaded programming. As is typical, the Windows uses a nonstandard, proprietary API, while Linux uses an open standard (the POSIX pthreads library).

Just to make it clear that the Windows API is not "richer", let me point out that you can actually write a wrapper around either API that makes it look like the other, and people have done so.

> Now, as far as 32k 'busy' running threads leaving the machine still responsive... let's just try that out..

Don't be retarded. But since you already were, my sibling poster has responded that this doesn't kill Linux stone-dead, though it does slow it down quite a bit, so you even lose your own retarded benchmark contest. Ouch.

mainly because it's not widely appreciated that it can be difficult to go back to the older file format.

To my astonishment, within a couple of hours Brian Jones, who is a program manager working on the Office XML functionality had posted a comment to the blog to point out the 27 Meg compatibility pack. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03/ 12/how-to-create-and-consume-openxml-formats.aspx

Wow, this is a little law student website on the other side of the planet from Microsoft, and they have Office program managers patrolling cyberspace looking for any negative comments ?

http://blogs.msdn.com/davidnotario/archive/2005/04 /27/412838.aspx What is mscorsvw.exe and why is it eating up my CPU? What is this new CLR Optimization Service? Short version: mscorsvw.exe is precompiling .NET assemblies in the background. Once it's done, it will go away. Typically, after you install the .NET Redist, it will be done with the high priority assemblies in 5 to 10 minutes and then will wait until your computer is idle to process the low priority assemblies. Once it does that it will shutdown and you won't see mscorsvw.exe. One important thing is that while you may see 100% CPU usage, the compilation happens in a process with low priority, so it tries not to steal the CPU for other stuff you are doing. Once everything is compiled, assemblies will now be able to share pages across different processes and warm start up will be typically much faster, so we're not throwing away your cycles. If you are really want to get rid of mscorsvw.exe from your task manager, just do: ngen.exe executequeueditems This begs the question, where is ngen.exe? I can't find it anywhere other than my Windows XP Server 2003 install.

Well some bored slashdotter obviously found a way to let Microsoft know... I just came across this smackdown of this patch on a B0rg Blog.

What's really funny is that it actually sticks to the new Microsoft comments policy!

All assemblies from other product that comprise .NET 3.0 (which contains .NET 2.0) are scheduled at priority 3, which are NGEN'd when the machine is idle. This explains why it got better on its own.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2007/07/13/kb 928365-for-ms07-040-leaves-some-managed-applicatio ns-sluggish.aspx.

David Notarios blog entry

Just highlighting domains of phishing sites isn't going to be enough. Here's today's list of domains that "sort of look like Paypal". These are after subdomain truncation.
"paypal-checker.com"
"paypal-contact.net"
"paypal-customize.com"
"paypal-erreur2.com"
"paypal-security.com"
"paypal-web-dll-scrnupdateaccount.ici.st"
"paypal-web-scrn-dll-pl-dai-pl-webscrndllfs-wertyu i.ork.pl"
"paypal.powered.at"
"paypal.q.fm"
"paypalaccverify.com"
"paypalcomcgibinwebscrcmd.by.ru"
"paypalcomcgibinwebscrcmm.by.ru"
"paypalcomcgibinwebscre.by.ru"
"paypalconstomers.com"
"paypalct.com"
"paypall.ro"
"paypalmd.com"
"paypalobjects.us"
"paypalsecuritycenter.org"
"paypalverification.org"
"paypel-acc-5.com"
"paypilpal.com"
"paypll-wscr.com"
"paypluspl.com"

These are from PhishTank, which blacklists at the URL level based on manual reports. For SiteTruth", we're in the process of converting to blacklisting phishing sites by the entire base domain. That's because we now see hundreds of entries like "session-624333.nationalcity.com.userpro.tw", which has to be treated as a bad indicator for all of "userpro.tw".

There's collateral damage. There are days when "tinyurl.com" and "notlong.com" get blacklisted, because phishing sites use them. MSN gets complaints about this. Today, anybody running something like "tinyurl" needs to continually check the phishing databases for attempts to abuse their service, or their own reputation is toast.

Because there's a learning curve? People don't like change. Microsoft has been very brave to make this big a change for this widely used an office suite, but I think for the most part it has paid off well.

Jensen Harris's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh gives some wonderful insights into the new design.

PS: I'd like to have an option to display the ribbon vertically too (one of my few gripes), but it isn't a showstopper for me, and the benefits of the new version far outweigh the drawbacks.

install xp in a virtual machine! virtual pc + windows xp FREE from microsoft!

or install your legal 32bit copy of windows in vmware

or google for running osx in vmware like im doing