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One of the points that Bill Hilf made in the interview on Channel9 is that Linux was "very different" from Windows. (He then added that either one, other, or both were "very different" from OSX.)

How true is this? I only ask because I have had some experience with MVS (the operating system which has no concept of "files" or "directories") and Tandem (whose weird features I can't remember enough to describe), and I would describe both of those as "very different" from UNIX or Windows.

When it comes down to it, UNIX and Windows look pretty similair to me. They both support WIMP GUIs. They both have concepts of files and directories. They both have users and groups and permissions. They both have preemptive multitasking and multithreading.

The whole reason that Hilf stated that "Linux is very different from Windows" was part of the justification as to why Microsoft would not build applications for Windows (which was transparent and deceitful). If my belief is correct (that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows), then my opinion of Hilf falls through the floor. Am I correct that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows?

There are a couple of of videos discussing Linux at Microsoft at Channel 9.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6535 5

There is an interview with Martin Taylor and Bill Helf in two parts on Channel9.

Interesting stuff...

There is an interview with Martin Taylor and Bill Helf in two parts on Channel9.

Interesting stuff...

There is an interview with Martin Taylor and Bill Helf in two parts on Channel9.

Interesting stuff...

Well if you have time, go on to Channel 9 and take at look his interview, including the linux lab itself..

According to this post on the IEBlog two of those have been patched (although the logic seems a bit warped). Does anyone know?

I'm glad Mozilla.org is keeping the pressure on the Redmond-based behemoth. The fact that IE7 will continue to ignore established web standard makes me sick at the very thought of it.

Um, no. The most recent news from Microsoft itself says that they intend to update their web standards to include better CSS support and transparent PNGs (finally!) It's important to keep up with this stuff, lest we be guilty of spreading FUD ourselves. I've since bookmarked the site just so I can keep tabs on what I can hope for in future web development.

Because of the internal representation (0x1039), I don't think the last digit can be higher than nine. I'm sure a Mac programmer can correct me.

http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000067.php

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/ 13/72476.aspx#72670

Yes, I believe you're right on that one.. but I think only lsass and winlogon would be a problem from an update standpoint. Everything else should be able to get updated & restarted without a boot. MS actually has done some very cool shit with transactional NTFS which makes for some interesting upgrade possiblities.

http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005/ 04/25/411874.aspx

I get this with my printer if I plug it into another port...but Windows just reinstalls the driver - I don't have to reboot. That is sort of odd.

Also I like this from the page I linked:

I remember that one major manufacturer of USB devices didn't quite understand how serial numbers worked. They gave all of their devices serial numbers, that's great, but they all got the same serial number. Exciting things happened if you plugged two of their devices into a computer at the same time.

If you want more Jim Grey, head on over to Channel 9 to see a couple of sit downs with him. Personally I found both Part 1 & Part 2 are both quite interesting and thought provoking.

If you want more Jim Grey, head on over to Channel 9 to see a couple of sit downs with him. Personally I found both Part 1 & Part 2 are both quite interesting and thought provoking.

If you want more Jim Grey, head on over to Channel 9 to see a couple of sit downs with him. Personally I found both Part 1 & Part 2 are both quite interesting and thought provoking.

From reading the blog I see you want to invite a representative group to evaluate your work. Technically that is a good idea, but currently it suffers from some weaknesses.
Let's first assume you want more than just fanboys drooling, you want to evoke the feeling that you're actually listening to other opinions and impress the heck out of your "foes". If that assumption is false then any further interest by current non-MS-users is futile, go stick with Thurrott and his kin. If it is true, then there are two major problems:

1. Selection of participants. Shun any known fanboys at all costs, have some people with known anti-MS-but-fair reputations show up. Go get Torvalds, Cox, Raymond, Parens, and other OSS people (Other Companies people might have a corporate interest to uphold) and their best friends to show up (Actually read about their opinions first, otherwise you'll screw up and invite Free Software people, like Stallman, who cannot, under any circumstances, endorse any proprietary doings, for example). If those people are allowed to play with your new toy a few days, and openly voice their opinions and suggestions, THEN you'll impress the heck out of everyone.
2. NDAs. As pointed out in the blog itself, secrecy is bad, so don't f**king do it, ok? Have everyone allowed to say whatever they want afterwards, including screenshots, etc. Surly, that won't sound positive only, maybe even harshly negative (Though I actually doubt that), but noone would be able to say you're still the evil empire...

In short, if you invite fanboys, then don't expect anyone but fanboys to believe them.

Now, before today, Team 99 was secret. I've learned from my messups with Jim Allchin's dinner not to do secret stuff anymore. Make everything transparent. Transparency is good.

:)

It's interesting to look into vulnerabilities within MS products pre and post their 2003 security push. Before 2003 their products were shamefully insecure. In 2003 they stopped all development for a month while the whole company underwent extensive security training, and re-vamped their development process. Since then their software has steadily hardened. I think the company gets a ton of flac now a days particularly for the bad taste it left in our mouthes in the early 2000's, but there's not much recognition of the solidness in their new offerings. I know it may be counter intuitive to say this on a thread discussing an MSN vulnerability, but seriously the vulnerability is pretty tame -- a link sent in a message.

IIS5 was a travesty, but IIS6 hasn't had a major vulnerability (it has had vulnerabilities like any software, but nothing widespread or critically dangerous). Here's an interesting comparison between IIS6 and Apache2, from Michael Howard -- http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2004/ 10/15/242966.aspx

win2k server was an alright platform, but win2k3 has proven itself to be rock solid. Again it has had vulnerabilities like any product, but nowhere near the number or severity of previous offerings.

As an MS employee I can say that now security is a massive part of ever stage of planning, from the design of the architecture to the code itself. We go through countless threat analisys, at every milestone we have security check points with external teams (within MS) who specialize in security. Once we are ready to ship the code, it still has to be sent to the security team for a final review and only when they give permission can it be released. I doubt other companies go to these extremes to try to secure their software. MS still has a lot to prove, but I'm pretty confident the days of MS ignoring security for usability will be a distant memory in the next few years.

Check Raymond Chen http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/ 14/229387.aspx

Check Raymond Chen's blog http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/ 14/229387.aspx

It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).

There's an interesting video on Channel9 interviewing Omar Shahine that describes Hotmail internal architecture. Yup, Channel9 is a Microsoft sponsored site, and Omar is a lead program manager on a Hotmail team. He has a great blog that shows a love for devices; you'll find him talking about the iPod, Treo, PSP, etc. Channel9 also has a ton of videos on everything ranging from C# to recruiting at Microsoft.

For instance, RunAs with Explorer is a really handy entry. For those of you who don't want to go read it, I'll summarize: Log in as your Administrator user (you can get the text login in XP by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del twice at the Welcome screen), go to Control Panel, Folder Options, and click "Launch folder windows in a separate process". Now you can use the command line

runas /user:ComputerName\Administrator explorer.exe

Most icons in the control panel have their Run As... menu options show up if you hold down Shift while right-clicking them. Unfortunately, Printers and Faxes is one of the exceptions, so you have to use RunAs with Explorer, as outlined above, to modify them.

For instance, RunAs with Explorer is a really handy entry. For those of you who don't want to go read it, I'll summarize: Log in as your Administrator user (you can get the text login in XP by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del twice at the Welcome screen), go to Control Panel, Folder Options, and click "Launch folder windows in a separate process". Now you can use the command line

runas /user:ComputerName\Administrator explorer.exe

Most icons in the control panel have their Run As... menu options show up if you hold down Shift while right-clicking them. Unfortunately, Printers and Faxes is one of the exceptions, so you have to use RunAs with Explorer, as outlined above, to modify them.

RunAs doesn't always work as expected
But this guy has a blog dedicated completely to the whole non-admin subject, including some utilities to make it easier.

Raymond Chen has some entries about version number checking in his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/ 13/407835.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/ 13/72476.aspx

MSDN also has an entry here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/sysinfo/base/getting_the_system_ver sion.asp

Raymond Chen has some entries about version number checking in his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/ 13/407835.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/ 13/72476.aspx

MSDN also has an entry here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/sysinfo/base/getting_the_system_ver sion.asp

I stronlgy believe NO ONE will use the Longhorn default theme as it is now. I've seen a very recent video on Avalon, which will be available as Beta1 this summer, Beta2 in holiday season (+/++ 6-12 months). Take the power of OpenGL/DirectX to a very basic level for the user in XAML...amazing stuff! I just checked out the MacOS site - Aqua will be a puddle compared to the UI that can be designed in Avalon (with some UI designers who know what they're doing). Needless to say, screenshots DO NOT DO IT JUSTICE!

Yeah, I think it would be cool if someone made an XML based display format.

Even cooler, it should be design for use on the internet with features like hyperlinks and embedded objects. That would be cool! And we wouldn't have to worry about different implementations rendering things differently, since it would be an open standard that anyone could implement! We could even use those XML documents to help us mini-applications or even entire UI structures. That would be boss!

Someone should really make some XML standards like that.

is obviously not useful

Not only is the comment not useful, it's factually incorrect... the behaviour of that line of code is undefined.

Yeah, when Apple was shipping that turd pile called "System 9" no one was criticizing the "wizards" or the "control panel". Now all of the sudden it's "crap". Funny that.

Why the hell would anyone go to "Start" to logout?

Well, as it is well known here in bashland, Microsoft doesn't actually research or think about the features that go into their OS'es, but you can read this if you want a bit of enlightement. Hope that helps.

MS isn't reaching too far from where their feet are firmly planted

The rest of your dumb rant aside, Microsoft has to cater to several hundred million people with whatever ships in Longhorn. Let me know when you get to that point and we'll talk about how much you suck because you're not making enough changes to your core product that some random guy in Slashdot seems to think are necessary.

1. When it wants to do this, that it prompts the user in an upfront way
2. The user can shut it off

Seriously, I know that Microsoft has been nasty before, but on this subject, it seems like the primary reason is to identify defects in their own software. Microsoft has learned a lot from their existing crash reporting. If Microsoft plays by the rules, what is wrong?

Now that it has been released, what 64-bit compilers are available for the operating system? The last time I looked, Microsoft was planning to use an ugly data model (LLP64) where only "long long" variables and pointers would be 64-bits. To me, that's a chicken-shit decision, broken code should be fixed or rewritten, not accommodated by crippling the compiler.

No. Code that relies on long being 32-bit is not broken. All right, not very broken. But very-very common. It should recompile and work out of the box without porting.

Read The Old New Thing. Search for Raymond Chen's replies.

I think that Adobe is killing FrameMaker because the code has gone out of control. It has become extremely costly to maintain and add features to FrameMaker.

Microsoft Word's code was also close to go out of control. For example, according to a Microsoft employee in his article Anatomy of a Software Bug, Word's architecture was really not made for multiple undo/redo. Reading the article restored my belief that there are good programmers at Microsoft, after all. Apparently adding multiple undo/redo was a sort of design stunt that few programmers could have performed. Microsoft spent a huge amount of effort to maintain Word.

It is interesting to look at the progress made by Photoshop and Illustrator over the years. It very much seems that Illustrator is taking the same path as FrameMaker did. Illustrator is not receiving enough care. Curve editing is a pain in Illustrator, it doesn't have the level of usability of Photoshop. Consistency between the two products is broken in many places. Photoshop feels way ahead of Illustrator.

Eventually, the list of features to be fixed or re-designed in Illustrator will grow so big that Illustrator will come to a dead-end, also.

Sique, your obviously a smart one, you noticed that Mozilla was an application, indeed it runs in so-called 'user space', and is not considered part of the OS despite being distributed and installed with many modern distributions. And what is ActiveX? It's describes an plugin-extension architecture for an application. What I mean to says there is a different judgement of; for a product with 100s of millions of users.

And does Bluetooth really need to execute entirely in Kernel-mode? What about moving drivers out of the kernel.

I'm not sure how you got from a Newton to a tablet PC with a straight face ... but to be honest all of the new features touted in OSX tiger seem to mere improvements (indexed search=locate,graphic hardware accelleration=directx/gdi+) to what has already existed, or copied an pasted from elsewhere (konflabulator).

Are there any actual new ideas in OSX?

Transactional NTFS

_

Actually the big deal about search is that you can type in any phrase and in a fraction of a second you can see documents with that phrase in its filename or anywhere in its text from anywhere on your hard drive, music files with an artist or album matching your phrase, etc. Right now that search takes several minutes. This leap in performance is analagous to what you can do with an abacus vs a computer; you don't even bother doing some things with an abacus.

Download the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta to try it out. Then watch a demo by the team who wrote it.

Cool. PAE must really come in handy on all those x86 boxen with room for 64GB of RAM. But there seem to be a few catches.

In all seriousness, if you really want to give them feedback I suggest commenting on their various IE blogs. You can get in direct contact with the devs that way. On an amusing note, the IE blogs have the highest comment counts of all categories of Microsoft blogs. Interesting :)

Several commenters of/in the blog mentioned tabs, including a link to someone at MSDN blogs that doesn't like them.

DT

but I would check out this Channel9 video to give an idea of what Microsoft is doing in the future. Microsoft is opening up a lot on ideas behind Avalon, and it's much more powerful than the cookie-cutter OS X. I don't care what Apple's latest skin looks like, Avalon (and XAML) will combine the ease of C#.NET programming with DirectX/OpenGL power/ease of use for any programmer to bring into Windows. Now that it was backported (with Indigo) to Windows XP/2003 Server, you have a much larger market. Few rarely mention Avalon (and any details) even though two CTP editions have been released to the community and customer feedback is strongly encouraged! So, continue with the rants and I'll take another look at Avalon...

The parent poster is refering to the deprecation of Managed Extensions for C++ syntax in favor of C++/CLI (which is undergoing ISO standardization).

While it is true the syntax has changed (much for the better: templates are now supported in managed C++ code and so are generics, keywords replace ugly __gc, and more), support for the old syntax is still in the compiler (/clr:oldSyntax), and IntelliSense.

However, you will be unable to mix new syntax and old syntax code in the same project without taking some penalties (IntelliSense will break, at the least). The designer will even spit out old syntax code when designing an old form or control.

While the old syntax is definitely on its last legs, the VC++ team was very concerned about not screwing over those (early) adopters of C++ code for the CLR thus far.

A good resource to read up more on the subject would be Herb Sutter's Blog, Stan Lippman's Blog, or any of the other VC++ team member's blogs.

Take this from a former VC++ teammate who left during the Whidbey product cycle (posting AC since I've never bothered to get a slashdot account).

The parent poster is refering to the deprecation of Managed Extensions for C++ syntax in favor of C++/CLI (which is undergoing ISO standardization).

While it is true the syntax has changed (much for the better: templates are now supported in managed C++ code and so are generics, keywords replace ugly __gc, and more), support for the old syntax is still in the compiler (/clr:oldSyntax), and IntelliSense.

However, you will be unable to mix new syntax and old syntax code in the same project without taking some penalties (IntelliSense will break, at the least). The designer will even spit out old syntax code when designing an old form or control.

While the old syntax is definitely on its last legs, the VC++ team was very concerned about not screwing over those (early) adopters of C++ code for the CLR thus far.

A good resource to read up more on the subject would be Herb Sutter's Blog, Stan Lippman's Blog, or any of the other VC++ team member's blogs.

Take this from a former VC++ teammate who left during the Whidbey product cycle (posting AC since I've never bothered to get a slashdot account).

Sounds very much like the printer lacks a USB serial number.

I've been predicting the same thing for quite some time. VPC allows Microsoft to step off the 'backwards compatibility' treadmill that Raymond Chen (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/) often speaks of.

The .NET Framework is another potential step in this direction.

Well, the whole premise behind the Avalon framework is that it makes content production so easy, anyone can do it. Instead of using "cryptic" syntax and nomenclature, Avalon is supposed to put evertyhing into layman's terms (video on MS's blog talking about Avalon; near the middle they start describing the coding process).

And to the other poster above who said the OS's GUI won't be versatile enough to support web content: Microsoft's strategy in developing Avalon was to take over the Flash market (at least that's what "analysts" and "insiders" claim), with hopes that web-content developers would switch over to a Windows-only platform.

God, I love that company.

... but lacking in interface designers who understand the software/human interaction.

You're absolutely right. I'm reminded of an interview with Bill Hill, the man who designed ClearType for Windows. He says that the most important operating system is not Windows or Linux or the Mac; it's homo-sapien 1.0, and there's no upgrade in sight.

* Channel 9 Wiki

* MSDN

• You want to save money at the expense of ease of use for customers and you are already invested in pdfs.
• You want to provide a big document that can be downloaded and printed off all at once (I never want this out of online documentation).
• You need to have everything look the same everywhere.

Can I recommend Aaron Margosis' blog? It provides a lot of tips for running as non-admin. His PrivBar is very helpful. He also talks about scripts that launch other apps with elevated permissions without having to log off - they change the user's permissions (give them admin rights), logon as that user, launch the app, and finally reset the permissions, all within the current user's session.

There's a lot that can be done to enable software to play nicely under a limited user account. Sometime's it's not worth the effort, but in some cases changing permissions on select registry keys and NTFS folders can get things working.

Can I recommend Aaron Margosis' blog? It provides a lot of tips for running as non-admin. His PrivBar is very helpful. He also talks about scripts that launch other apps with elevated permissions without having to log off - they change the user's permissions (give them admin rights), logon as that user, launch the app, and finally reset the permissions, all within the current user's session.

There's a lot that can be done to enable software to play nicely under a limited user account. Sometime's it's not worth the effort, but in some cases changing permissions on select registry keys and NTFS folders can get things working.