Somebody should mod the parent up "moronic M$ basher". In fact, Microsoft has had an active speech research team for more than a decade. (Doubt me? Look at the Proceedings of ICASSP if you want evidence.)
Instead of providing a Media Player an Internet Browser the Operating System manufacturer should concentrate in creating a set of tools and APIs that can be used by developers to create END USER software to watch media and navigate internet.
Problem is, that's already the way Windows works. WMP is a thin skin on a common component. IE is a tiny layer on top of UrlMon. The hard part is the common core, not the application. In fact, the reason that Microsoft's bundled applications are typically so mediocre is that they are thin layers on top of public APIs.
The top three at Google have complete control. Ahy two of them hold a majority of voting shares.
The class A chares cannot be transferred without consent of the board of directors.
To my knowledge -- and it's pretty good, but not perfect -- all mission critical services at Microsoft run on Windows, most on prerelease software. Mail runs on Exchange, and usually on a pre-beta of the next version of Exchange. Accounts receivable runs on SQL Server -- it's been running on 2005 for about a year now. IM, LCS, etc. all run on Windows.
Excatly. There's exactly one class of applications which needs to create a WH-CBT hook -- Computer Based Training apps. They really do need to track everything, in order to correct the insane thing users try to do and say "No, that's not what you want to do." Nobody else should ever hook that stream.
Actually, Apple is a monopoly in a stronger sense than Microsoft is. Microsoft was found to have pricing power in the market for PC-compatible operating systems, even though it has nominal competitors. (Antitrust law kicks in when a company has the power to control prices, not when it is the only provider.) Apple is the sole provider of operating systems for the most recent Macintoshes, and has both pricing power and complete market penetration.
Not antitrust enforcement... but EU antitrust law itself. That the EU thinks Microsoft's behavior in bundling a media player with Windows should amount to an antitrust violation shows, at best, marginal understanding of the purpose of antitrust laws. That seems to be the motto of the EU these days, however, where a little knowledge is definitely a dangerous thing.
That's insightful? Sheesh -- the Slashdolt mod are out in full force on this one!
Look, I'm no fan of the EC decision. I think it was counterproductive and ill-thought-out. I expect that the Court of the First Instance will eventually turn off XP N, precisely because it's quite clear that Monti's Mounties hadn't read Bork on antitrust.
But it certainly doesn't show a marginal understanding of the prupose of EC antitrust laws -- seeing as how the EC (with court supervision) decides what those laws mean and what their purpose is. There's a legitimate question about how much antitrust laws protect competition by protecting competitors. The US has taken a pretty radical position here, holding that protection of competitors is not a valid purpose of antitrust laws. The EC, and the rest of the world, does not. The US may be (and, in my opinion, is) right, but that claim certainly requires a lot more evidence than we've seen so far.
The problem with your claim is that the GP (and this story as a whole) refute that.
The EC's plan with XP N was that some player vendor (like, say, Sony) would pay OEMs to ship XP N + some version of their player and make money of an ad stream, an upgraded version, or some other source (CD sales, for instance). That's how shovelware works.
In this case, though, that didn't have the expected outcome. Real, Sony, others...none of them ever took up the gauntlet. Why?
There are several possible reasons.
(1) Consumers like what Microsoft produces. (2) OEMs save money on support by standardizing on Microsoft through and through. (3) Nobocy could write a competitive player.
You're claiming (3) -- but we know that Sony did just that for their rootkit, so that isn't true. More subtle business analysts often calim (2) -- but a company like Dell could have simply transitioned over to XP N everywhere in Europe, and the support costs for two versions would have been eliminated, since Dell already has those support costs. More than that, any high street vendor in the EU could have moved, and felt no marginal support costs. None of them did.
So we're left with (1) -- consumers, for whatever reason, like what Microsoft produces. It isn't perfect, but, for the most part, it works exactly as required, and people work around the odd corners.
Actually, one of the key points that we considered when we made the move to 64 bits for Exchange was that roughly 80% of the Exchange servers out there *right now* are 64-bit capable. People have been using Opterons in 32-bit mode to run Exchange 2003.
Sorry, but that's just not true. There are a set of items created for each thread which prepare it to support a GUI (such as the extra slot assigned to, say, MsgWaitForMultipleObjects, for instance), and they are created whether or not any call is made into a routine inside USER32.dll. There are some things which can be delayed (such as the creation of the actual windows message queue), but there are other things which aren't.
(And, for what it's worth, console applications being multithreaded have nothing whatesoever with the presence of such preparations. The kernel objects are there either way.)
But the key point is this:
the Linux GUI libraries [...] tend to be heavier to load. And they have to talk with X instead of just doing things.
Why do you think those things are "heavier to load"? Because Linux makes different engineering tradeoffs.
Why should the GUI have any impact whatsoever on low-level process and thread operations?
There's a cost involved in wiring a process or a thread to a GUI -- data structures to initialize, event handlers to start up, etc. If most threads are going to be GUI-less, then that price shouldn't be payed except for the ones which explicitly ask for it, which is the optimization which *n*x usually makes. Not so for Windows OS's, which assume (correctly) that almost all processes and threads want a rich GUI.
Sorry, but what I said above is the truth. Linux and *n*x generally have a fantastic process creation system for command line processes. Windows optimizes for creating GUI processes. It's an engineering tradeoff.
Umm..no. Linux processed and threads are adequate as long as there is no graphical component to their operation. Add a GUI, and Windows beats every Linux system hands down.
The real reason for those numbers is simple: Singularity has no GUI, and so they (correctly) measure against systems without a GUI.
It happened in 2K3. FastStart did not do what people believed it did...or, at least, not for the reason that they thought.
DLLs have a "base address", and loading a DLL at other than its base address makes the process of using the DLL very slow. All FastStart did was load the DLLs to make sure that they were placed at their preferred base addresses. For technical reasons, this was necessary on Windows 9x and ME. It is not necessary on any of the NT-derived versions.
(By the way, no, this is not some "black art secret". It's well-documented in the platform SDK. It's also one of the ways that Windows made different tradeoffs than *n*x, and it's one of the reasons that most cross-platform applications perform so poorly on Windows: the developers don't know that they should rebase their DLLs. If you doubt me, look at the boot speed for Mozilla or Firefox, and learn why it is that it suddenly dropped.)
Now that the older versions are not supported for install, that particular feature is no longer necessary, and is no longer installed by default.
I stopped reading when I read things like "preload [OpenOffice]; that is, after all, what Microsoft does." That's crap -- you can look for yourself and see that Office isn't preloaded.
Once again, the Slashdolts are living in a fantasy world.
No, OpenOffice.org does not run on "everything". It's a horrific resource pig, which will require significant hardware upgrades to run. By contrast, Microsoft Office runs on the hardware they already have.
I don't think I've ever heard of a BBC series called Doctor How. It is the next memeber of the Doctor Adverb sequence (Dr. Who, Dr. Why, Dr. Which, Dr. Where, etc.)?
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody should mod the parent up "moronic M$ basher". In fact, Microsoft has had an active speech research team for more than a decade. (Doubt me? Look at the Proceedings of ICASSP if you want evidence.)
The top three at Google have complete control. Ahy two of them hold a majority of voting shares. The class A chares cannot be transferred without consent of the board of directors.
To my knowledge -- and it's pretty good, but not perfect -- all mission critical services at Microsoft run on Windows, most on prerelease software. Mail runs on Exchange, and usually on a pre-beta of the next version of Exchange. Accounts receivable runs on SQL Server -- it's been running on 2005 for about a year now. IM, LCS, etc. all run on Windows.
Excatly. There's exactly one class of applications which needs to create a WH-CBT hook -- Computer Based Training apps. They really do need to track everything, in order to correct the insane thing users try to do and say "No, that's not what you want to do." Nobody else should ever hook that stream.
We don't use the phrase "safe hex" any more. The more PC term these days is "safer sectors".
Actually, Apple is a monopoly in a stronger sense than Microsoft is. Microsoft was found to have pricing power in the market for PC-compatible operating systems, even though it has nominal competitors. (Antitrust law kicks in when a company has the power to control prices, not when it is the only provider.) Apple is the sole provider of operating systems for the most recent Macintoshes, and has both pricing power and complete market penetration.
Look, I'm no fan of the EC decision. I think it was counterproductive and ill-thought-out. I expect that the Court of the First Instance will eventually turn off XP N, precisely because it's quite clear that Monti's Mounties hadn't read Bork on antitrust.
But it certainly doesn't show a marginal understanding of the prupose of EC antitrust laws -- seeing as how the EC (with court supervision) decides what those laws mean and what their purpose is. There's a legitimate question about how much antitrust laws protect competition by protecting competitors. The US has taken a pretty radical position here, holding that protection of competitors is not a valid purpose of antitrust laws. The EC, and the rest of the world, does not. The US may be (and, in my opinion, is) right, but that claim certainly requires a lot more evidence than we've seen so far.
The problem with your claim is that the GP (and this story as a whole) refute that.
The EC's plan with XP N was that some player vendor (like, say, Sony) would pay OEMs to ship XP N + some version of their player and make money of an ad stream, an upgraded version, or some other source (CD sales, for instance). That's how shovelware works.
In this case, though, that didn't have the expected outcome. Real, Sony, others...none of them ever took up the gauntlet. Why?
There are several possible reasons.
(1) Consumers like what Microsoft produces.
(2) OEMs save money on support by standardizing on Microsoft through and through.
(3) Nobocy could write a competitive player.
You're claiming (3) -- but we know that Sony did just that for their rootkit, so that isn't true. More subtle business analysts often calim (2) -- but a company like Dell could have simply transitioned over to XP N everywhere in Europe, and the support costs for two versions would have been eliminated, since Dell already has those support costs. More than that, any high street vendor in the EU could have moved, and felt no marginal support costs. None of them did.
So we're left with (1) -- consumers, for whatever reason, like what Microsoft produces. It isn't perfect, but, for the most part, it works exactly as required, and people work around the odd corners.
Actually, one of the key points that we considered when we made the move to 64 bits for Exchange was that roughly 80% of the Exchange servers out there *right now* are 64-bit capable. People have been using Opterons in 32-bit mode to run Exchange 2003.
(And, for what it's worth, console applications being multithreaded have nothing whatesoever with the presence of such preparations. The kernel objects are there either way.)
But the key point is this:
Why do you think those things are "heavier to load"? Because Linux makes different engineering tradeoffs.
Different goals, different designs.
I see the slashdolts are out moderating today.
Sorry, but what I said above is the truth. Linux and *n*x generally have a fantastic process creation system for command line processes. Windows optimizes for creating GUI processes. It's an engineering tradeoff.
Umm..no. Linux processed and threads are adequate as long as there is no graphical component to their operation. Add a GUI, and Windows beats every Linux system hands down.
The real reason for those numbers is simple: Singularity has no GUI, and so they (correctly) measure against systems without a GUI.
Things which talk about not violating Shannon's law make me think of other things which talk about not violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
"In the house, we obey not only the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but Shannon-Hartley as well!"
It happened in 2K3. FastStart did not do what people believed it did...or, at least, not for the reason that they thought.
DLLs have a "base address", and loading a DLL at other than its base address makes the process of using the DLL very slow. All FastStart did was load the DLLs to make sure that they were placed at their preferred base addresses. For technical reasons, this was necessary on Windows 9x and ME. It is not necessary on any of the NT-derived versions.
(By the way, no, this is not some "black art secret". It's well-documented in the platform SDK. It's also one of the ways that Windows made different tradeoffs than *n*x, and it's one of the reasons that most cross-platform applications perform so poorly on Windows: the developers don't know that they should rebase their DLLs. If you doubt me, look at the boot speed for Mozilla or Firefox, and learn why it is that it suddenly dropped.)
Now that the older versions are not supported for install, that particular feature is no longer necessary, and is no longer installed by default.
None. Fastfind is no longer loaded at startup, and has not been for some versions.
Turn on the task manager. Look to see that Word, etc. aren't installed. Check the start up time.
Go to a version of windows which shipped before the version of office you're running. Do the same test.
Notice how fast both are. Notice that Word 2003 already supports XML. Then realize you've been lied to by the OO.o worshippers.
I stopped reading when I read things like "preload [OpenOffice]; that is, after all, what Microsoft does." That's crap -- you can look for yourself and see that Office isn't preloaded.
Once again, the Slashdolts are living in a fantasy world.
No, OpenOffice.org does not run on "everything". It's a horrific resource pig, which will require significant hardware upgrades to run. By contrast, Microsoft Office runs on the hardware they already have.
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: the first rule of Slashdot Hyperbole Day is that you don't mention hyperbole day!
I don't think I've ever heard of a BBC series called Doctor How. It is the next memeber of the Doctor Adverb sequence (Dr. Who, Dr. Why, Dr. Which, Dr. Where, etc.)?