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Microsoft's New Mantra - It Just Works
bonch writes "Fortune has a story about Microsoft's new philosophy--'It just works.' Jim Allchin details various planned Longhorn features to meet this goal, such as auto-defragmenting in the background, the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously, and the new ad campaign Microsoft is running to get people excited about Windows. Mentions are also made of the competition from Linux, OS X Tiger, and Google."
From what I understand, the advertising campaign Microsoft is launching (it's quite large too) has absolutly nothing to do with Longhorn. They are simply addressing XP.
Foxed Design
...or if you prefer, it just crashes.
I've got too much experience with Windows to consider it for an enterprise environment.
Did anyone bother to ask the customers what they want?
To be fair, microsoft has symlinks already, they are just called shortcuts. What they are talking about here is hard links, which unix has been doing for decades also.
Jim Allchin details various planned Longhorn features to meet this goal, such as auto-defragmenting in the background
Here's something that works: implementing a file system that doesn't require constant defragmentation.
auto-defrags small files (20 mb) but the large files are not defraged.
OS X defrags large files after an install and because they use the end of the drive for writing data to and such most of the info on the drive already stays where it is and maintains integrity.
NTFS does neither of the later things... it will be nice when longhorn comes out.. I might buy it for a new computer perhaps.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Gnome & Nautilus support icons that preview the document they represent right out of the box; and of course hard links have been around a good few years on Unix-like OS too.
Actually "It Just Works" was a slogan MS were using to describe Windows XP at one point. Four years ago if this is any measure.
I thought Windows already had the ability to set Hard links & junctions.
The Internet Explorer, Recycle Bin, "My Network places" icons are links, not shortcuts, right?
With a shortcut, you can modify the shortcut metadata without affecting the metadata of the target. But with these dudes, you modify one set of meta data and it affects all of the icons.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Cross-linked directory == same shit, dude, except that it was (1) unintentional, and (2) it meant that you probably lost a file (two files, A and B, with 2 directory entries, but both entries point to A. B is lost).
Evidently, you weren't around in the old DOS days.
Sorry for replying to myself, but I forgot the link.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
To be fair, microsoft has symlinks already, they are just called shortcuts. What they are talking about here is hard links, which unix has been doing for decades also.
Windows has both junctions and hardlinks for years as well, however many peole never use them. NTFS had support for them from its creation.
What Microsoft is talking about is having 'search' folders that display a set a documents based on criteria, like the search folders introduced in Office Outlook back in 2002. (Again a Microsoft innovation)
Also Win95 and newer had the ability to save searches, so that just opening the search would open the folder - again people did not use it.
The new version of this feature is what Microsoft is talking about, where the folders will have a better UI to access the 'search' folders and update faster instead of implementing a new search by maintaining a simple indexed system. (again something that was in Win2k, but never used because of the lack of support in the UI).
Everyone says Microsoft is stealing these ideas from Apple, but if you look back Microsoft had these concepts in their OS but the UI lacked for them.
Microsoft is simply putting some performance to the them and making them easier to use. As they did in Outlook 2003, search folders super easy and extremely fast in Outlook. Indexing and maintaining Inboxes of folders in execess of 10gb without a blink of an eye.
If I was going to say who was copying who, Apple copied these concepts, especially as the Microsoft Office team demonstrated more how they would work in the future OSes via their implementation in Outlook 2003. Which was in beta and had this conceptual feature long before tiger even was in the birthing process.
The Microsoft Desktop Search Agent is another feature where Microsoft is testing the UI of the search features, and as you would see if you have tried both, Apple is copying more of Microsoft again, than what they would want you to believe.
One thing about Apple, their marketing is more effective, and they have more zealots in their corner, Microsoft somehow doesn't have the same fan base where you have people consistently post 'we love Microsoft no matter what they do'.
PS this post is more for the thread than just a response to your comments, so please don't think I am directing everything at your comments about hardlinks.
$ ln -s /foo/bar/say_it_aint_so ~/say_it_aint_so
Worked on Macintosh, for starters. I don't know if there ever was a Real Jukebox for Mac. If there was, I wouldn't have installed it.
But it was the album management that was truly wonderful. I still would rather have SoundJam's selection interface than iTunes; though I'm starting to get used to the 3-pane browser iTunes likes. I never built playlists; I didn't need to.
When you sorted your library by Genre, you got a list of genres with disclosure arrows. Hit one, and you got all artists in that genre, with disclosure arrows for artists. Hit one of those, and see all the albums, each with another disclosure arrow. Hit one of those, and you see all the tracks on that album.
Similarly, sort by Artist, and you get the Artist/Album/Track list; sort by Album and you get Album/Track. All in a format very similar to System 7 Finder's list view. (I think they must have used the same Toolbox routines.)
SoundJam also ran really well on low-ish machines. It was actually useful on my 100 MHz 603E-based Performa.
Though I believe Apple contacted the N2MP3 developers to write iTunes first.
When iTunes first came out, WinAmp users were still organizing MP3 files in directories, saving dozens of playlists, and spending hours on tag management and file name synching.
Real had some media management, so did Musicmatch, but they were both messy, confusing, cramped, and slow to search.
Right from the beginning, iTunes changed music from a wild collection of files on the hard-drive that had to be periodically coralled to a single library entity, searchable, playable, with built-in tag editing that put everything else to shame.
It took the effort out of having a music library. A lot of geeks are still frustrated with it because they got all their file directory skills for MP3s down pat and the new way doesn't fit them, but can you honestly see twelve year old girls organizing thousands of songs the old way?
It brought MP3 truly to the masses, not just the college crowd.
Is it even theoretically possible to embed computer code in a JPEG file and execute it through the viewer? No, this is not even theoretically possible.
I must have dreamed then when this came up.
Thanks for clearing that up Mr. Troll Coward, Sir.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Microsoft has never done that
Altair Basic, basically reimplemented code from some mainframe basic interpreters
Dos... basically a bad copycat from CPM bought from a small Seattle company
Windows... one of the problems why Apple failed in the courtcase, was that Apple never managed it, to have Microsoft open their Windows 1.0 and 2.0 code, they had been suspecting for a long time, lots of MacOSX code went into the early Windows versions
Word, basically a wordperfect clone, ditto for the predecessor for excel, wasnt it the guy who invented spreadsheets who went to Microsoft with a new idea and later he was told to go somehwere else, while Microsoft started to work on the first version of Excels predessor on the Mac
Harddrive compression... they lost a courtcase against stac
The WindowsNT base, basically they bought the core team from DEC which did VMs.
Windows networking basically a forked SMB from IBM
NTFS basically a forked OS/2 filesystem
Win95 gui, a blank copy of the OS7 desktop
Internet Explorer, based on Spyglass Mosaic, Spyglass had to fight in court to get any payments besides the small initial one
The list is much longer, Microsoft never was a company which did any real inventions, the usually just copy or buy them and then tell anybody they need freedom to innovate.
I believe a shortcut is a file that points to another file. In other words, random program B has to know how to read a shortcut in order to access the file it points to.
Symlinks, on the other hand, are a filesystem level thing. That means that program B doesn't have to know where the file is at all, it thinks the symlink is a regular file and treats it as such. The FS Driver takes care of the rest.
When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions are tested:
If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated -- it is defragmented on-the-fly.
English is easier said than done.
Hey, while you're right, there's no need to be an ass about it.
Some people genuinely believe that the plural of virus is viri. While they're wrong, at least it's a mistake with a decent basis. It turns out that a bunch of words in English are derived from Latin words, and plenty of these words do follow the convention of -us postfix for singular and -i for plural.
Seesh, I myself made that mistake for a while, after years of having these endings tables drilled into my head.
Zero dimensions = a point
One dimension = a line
Two dimensions = a plane
See also Flatland by Edwin Albott
-David
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Run regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll to turn off video preview. Works beautifully. XP was designed when most people had little digicam clips of a few megs on their machines, so MS thought that parsing them wasn't a bad idea. BTW, it doesn't just thumbnail the clip, it gets the total playtime and resolution as well, which is what is slowing down your system.
Isn't this going to be the version with DRM and all the other copy "protection" crap.
I'm sure it won't work like linux, eg you can copy it, maniuplate it, move it arround from pc to pc, store it on your local servers for quick downloads and access, without a license, with out a phonecall to microsoft.
Linux will work wether I have a CD, DVD, USB, network access, or even bootstrap floppy without much effort.
Linux will work as a terminal or a server right out of the box.
Linux will work on 32mb ram with a 400 mb disk and
a tty text console.
Linux will work on a 2048 node supercomputer parallel cluster.
Linux will work on x86, x86-64, dec, sparc, mips, power-pc, and even ARM.
GNU/Linux will work for editing, spread sheets, graphics, office productivity, mail servers, database servers, web servers, dns servers, smb servers, and development in over 10 different languages right out if the box.
So how is microsift claming "it just works" again?
Modal dialogs and windows are an important tool.
With little exception, I believe modals are a crutch for lazy programmers who don't want to worry about addressing multiple contexts.
Ok, give me a good reason why I can't highlight text for cut&paste in Firefox while its Preferences window is open. Suppose I wanted to set my Home Page to something I am reading on a page.
Except for situations where the application is really entirely blocked, perhaps like "out of memory, should I crash?", modals have no place.
For symbolic links, you are correct that an application may need to be modified when it wants to remove the underlying file instead of the symbolic link itself. With hard links, the file will be removed when there are no more directory entries pointing to the file.
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
Do not forget the shortlived Apple Newton eMate and the shortlived eWorld e-mail system that predate the iMac. :-)
eMate = 1997
eWorld = 1994
iMac = 1998
About each product...:0 0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton#eMate_3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emate#eMate_300
Actually, a quick search on Google Groups by date suggests that the phrase in a marketing sense was first popularized by Steve Jobs... but when he was at NeXT.
I suspect that the phrase transferred to Apple with him. It was certainly widely used around the launch of OS X.
You can see here, that it was a well entrenched NeXT slogan by late 1992. The earliest quote from Jobs using it as a slogan I could find was in January of that year.
Why yes, I do have too much time on my hands.
Stealing ? Apple *paid* Xerox.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
What's even better is where the supervisor can remove all access from something from himself, orphaning a section of the tree.
Was a real problem in the 3.x days, from what they told me when I went through air force tech school. You had to rebuild the entire NDS tree to fix it.
DISCLAIMER: I never had a chance to work on it myself, so I dunno. Lucky me was stuck being the only UNIX guy in an NT shop, with nothing but an old I-series HP to keep me company.
Did they ever find a way around that problem?
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
NTFS basically a forked OS/2 filesystem
NT is basically forked OS/2. But it's not like that.
OS/2 was originally a joint IBM/Microsoft project. I've got disks for "Microsoft OS/2 v1.3" around here somewhere. It came in a box with LanManager and looked a lot like NT 3.5. Unfortunately, while the OS/2 disks are fine, some schmuck from my shop had used a couple of the LanManager disks for scratch disks, so I've never gotten to play with the network part of it.
Basically, someone at microsoft got the idea that they could port the windows API to OS/2 - and it worked. When management was told, they took their toys and went home to make windows NT. Really pissed off IBM from what I hear.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
It is true that the shell namespace has hardlinks in it. It also has virtual folders like the Control Panel or enhanced folders like the Desktop or Fonts.
The problem is that none of this is present in the filesystem which still uses those lovely drive letters. If you want to iterate the filesystem, you can use simple, tried-and-true APIs. If you want to iterate the shell namespace, you have to deal with the most convoluted system ever devised and handle numerous design flaws yourself (example: when retrieving the name of a shell item, it can be returned in one of three ways, each of which you have to handle).
This is in fact the reason why there are so many Windows applications out there that ignore the shell namespace and only give you drive letters. It is a pain in the ass to do it properly.
This means that if you want to access your desktop, your home dir or your documents in such an application, you have to go to the relevant filesystem folder. Confusion and anger follows.
This shows another idea that Microsoft doesn't get: making Windows development easy and intuitive for programmers.