I think you make two really good points, Apple don't seem to care so much about vast market share (although, through no fault of their own they have that with the mobile mp3 market). Also market fragmentation, i.e. more players makes MS's job a lot harder. Before they really only had to compete with Symbian. Now they've also suddenly got Apple and Android to compete with.
The fact that HTC (the only manufacturer imo that had a decent Winmo device) is now shipping on Android further highlights the danger to them gaining much market share at all, never mind being the dominant player.
You're claiming that the success or failure of an application is a direct condemnation of the infrastructure stack that runs it? On that basis, I could cite any LAMP application that was ditched for a Microsoft stack application and say that Apache, PHP, and MySQL can't compete with (insert name of Microsoft stack application here) running on plain old.NET and an MSSQL database.
Not that MS would ever play it the other way around, citing every move away from Linux as a 'win' for MS technology urging us to 'get the facts'...
They seem a lot quieter about the 'facts' recently. Haven't heard much about their great success at e.g. the LSE for a while....
Basically MS have lost market share, mindshare and respect for their browser and now when they see the vista of browsers competing effectively against them, they've sat down and said 'gosh darn it, how can we leverage our Windows(tm) advantage to recover and totally dominate the Web once more?' What do the other guys not have that they just can't emulate on our platform ?
And they all agreed that 'leveraging' DirextX would be the best.
So they've made up this pointless metric of displaying shit faster on the screen, like the web's a video game or something and said - 'see, this is really important and we're the best at it! Now buy Windows 7 and download IE9 so we can totally crush the competition already!'
I'm pretty sure they've also instructed every salesman and evangelist to trumpet IE9's hardware acceleration to try and crowd out the competition.
MS really can't brook any competition in their playpen.
They look at what the competition are doing and try hard to emulate it, but just don't 'get it'
And by releasing all of this hardware they MUST be pissing off their hardware partners who are allegedly Microsoft's real customers, and that can only hasten their adoption of competing OS's like Android.
I laugh at Microsoft being forced to improve its support of a technology that can only help its competitors more than itself. Really, better Javascript support is not core to MS product lines in any way, and can only help trying to build a Web-centric app world (e.g. Google Office).
But I'm sure they won't cede the future to others that easily.
I like this idea. Just this one extra step would put the onus of action on the users enough that they would not only pause to think, but actively associate any malware infection with their direct actions (possibly).
Rename downloaded EXE's to.web and put up a dialog with an accept button that say 'I know the Risks' when they try to rename it/make it executable.
Can somebody do a survey of all of these infected machines and check what OS version they're running?
If there's a growing number of Vista and Win 7 machines then someone should get back to MS and let them know whatever they're doing ain't working.
With all of these security initiatives I'd have thought botnets would have been a shrinking problem - not something that was a growth industry as this article seems to indicate.
>IOW, with GCD you do not need to configure every application how much threads it should start.
You seem pretty hung up on this issue, but in reality most apps can configure themselves without the need for users ever dinking with the settings. A good algorithm that I've used is create threads in the pool 2 * the number of cores available and have the app expand dynamically to 4 * the number of available cores when really busy. When idle, the thread pool then shrinks to the original computed low-water mark again.
This works fairly well and means users never have to configure anything, and it will scale up to however many cores your system has available without the user ever having to worry about it.
But I take your point that an OS managed thread pool will manage OS resources much better, instead we have a situation now where multiple apps all have their own pools and most likely there are loads of threads per process doing absolutely no useful work.
Also interesting to see in GCD is the two different types of queues, serial and parallel, with the serial queues potentially greatly reducing the number of locks an app might have to manage.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you make two really good points, Apple don't seem to care so much about vast market share (although, through no fault of their own they have that with the mobile mp3 market). Also market fragmentation, i.e. more players makes MS's job a lot harder. Before they really only had to compete with Symbian. Now they've also suddenly got Apple and Android to compete with.
The fact that HTC (the only manufacturer imo that had a decent Winmo device) is now shipping on Android further highlights the danger to them gaining much market share at all, never mind being the dominant player.
Did the attack originate in Greece?
Yeah, it was written in Dephi
You're claiming that the success or failure of an application is a direct condemnation of the infrastructure stack that runs it? On that basis, I could cite any LAMP application that was ditched for a Microsoft stack application and say that Apache, PHP, and MySQL can't compete with (insert name of Microsoft stack application here) running on plain old .NET and an MSSQL database.
Not that MS would ever play it the other way around, citing every move away from Linux as a 'win' for MS technology ...
urging us to 'get the facts'
They seem a lot quieter about the 'facts' recently. Haven't heard much about their great success at e.g. the LSE for a while ....
Facts? We got 'em thx
Basically MS have lost market share, mindshare and respect for their browser and
now when they see the vista of browsers competing effectively against them, they've
sat down and said 'gosh darn it, how can we leverage our Windows(tm) advantage to recover
and totally dominate the Web once more?' What do the other guys not have that they just
can't emulate on our platform ?
And they all agreed that 'leveraging' DirextX would be the best.
So they've made up this pointless metric of displaying shit faster on the screen, like the web's
a video game or something and said - 'see, this is really important and we're the best at it! Now buy
Windows 7 and download IE9 so we can totally crush the competition already!'
I'm pretty sure they've also instructed every salesman and evangelist to trumpet IE9's hardware acceleration
to try and crowd out the competition.
MS really can't brook any competition in their playpen.
Actually the zombies and mock funeral are more as a warning for the telcos.
Buy and install our KILLER ! OS or we bring in the zombies!!!
It's practically free! Or at least it will be until we kill the competition
and then we'll revert to Windows based er, competitive pricing.
That OK with you? Thought so ... .. who is it? t-mobile heh heh heh hehhhhh
Right! Take the zombies on to the next one
You must be all outta gum
Cargo Cult Microsoft?
They look at what the competition are doing and try hard to emulate
it, but just don't 'get it'
And by releasing all of this hardware they MUST be pissing off their
hardware partners who are allegedly Microsoft's real customers, and
that can only hasten their adoption of competing OS's like Android.
I laugh at Microsoft being forced to improve its support of a technology that can only
help its competitors more than itself. Really, better Javascript support is not core to MS
product lines in any way, and can only help trying to build a Web-centric app world
(e.g. Google Office).
But I'm sure they won't cede the future to others that easily.
I like this idea. Just this one extra step would put the onus of action on the users enough that they
would not only pause to think, but actively associate any malware infection with their direct actions (possibly).
Rename downloaded EXE's to .web and put up a dialog with an accept button that say 'I know the Risks' when
they try to rename it/make it executable.
Could make a difference ...
Can somebody do a survey of all of these infected machines and check what OS
version they're running?
If there's a growing number of Vista and Win 7 machines then someone should
get back to MS and let them know whatever they're doing ain't working.
With all of these security initiatives I'd have thought botnets would have been a shrinking
problem - not something that was a growth industry as this article seems to indicate.
>IOW, with GCD you do not need to configure every application how much threads it should start.
You seem pretty hung up on this issue, but in reality most apps can configure themselves without the need for users ever dinking with the settings. A good algorithm that I've used is create threads in the pool 2 * the number of cores available and have the app expand dynamically to 4 * the number of available cores when really busy. When idle, the thread pool then shrinks to the original computed low-water mark again.
This works fairly well and means users never have to configure anything, and it will scale up to however many cores your system has available without the user ever having to worry about it.
But I take your point that an OS managed thread pool will manage OS resources much better, instead we have a situation now where multiple apps all have their own pools and most likely there are loads of threads per process doing absolutely no useful work.
Also interesting to see in GCD is the two different types of queues, serial and parallel, with the serial queues potentially greatly reducing the number of locks an app might have to manage.