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Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson
avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."
Wouldn't it be more accurate to compare NT/Cairo with Vista/Singularity?
I never get used to these constant resurrections
This article has a confusing title, given that dominance of the Cairo graphics library these days.
Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.
Daniel Eran. Just Say No.
Cheers,
Ian
I shit you not, I was listening to the Wizard Of Oz on TV in the background when I opened this story.
Coincidence ?
I think not.
On a serious note, if it worked before, why do anything different ?
Are you trying to tell me that Microsoft doesn't have all the money ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I guess I was under the mistaken impression that Windows 95 was just more than just a "polished" version of Windows 3.0. That's what happens when you look at something objectively. I need to reevaulate my view of Windows 95 and Microsoft and add a lot more irrational hatred. :end of sarcasm
That's part of competing -- to give your customers EVERY reason to pick you over someone else. Any good business does it by:
1. Providing a product that meets the current needs of their customers.
2. Providing a path to new features/efficiencies for their customers' futures.
3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely.
4. Providing a proven ROI for a short-term and long-term focus.
Microsoft, to me, is not a monopoly -- except when the State is involved (providing patents and copyrights and trademarks). I'm against those monopoly provisions, but those are "legal" ones. Without them, Microsoft's power over competitors would be equalized. You can't blame Microsoft for taking advantage of what you, the voters, allowed them to utilize. The judgements against them calling them a monopoly are only there because you, the voters, let those policies become standard based on Microsoft's given legal priviledge over competition. Nothing prevents competition from doing what Microsoft does -- except than the competition would rather use THEIR monkeys in government to try to stem Microsoft's growth.
As we see in the relatively free and unencumbered market of the web, Microsoft doesn't have any sort of monopoly -- people are free to choose what they want, and they do. In fact, the long tail effect shows that many products openly compete with Microsoft -- both legally obtained products and illegally obtained ones.
The whole Vista issue is a non-issue. Everyone who cries foul against Microsoft refuses to see that the products they prefer just don't meet the top 4 items I listed -- in fact, some of them fail most or all of them. No one will invest in a product, even a free one, if it doesn't offer those items. Many Microsoft products do -- but not all of them. Vista will succeed only because consultants will like its standardization, manufacturers will like knowing there is a standard interface for their hardware/software to run on, and resellers will like it because it has always worked well enough for both the casual and the power user.
Who cares about it looking like past products? If it worked for Microsoft in the past, why wouldn't they follow through with similar performances -- and making new ones to try to produce a better selling product?
Article rambles all over the place, seems more to be pleading for reader to look at previous articles by author rather than make its higly convoluted point. Reads like a lot of sour grapes about historical irrelevance so I assume the author is just looking for hits by trying to be inflamatory.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If an individual has a message they feel is important that they want to get out, I don't see an issue with posting a reference or two. Flooding a board is another story.
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Or are you trying to use distactics to distract people from his core argument, building up hatred by labelling him a spammer?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't really get all that vista hype...I really don't. If you ask me, Microsoft lost this battle over the market, once Google stepped up and became what it is today. Google changed all the rules - and the battle now is not about advanced graphical layout and trifles of sorts, but about offering real and valuable services to the users. Microsoft is like the last mammoth - it's huge and strong, but alas, belongs to a dying breed.
Locksmith
NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
6 /s04_01.htm
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i38
4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .
NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Vista should be compared with the construction of
a custom build bike/car to be displayed at Detroit's Autorama
and hopefully will draw the last 8 cut.
Well it might make the best 8, but Vista will never be
a winner in real day practice, because no-one is going to
drive a $1 million cost custom to the supermarket or even
to the next state or cross country.
Vista is not the next industry desktop workhorse,
certainly not of what i have seen. Being the biggest bad ass
ballmie bully on the block might pull it through, but
it won't make much friends.
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
More spam from the idiot who was caught spamming digg.
/. editors don't get it.
This guy has been caught spamming dozens of sites. Apparently, only
Factual errors aside, I think he's trying to say:
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
Along with Ashton-Tate and Lotus Development, Microsoft was considered one of the Big Three software developers of the 80s. Apple courted all three to develop software for its new Macintosh.
Ashton-Tate managed to run itself out of business, and Lotus was eventually bought up by IBM in 1995, leaving Microsoft as one of the largest and most influential developers of desktop applications.
Microsoft's position as a vendor for both DOS and office applications gave it certain advantages over its rivals, particularly when Windows 95 appeared and obsolesced not just previous versions of DOS and Windows, but also competing developers' existing applications, including DOS standards WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Rapid advancements in technology created a wildly chaotic market, where simple announcements of future plans could trump real products. Given the prevalence of misinformation wars in the tech industry, it's no surprise that Microsoft applied its vast market power to become one of the most notorious sources of FUD and vaporware.
Innovations in Vaporware
Previous articles have considered Microsoft's vaporware attacks on QuickTime and the Newton and PenPoint OS.
While many companies in the competitive tech field announced products they were ultimately unable to deliver, Microsoft applied an innovative, two handed approach to playing the vaporware game.
Rather than just bluffing its hand like other companies, Microsoft played the game with a set of cards in one hand, while waving the illusion of another set of cards in the other hand. The fake set of cards were highly distracting because they looked like a much better hand than anyone else could possibly have.
Standing around the card table were a number of analysts who all expressed how impressed they were by the cards Microsoft waved in the air, and made regular remarks about how foolish it would be for anyone else to stay in the game. The worst part was that many of those analysts could see Microsoft's real hand, and knew the company was bluffing.
Microsoft's NT Plans Prior to Cairo
In 1991, Apple was releasing the Mac System 7 and Tim Berners-Lee was using his NeXT to build the world's first web server and browser.
PCs were still using the character based DOS in a slightly faster version than was released a decade earlier in 1981, although Windows 3.0 was beginning to provide DOS PC users with a rough approximation of Apple's graphical desktop.
After witnessing sales of Windows 3.0 take off, Microsoft began its schism with IBM over OS/2 3.0 development. Microsoft's new plan involved an entirely new operating system based on its contributions to OS/2; the new OS was referred to as Windows NT.
Unlike the existing DOS based Windows 3.0, NT aimed at being entirely new and modern in every respect, untied to DOS or to the existing x86 PC architecture.
Microsoft initially targeted NT to run on the i860, Intel's new 64-bit RISC processor that was supposed to usher in the future. The i860 was a modern design and carried none of the legacy baggage of the standard x86 based PC.
It included graphics acceleration features similar in principle to the forthcoming PowerPC Altivec and Pentium MMX; those features resulted in the i860 being used by NeXT to power its high end NeXTDimension video card.
Unfortunately, the i860 didn't work out for Microsoft. All that remained from its efforts to build a new operating system based on the processor was the i860's code name: N10, which is widely repeated to be the meaning of NT. Of course, Microsoft and IBM had also long referred to OS/2 3.0 as "NT," for new technology, so the idea behind the i860 as the source of NT's name might be historical revisionism.
No Operating System Experience
Microsoft struggled with the complex reality of building its own operating system without IBM. Up to that point, Microsoft had only been delivering tepid updates to MS-DOS, which it had licensed from a small
What did Windows 95 actually add? The only thing I can think of is Win32, but really, even Microsoft seems to be admitting this isn't a lot -- they are giving away free upgrades to XP 64-bit to anyone with a legit 32-bit copy of XP Pro.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.
Microsoft makes operating systems and office/productivity apps, and that's about it; nothing magical or "next generation" about that.
Don't expect "next generation" and you won't be disappointed.
BTW Linux is still staring at its own navel...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.
One thing I'm tired of in the Windows Vista/Mac OSX comparisons is the claim that indexed search was a Vista feature first. I'm afraid Mac OS has featured Indexed search since Mac OS 8.5 was released in 1998 with Sherlock. Sherlock was based on the Apple Advanced Technology Group's V-Twin search engine. Sherlock did a full index of text in documents on all hard drives and allowed users to search on document contents before Longhorn was even a code name.
Now, Microsoft did promise to have a database file system with search way back in the Cairo dark ages. Cairo never shipped. They promised it again for Windows Longhorn. But they never shipped WinFS did they? The search feature in the final version of Windows Vista is from a little company that Microsoft bought so they would have some kind of desktop search to compete with Google's. Well, actually MSN bought them.
Vista did not have full indexed search before MacOS since this has been a shipping feature for Apple since 1998!
Mac OS 8.5 with Sherlock
By "unfortunately infamous" do you mean "No page with that title exists", or "The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."?
--
make install -not war
Remember they were included in Cairo in some form in 1995. Vaporware as usually described, is announcing something that don't exist in the hope of warding off the opposition from entering the market and also with the full knowlege that such feetures are not implementable in a realistic timeframe. Else why haven't we seen the pre-announced features even now in late 2006.
.. [be] the Cairo desktop itself .. Cairo's Object File System (OFS) makes the whole hard disk a single huge docfile that exposes its internal objects to the user"
.. Almost all this technology is expected to converge in Cairo"
. html
"The top level will
"In Daytona's successor, Cairo, OLE structured storage will be able to attach to, and extend, the file system",
"Microsoft's future object-oriented file system for Windows NT (see the sidebar "A Peek at OFS"). Ultimately, we could be looking at a distributed file system based on this technology
"Object File System Lets you create a pseudodirectory that unifies local, network, and Internet files"
http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002430
was Re:Better Windows history here...
davecb5620@gmail.com
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry. Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article,
The Roughly Drafted article is not supposed to be a Window's history, it's a Microsoft Marketing history. Versions of software are mentioned and compared to competing and promissed versions. The history presented is accurate as are the product descriptions. What's more important is how M$ prommisses everything their competitors have today, convince the press the promisses are credible, but fail to deliver for decades. To find the same information in Wikipedia, you need to combine the Microsoft specific information from these articles:
Or you could just have a memory and a brain. It should be clear to any Windows user that M$'s operating systems are bloated, insecure and feature poor. It is equally clear that the reason for their market dominance has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with technology. The author goes into some of those mechanics and why they won't work in the future.
The central thesis, that M$ uses vaporware to it's advantage, is clearly true. The similarity between Cairo an Longhorn mostly exist because Microsoft has yet to deliver on the feature promisses they made for Cairo. As the author pointed out, those features were available in competing products of the day and many are still not implemented in the new 10 Gigabyte sized Windoze.
Yes, when I say many, I refer to the lack of standards and use "Embrace, Extend Extinguish" delivers after a decade of fumbling. You can run in circles forever with slippery M$ promisses, or you can get out and enjoy standards based software from innovators. This has been the case for decades.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Windows NT does *NOT* stand for Nested Task. That's complete misinformation, either made up by the parent or by the friend of the friend of whoever he got it from. NT stands for "New Technology". The fact that the parent post is modded "+5, Informative" reveals something about the experience level of Slashdot moderators... many of them are probably high school and college kids.
IBM was exactly the same way. And big corporations and the trade press hung on IBM's vaporware announcements the same way.
Once a sole company dominates the marketplace as thoroughly as Microsoft today or IBM a few decades ago, the sensible corporate types and the trade press hardly bother with the competitors.
Who cares whether Control Data or Burroughs or Amdahl makes better computers than IBM? They can't win. Who cares whether the Mac OS or Linux is better the Windows? They can't win.
If you believe the future is inevitably Microsoft, it doesn't matter if it bungles its plans or reneges on its promises or manipulatively changes its direction. Because a murky view of Microsoft's future is more important than a clear view of the competitors' present. Because the competitors have no future, or at any rate not one that matters.
So everyone goes along happily listening to Microsoft's rosy fantasies, and when they don't materialize everyone will shrug and say "But look, it's still a lot better than XP."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it.
I lived through it too but I agree with the author's assertion that the trade mags of the time were full of shit and that M$ still is. In the end, it's hard to disagree with the author's well documented thesis: that M$ conned the wintel press into comparing existing software to M$'s future vision. The details are less important than the big picture because it will keep you from being fooled into thinking Vista is competitive.
This is one of the best summaries of M$ marketing practices I've ever seen. If you have a better feature compare, spanning two decades, I'd like to see it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860
Microsoft initially developed what was to become Windows NT on internally-designed i860-based workstations (codenamed Dazzle), only porting NT to the Intel 386 and other processors later. It is often rumoured that the original meanings of the 'N' and 'T' in Windows NT was for "N-Ten", after the working name for the i860 core.
cpeterso
This is nothing new. Just another irrational, ranting, foaming at the mouth Microsoft hater.
His article is like porn for Slashdot zealots: extremely skimpy on fact, and complete hatred against all things Microsoft. Nothing gets headline status around here quicker than an article reinforcing Slashdot's anti-MS FUD.
I don't think the point of Gnu/Linux is to 'win'.
The point it to provide a free alternative that works better.
And since it does not behold to the same economic pressures
that most software does, I don't see microsoft makeing it go
away as easily.
But that's my oppinon...you can choose what ever OS you want to.
Money is the root of all evil?
This shows two things:
1) Control Data no longer exists, Amdahl isn't doing so well after being absorbed by Fujitsu, and Burroughs merged with Sperry to form Unisys (which, as of 12/2006 is in the red).
2) Monopolies don't last forever.
Honestly I don't know what Windows does to "preempt," but before NT the scheduler was crap, after NT the scheduler was crap, process control has always been broken, the UI locks up and can't be restarted, anything other than a bare bones install can take minutes to shut down and/or require two or three "shut down" requests and/or manual process kills (which themselves can take minutes and/or cause lockups), and then there are things like the goofy user interfaces for networking and services. Protected memory never meant a thing for Windows stability, or if it did, I'd hate to think what it would have been without it. So, whatever.
I've never thought that Eran's articles were any loopier than those from other computer pundits. They're long and kind of dull but perfectly within the bounds of reason. It's a columnist's (= opinion writer's) job to be provocative, not balanced. Apparently Eran's mistake is wanting to participate in a fanboy blogsite whose noise level puts Slashdot's to shame. His being banned from Digg is a headscratcher, but the average Digg poster is a lost cause anyway.
I really can't tell if you are right or wrong, but it seems your description of how to get to the frontpage of digg works very well. Nice to know if I ever might need it. Thank You!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. It is leveraging the monopoly in an anti-competitive manner that is illegal.
Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.
But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.
And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.
The article is poorly organized. Slashdot's story about the article does not quote the most important parts. Slashdot readers have commented on the Slashdot story with numerous irrelevant points.
The article is a description of what is reasonably, in my opinion, called fraud. Quote: "After a half decade of being presented as a legitimate competitor to NeXT's object oriented development tools and various other products, Cairo was revealed as a complete hoax."
The author is trying to stop the "Fraud as a Business Plan" practiced by Microsoft. (There is also a need to stop incompatible file formats as a business plan. Open Office is excellent, and free, and uses an ISO standard file format.)
Daniel Eran's site is a terrible mishmosh that doesn't look good in Firefox or IE. In Firefox there were giant-sized gray letters superimposed over the text. On IE at the highest level of text magnification the type was still on the smallish size. His narrative seems to be a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness diatribe that meanders and folds back upon itself.
4 5B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html
For example, on this page:
http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-
There's a weird picture of a Windows logo with blue lines and flames. Click on it and you get a page entitled "1990-1995: Why the World Went Windows."
On that page there's a link entitled "1990-1995: The Race to Deliver the Next New Platform IBM and Microsoft partner on OS/2."
Okaaaay. Well a lot was happening in those years, after all. But if you click on that link you bring up a page entitled "1990-1995: Hitting the Wall." Say what?
I'm embarrassed for the poor schmuck. One of the downsides of the Web is that it allows people to soil themselves in public.
Insert witty sig here.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoc
After reading this guy's article and a few of the side articles that it links to, I realize that the point he's trying to make is:
1. Apple made the Next Big Thing (Macintosh).
2. Apple sat on its lead and did nothing (OS 7, 8, 9; attempted to sue Microsoft, Copland, etc.)
3. Apple was saved by acquiring vision from a failing competitor (NeXT)
4. Profit!
Meanwhile...
1. Microsoft made the Next Big Thing (a Macintosh-like interface that worked on computers people could actually afford - Windows 95)
2. Microsoft is sitting on its lead and is doing nothing (Windows Me, Vista, odd security glitches, etc.)
3. ???
He claims that Microsoft is sitting square at #2, trying to live off vaporware and bloat. Since Microsoft isn't going to get away on its own, now what? But, what company is out there that Microsoft could purchase that could give Microsoft everything it needs (an OS that runs on commodity hardware) without all of the baggage, is failing enough where Microsoft could get away with buying it, and which supports other parts of Microsoft's stack (Mono, OpenExchange)?
That's right - Novell.
After reading the articles and looking at the market, I sincerely think that Microsoft is getting ready to groom Novell and the market for a NeXT-like sweep of the market, replacing NT with Linux, replacing VB with Mono, replacing Exchange with OpenExchange, and maybe even propping WINE up to kill some time, sort of like Mac and its Classic environment.
Am I insane?
Mr. AC, I see you post this same reply to twitter every time he posts.
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Exhibit 3
Exhibit 4
Exhibit 5
Exhibit 6
Exhibit 7
In fact, the list goes on, you seem to have posted this same reply verbatim to every single one of twitter's posts! Just look at the list of posts made by twitter and notice every single one of them, starting on a certain date, has the same reply by you, verbatim. I dunno what you have against twitter, and while I certainly don't endorse his claims, it seems stupid for you to harass him like this.
(if you weren't an AC I would guess karma whoring, as most of these replies tend to get +5)
This isn't the first time I've read one of this guy's articles. He makes his biases clear right up front, and they aren't subtle...so you might want to be cautious of that. He's a very heavy advocate of Apple, which always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but for all that he writes well and occasionally makes valid points, when he isn't busy telling us about how Steve Jobs is supposedly the Messiah. There are also some surrealist charicatures of Steve Ballmer which I'm sure Ballmer wouldn't find flattering.
He also has a good grasp of history...he knows the 80s well enough that I can only assume he was alive at the time. For that alone, his articles are worth the price of admission, since even if you don't agree with his final premises, you'll get enough out of the 80s side trips that it won't much matter.
That's what I figured it stood for. As in "nice try, but it's not quite there yet". Or maybe it just stood for "nearly there".
-- Alastair
"VMS + 1 = WNT" makes no more sense than "IBM - 1 = HAL" (see other web trivia regarding "2001: A Space Odyssey")
I realize that not all Slashdotted stories are created equal, but for crying out loud, Daniel Eran isn't just a lousy writer--he fills every single one of his "articles" with factually incorrect statements, absurd leaps of logic, and demonstrates a consistent failure to apply proper rules of analysis to his own conclusions. Ever since I saw him blithely carve the concept up "market share" into a pie graph whereupon it was possible for Microsoft to hold 48% of the PC hardware market due to OS shipments, I've been waiting for people to stop giving him traffic. It's not that he writes articles that challenge other people's pre-conceived notions--it's that he writes articles that demonstrate a profound personal stupidity and a total lack of understanding concerning how data is properly presented and filtered in order to demonstrate a correlative (much less conclusive) relationship. (research methods, in other words).
Now hang on a minute. It's one thing to talk positively about what Mac OS 8.5 was accomplishing back in 1998, but if you're going to talk about Windows, at least get your facts straight!
:-) The content indexer included with Vista and MSN Desktop Search are almost identical code-wise, and is merely an evolution of what's been around in Windows for many years. See Windows indexing service. Now we just gotta wait a little bit longer and see what Apple does to top Microsoft's offering in Vista.
First of all, nothing Apple has shipped up to now even comes close to what WinFS was trying to solve. It's not a search engine... it's a relational database store for arbitrary user data that presents content to the operating system as a series of "entities". Comparing WinFS to a content search indexer is missing the point. See WinFS. Frankly, it's a good thing that they waited, because they have piles of other things to fix with Windows before they introduce something this drastic.
Microsoft shippied the first version of their content indexing service in mid-1996, though it was really the Content Indexer component that was part of the Object File System aspect of Cairo. That was announced in 1991. It didn't ship as a standard component that would do system-wide indexing until 2000, but it has been there all this time. Microsoft did buy a company in July 2004 called Lookout to get their Outlook indexing capabilities, which was then rolled into MSN Desktop Search.
The problem, of course, was that the Indexing Service UI sucked horribly. Most Windows 2000 users haven't even seen it because they don't know it's there! Then again, most long-time Mac users will tell you that Sherlock has always sucked on OS X, and suffered from its own problems of not being sure if it was a program to search your local drive, or to search the Internet.
In short: Lame duck vs. lame duck.
Oh, and, MSN Desktop Search (the first non-crap search indexer from Microsoft) shipped before OS X 10.4 with Spotlight (the first non-crap search indexer from Apple), but that's not something a Mac user would say, right?
Should be interesting...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Windows 3.0 gets polished and becomes Windows 95? hardly, as these two Operating Systems are vastly different, with their only real similarity being they both run on top of DOS.
Windows XP gets polished and becomes Windows Vista? Again, hardly, as again they are VERY different. XP And Vista are much closer than 3.1/95, but they're still worlds apart. Feature sets are very different, capabilities are very different, overall user experience is VASTLY different, and checking things out under the hood a lot has changed, and it's kind of interesting to see just how much. Yes a lot of features were unfortunately dropped, but there is still a lot here to chew on.
I saw earlier a comment saying the blogger is a spammer. Somehow, that wouldn't surprise me. It's an MS flame article though. Can we mod front page articles -1 flamebait? ;-)
When I go buy a coffee in many of the places around, I get some bit of coffee creamer with it, regardless of if I ask for it. If I explicitly tell them waiter to not include it, it usually (but not always) won't be there.
That said, none of those places insist on putting the creamer in the coffee for you and stirring it (usually they will do so when asked however)
The problem with Microsoft is that they keep insisting on doing something similar to putting in the milk and stirring.
Not a big problem for me personally, I just don't use their products. It is a big and costly problem when looking at it with a bit more of a bird's eye view however.
Well, can you finish it? So how deep are you bowing your head in shame? I think so deep it is all the way up your ass because you keep buying MS products.
In dutch we have a saying about a donkey, they don't hurt themselves on the same stone twice. Have you got the brains of a donkey?
Ah no, offcourse not. This is IT were common, business, sense does not apply. If a regular supplier wrongs you, you never deal with them again, in IT, you keep coming back for more. Yes sir, thank your sir, can I have another SIR!
This is not just a slam against you or MS. It is the same with companies that complain about Dell yet buy Dell. It is about all those big IT projects that keep going to the same company no matter how many times it has gone over budget and over time to deliver an inferior product. Every country has their own version of it BUT it is always the same story. Countless blunders and the next project gets assigned to them again.
What is perhaps even most amazing is that nobody even bothers to come up with excuses. Past performance just doesn't seem to exist in IT. It is almost as if when you work in IT your memory is surgically removed. This has been done with rats (short term memory anyway) and the rats will then do the same stupid thing time and again because without their short term memory they just can't learn from past mistakes.
If you stub your toe on the same table time and time again, don't blame the table. Blame yourselve. Perhaps IT should go into one of those programs for abused wives who keep going back to their husbands. That or a cattle prod. "Wow that MS sales rep I talked too AAARGH!!!!"