Actually, its the long history of MSFT's "embrace and extend" philosophy, making lock-in and format wars an unnecessary market, that prompts these cynical attitudes.
One has to remember that MS's philosophy for years was "we BUILT the friggin market, they should conform to US". They still seek to define a lot of the formats, protocols, etc for the innovation they see as their own. Did you see.NET on *nix when its was released? Should you have? Perhaps not, but when a school determines not to use MS for networked services because of a perceived lock in or aftermarket-only compatibility, MS sales will rush in to placate the decision makers instead of simply providing this out of the box. This hand-waving that occurs in these situations has been observed again and again (government acceptance programs, school purchase plans, lawsuits, format discussions, standard bodies, support chains, etc).
MS is fiercely competitive, and all decisions are coordinated to only give a nod to fostering a non-MS sale when forced. Otherwise, you better believe they act in concert to suggest that each MS piece is best served by another MS piece - and they make sure there is a solid piece in every slot that tech is needed. They want to continue to *define* the standards, not *conform* to them. This is the doorway towards innovation and thus competitive-advantage they repeat again and again in memos. You have to realize this first.
Even with this in mind, one can appreciate their tech and admire their smarts at times. But playing well with others has never been in their interest. This is not the fault of the good poster above and his tech team. It is a corporate top-down strategy that's worked for them, and will continue to be used.
No matter what they state is going to be "opened" or "published" they move onwards quickly.
you obviously didnt really trade much music "back in the day". we would go to school auditoriums and swap tapes, either copies, bootlegs or new. the system could involve meager amounts of money to offset perceived value, but the system thrived. it still does, if you know where to look.
truth is, the public builds markets where the convenience and value of property is set by the participants. the music industry plays only into the first sale. with copying, the concept of "copyright" has disappeared for almost all information. if the medium originates digitally, sorry but you cannot use that channel in a locked pipe any more. i agree its an issue for many players, but the technology is out of the bag.
the locks placed now on channels are the last vestiges of that system, but they are disappearing. you will see that the promise of continued content, of content in non-digital deliveries (live performance) become the major stream. there are models like this, in churches and public radio, where they simply ask for direct investment for future projects, not selling by-the-pound and locking the medium down. this is where newspapers, music and eventually videos are heading.
a new, convenient device may prop up the notion that "we can secure the channel" now and again, but it doesn't last. everyone here knows this, and you even play by this model "i pay for things" voluntarily, not be force. you should simply pay to the artists you've enjoyed after you've sampled their goods. any good restaurant works under the same premise, and that usage has real duplication cost. Note even the software industry, where "registration" holds the real benefit in service, support and upgrades, and the package is usually completely unlocked.
The sentiment here on/. is old and tiresome, but true: digital information is going to flow freely now that the Age Of Information has liberated its duplication and dispersion. steps to fight it are just waste and prolong the inevitable.
Personally, i will acquire anything for free if the effort is low, and pay the commercial price if i feel i enjoy it. slashdot is part of this group. have you joined?
I'm not sure who's counting, over what time and using what metrics, but the Age Of Information is just starting, and Linux is just the tip of a much large iceberg. MS will be just another player in a much larger world as time goes by. The free alternatives to any product are DIY constructions using parts available and common knowledge. FOSS exists because the "parts" are digital and there's (relatively) no effort in duplicating them.
even more, he implies Google to start this check with a *source* verification system for content. so, really, the content doesn't matter, he wants help in preventing his content from being rehosted elsewhere, as much porn just flows from "sample" areas to vast libraries of aggregations, like the youtube clones, etc. this is about control, hence money.
as if MS needs another reason to try buying a competitor, along comes a new ad platform. the markets may not be a popular as some of the portal aggregators, but there's more than enough market to go around.
does anyone have an ad platform broker, that manages your ads on multiple platforms for you? i mean, thats the spirit of the web - encapsulate and aggregate, right?
All of the "facts" are true, and yet Vista is still a slow giant that doesn't play well with others and needs an uber-machine to accomplish basic feats.
Comon' guys, the market isn't saying these criticisms based on fictional accounts - they bought/used Vista and it sucked as an experience.
And PLEASE, give up on the Aero-is-cool stuff. You are playing catchup on the desktop - by far. You've simply been in GDI for so long you can't see the irony of cheering about abandoning it now.
Give your user support offices that "quiz" and listen for laughter.
Children are thus raised to squeal and squawk whenever anyone seems to be "stealing IP" - which not only implies they dont copy games, music, etc. but in that they report infringement whenever they see it (parents, schools, comrades, jobs).
Years later, when every copy of every commercial product is dutifully paid for, more people than ever will be clamoring for alternatives to the expensive world of vendor-dictated pricing, feature and upgrade schedules.
And so, this generation will adopt FOSS earlier, knowing that their new laptop cannot handle [MS OS du jour] and they cannot buy new hardware, and [now] they dont want to "steal" some IP. "No! I would never steal IP! Thats why I use free stuff - its legal."
This can been seen a welcome thing for FOSS, as it really nails home that commercial software is gonna cost ya.
Hardly. Toxins, unknown safety precautions, and after-the-fact disclosure of shortcuts all make unions one the few ways "productivity for productivity's sake" is kept in check. The other is lawsuits. History is rich with examples where an unchecked corporation was not acting within safe guidelines for the public, and unions, investigative journalists, class-action lawsuits, whistle-blowers are the front line for what eventually becomes law.
Not in the metadata, but the patent doesn't specify. Digimarc does this; they try to embed information into the image via stenography. However, it must be quite redundant, cover the entire image, and not affect the output, through all kinds of filters that post processing entails. This is a difficult problem, IMO.
For example, jpg and several other popular formats allow for pixel info that is not displayed, but that is an easy target. in true steg, the information is interwoven with part of an image which are "busy" as so bits flipped expressing for encoding - or spread so widely that single,subtle shifts - are not intrusive. Filters can reduce the number of matching bits down to a statistical norm, but the image quality changes. Also, the steg must be impervious to cropping, rotation and flipping.
I can see this being viable for commercial uses, but then again, if you're caught with unlicensed photos, all revenue from things they are attached to are on the table for awards. Most pros do not steal commercial images - one's reputation is finished.
Online, I think if you succeed in finding your photos via a crawler that matches based on this info, you're then left splitting fair use from not. Most online uses are fair, actually, since they're not for profit. Now remember, you can crawl images now and sniff out similars - its painful and error-prone, and this doesn't make it easier.
So then after you dice through all your hits, you find your photo being used [for example] to sell Cisco hardware for billions, you then write and ask for compensation, showing them the proof. And...up to this point, people were stopped at this last step? Courts look at the two images now and didn't believe they were the same? Smells like gimmick.
How often are images stolen and used for commercial purposes? I really dont know.
Not if they want to save face. This is a proud and stubborn family, you see. You cannot release Office, start saving a whole bunch of new files for it, then start changing for format too soon. Too much trouble, pklus people's backup have to still work. You have to slowly migrate the features in. Those features are polled and polled from feedback, security, and corporate wallets. Some never make it.
Really, your best best is to write an Office plugin/addon thingy that makes ODF the default and sticks it into all the menus, doing the conversion in the background live. That tools would make a bundle.
The horse has left without the cart. Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML - today. MS cannot change their format - the spec is in the field. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't taken some things into consideration for future releases, but frankly the reality set.
OOXML is not a standard. It cannot be used to shield any entity from MS's product changes. Also, OOXML extends into nebulous areas where other implementors or translators will be unable to replicate the viewers or editors like Office. Governments or corporations must take it or leave it.
PS
I recently received a DOCX from an MS rep and wrote back asking for a DOC format (we've not upgraded). They sent me a PDF. Moral: OOXML isn't a standard. There's no turning back - its a conversion world, not an interoperable one.
MSFT doesn't sound much different than the larger corps i've been in (meetings upon meetings, lots of slow coordination). It may simply be a side-effect of having any property that is high-value suddenly puts a lot of opinions and organizers around it. i've seen it happen even when its not software, but just data itself (customer lists, etc). It seems to grow organically, and becomes a circular pattern of "we're so busy, we need someone to organize the..." and another body is added that isn't really solving tech issues and developing, but just organizing.
I would really appreciate an environment of smart technical people like I read about on some of MS's blogs. I'm envious of places that have "labs" and similar, and constantly try to build that around me, even if we simply have to admit we're not smart [yet] and get crackin' on a problem.
Re. your other comments: I sometimes forget the sheer age of MSFT today. They have a ton of history using their own...well, everything. But if not the kernel, at least the filesystems and exe wrappers for *Nix formats would go a long way. eh, there's a lot of issue I have with the unix platform as well, but the consolidation - from a MSFT view - just seems like a huge liberating experience.
I see your point about the emotion, though. I have felt the same about some of my own flawed designs;)
Wow - I wanna see the meetup of that 6% of tiny-penis, high-quality-meds-taking, fake-watch-wearing, lottery-ticket-holding, nigerian-bank-account-holders who are all chatting about the sexy-bored-housewife they met via their inbox.
i'll being my perpetual motion machine and some investment stock certs.
Actually, I have never, and do not, work at MS. I could enjoy it, for sure (I am fan of the.NET framework, in its place) - but I dont want to live in Redmond. I am a fan of some of the dev blogs, and I'm constantly googling issues during my integration work, hitting their sites (codeplex, blogs, msdn).
Like any large company, MS has some interesting work (labs) and some great concepts (.net, silverlight) and some duds (msn) but some of the exec-level minding the Office/OS/IE stuff is overbearing. Its really too bad that Vista continued the large-kernel, tightly-bound-system-service idea. I would rather a much smaller OS and easier layering of the services, but the modern OS is a wild beast with many masters.
Honestly, I think they should build everything on top of a BSD kernel and join the world of Simply Great Applications, much like Apple. The amount of overhead in designing/maintaining/servicing their own kernel is a huge money loser. There's some sort of wacky notion that OS's design and system services are a "secret sauce" that must be kept in-house - but it is a fallacy. OS's are quickly becoming a cheap commodity, and all the interfaces are slowly edging towards public and standardized. If they directed all of the OS folks into wrapping a *nix-like kernel and building from existing, they'd instantly qualify for lots of other-OS software, closer standards to qualify at governments, interop with all file formats, etc. It's a no-brainer to me.
I think MS still wants to compete via tie-in. But I believe this is hurting them more than its worth. EU Lawsuits, standards bodies questioning them, strange/bad old Win32 constructs hiding in the closet - enabling ReallyBadSoftware to be written, and completely unique management platform. Sadly, they'd be able to leverage much more of their braintrust into making great *user experiences* than coming up with InventedOnlyHere tech for their OS. And still, all the real money would flow in from their licenses for corp servers and office (the big $).
But what do I know. I'm a developer guy. I just read the trades.
No, I can't. I've just not read any more personal blogs about ex/current MS emp's talking about the current development strategies. Plus I may be naive, but someone somewhere had to learn a lesson about Vista "cloud" of dysfunction internally.
What you imply may be true - more of the same, since there's certainly an undercurrent of "success" on the Vista line at places in the company.
Anyone inside the project teams on the vista push knew many of the work patterns were B-A-D. teams had a top-down requirement change almost daily. they fought for changes via up-one-flagpole-down-another. The schedule cut all kinds of scope while the new features were "must haves". the security initiative, the team patterns, the scope dictation and the requirements "volleyball" were terrible at ever "finishing" a concept. Each team with any kind of pull would demand all others conform to the request they wanted, and the winning concept were decided in the mgmt level, not knowing the real impact of their decisions until afterwards.
Add in ideas that nobody had really tackled before, like the secure channel for content, driver signing, legacy app security rights vs. UAC, etc and you're bound to have a lot of latent problems that demand a longer period of testing. But this was after the 1st "scrap" so there really wasn't time to push the market off any longer, MS's ability to deliver was already in question.
it had many flavors of dysfunctional. but they've changed a lot and are starting differently with the next gen OS.
We once had to port live data from Texas to Oregon from giant tables repeatedly, not too well built. So we looked to send XML, enforcing a DTD/schema on the sender teams. We ended up writing the encoders because we used an early and crude compression scheme:
We took the source table and counted the number of duplicate sets per column, then returned sorted data in order of highest duplicates to lowest.
Then, we encoded in XML using a column, then row order. Scanning downward, if rows duplicated > 2x, we merely attributed the R tag with repeats="xx"
Additionally, if the sender detected non-duplicate columnar data, but could find repeating sets, there were more attributes for that.
This could be expanded into sequences, dictionary schemes, etc. This was 1998 and all the world was XML. I'm glad this concept died with web services, bandwidth, etc.
Essentially, the transfer of all this data as XML was interesting and fast(er) but didn't sacrifice the universality of being able to generate ascii-based text files from multiple (and divergent) sources. I came to see how XML could in fact be an OK choice for some communication formats.
Overall, it was a pleasant experience - but I've had too many others where folks wanted to shove XML into serialized objects for some strange reason (with no need for communication or human-readability).
you may want to check your facts, but the institutional members - not local priests,etc - have also been implicated with "forgiving" the abusers and basically acting outside the law of the host countries.
this is an institutional problem, and the "standard" for the church was to move the abuser away, try to reform them internally, and place them in a new location under "probation"
Wouldn't you like that treatment if you committed a crime? Not a minor crime either, but a rape.
This is why they lose in the courts almost immediately, if not settling beforehand. They have been operating under a flawed "fraternal" concept for, well, centuries.
You should really question being associated with such a group, regardless of your relationship to the deity of your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, its the long history of MSFT's "embrace and extend" philosophy, making lock-in and format wars an unnecessary market, that prompts these cynical attitudes.
.NET on *nix when its was released? Should you have? Perhaps not, but when a school determines not to use MS for networked services because of a perceived lock in or aftermarket-only compatibility, MS sales will rush in to placate the decision makers instead of simply providing this out of the box. This hand-waving that occurs in these situations has been observed again and again (government acceptance programs, school purchase plans, lawsuits, format discussions, standard bodies, support chains, etc).
One has to remember that MS's philosophy for years was "we BUILT the friggin market, they should conform to US". They still seek to define a lot of the formats, protocols, etc for the innovation they see as their own. Did you see
MS is fiercely competitive, and all decisions are coordinated to only give a nod to fostering a non-MS sale when forced. Otherwise, you better believe they act in concert to suggest that each MS piece is best served by another MS piece - and they make sure there is a solid piece in every slot that tech is needed. They want to continue to *define* the standards, not *conform* to them. This is the doorway towards innovation and thus competitive-advantage they repeat again and again in memos. You have to realize this first.
Even with this in mind, one can appreciate their tech and admire their smarts at times. But playing well with others has never been in their interest. This is not the fault of the good poster above and his tech team. It is a corporate top-down strategy that's worked for them, and will continue to be used.
No matter what they state is going to be "opened" or "published" they move onwards quickly.
you obviously didnt really trade much music "back in the day". we would go to school auditoriums and swap tapes, either copies, bootlegs or new. the system could involve meager amounts of money to offset perceived value, but the system thrived. it still does, if you know where to look.
/. is old and tiresome, but true: digital information is going to flow freely now that the Age Of Information has liberated its duplication and dispersion. steps to fight it are just waste and prolong the inevitable.
truth is, the public builds markets where the convenience and value of property is set by the participants. the music industry plays only into the first sale. with copying, the concept of "copyright" has disappeared for almost all information. if the medium originates digitally, sorry but you cannot use that channel in a locked pipe any more. i agree its an issue for many players, but the technology is out of the bag.
the locks placed now on channels are the last vestiges of that system, but they are disappearing. you will see that the promise of continued content, of content in non-digital deliveries (live performance) become the major stream. there are models like this, in churches and public radio, where they simply ask for direct investment for future projects, not selling by-the-pound and locking the medium down. this is where newspapers, music and eventually videos are heading.
a new, convenient device may prop up the notion that "we can secure the channel" now and again, but it doesn't last. everyone here knows this, and you even play by this model "i pay for things" voluntarily, not be force. you should simply pay to the artists you've enjoyed after you've sampled their goods. any good restaurant works under the same premise, and that usage has real duplication cost. Note even the software industry, where "registration" holds the real benefit in service, support and upgrades, and the package is usually completely unlocked.
The sentiment here on
Personally, i will acquire anything for free if the effort is low, and pay the commercial price if i feel i enjoy it. slashdot is part of this group. have you joined?
Dont try to save them. We're all hoping for that secret spaceship project to move along and cart these loonies to the next interstellar volcano.
Itd be much more fun to dress as pirates and attack the seaorg on the high seas than unwind their big ball of cult.
I'm not sure who's counting, over what time and using what metrics, but the Age Of Information is just starting, and Linux is just the tip of a much large iceberg. MS will be just another player in a much larger world as time goes by. The free alternatives to any product are DIY constructions using parts available and common knowledge. FOSS exists because the "parts" are digital and there's (relatively) no effort in duplicating them.
Check your trends on a decade basis.
even more, he implies Google to start this check with a *source* verification system for content. so, really, the content doesn't matter, he wants help in preventing his content from being rehosted elsewhere, as much porn just flows from "sample" areas to vast libraries of aggregations, like the youtube clones, etc. this is about control, hence money.
as if MS needs another reason to try buying a competitor, along comes a new ad platform. the markets may not be a popular as some of the portal aggregators, but there's more than enough market to go around.
does anyone have an ad platform broker, that manages your ads on multiple platforms for you? i mean, thats the spirit of the web - encapsulate and aggregate, right?
All of the "facts" are true, and yet Vista is still a slow giant that doesn't play well with others and needs an uber-machine to accomplish basic feats.
Comon' guys, the market isn't saying these criticisms based on fictional accounts - they bought/used Vista and it sucked as an experience.
And PLEASE, give up on the Aero-is-cool stuff. You are playing catchup on the desktop - by far. You've simply been in GDI for so long you can't see the irony of cheering about abandoning it now.
Give your user support offices that "quiz" and listen for laughter.
There's tons of uses for this!
You've fried your circuit if it tastes like THIS
Your dog needs these chewies if his kisses taste like THIS
Your wife needs new underpants if...
Children are thus raised to squeal and squawk whenever anyone seems to be "stealing IP" - which not only implies they dont copy games, music, etc. but in that they report infringement whenever they see it (parents, schools, comrades, jobs).
Years later, when every copy of every commercial product is dutifully paid for, more people than ever will be clamoring for alternatives to the expensive world of vendor-dictated pricing, feature and upgrade schedules.
And so, this generation will adopt FOSS earlier, knowing that their new laptop cannot handle [MS OS du jour] and they cannot buy new hardware, and [now] they dont want to "steal" some IP. "No! I would never steal IP! Thats why I use free stuff - its legal."
This can been seen a welcome thing for FOSS, as it really nails home that commercial software is gonna cost ya.
Hardly. Toxins, unknown safety precautions, and after-the-fact disclosure of shortcuts all make unions one the few ways "productivity for productivity's sake" is kept in check. The other is lawsuits. History is rich with examples where an unchecked corporation was not acting within safe guidelines for the public, and unions, investigative journalists, class-action lawsuits, whistle-blowers are the front line for what eventually becomes law.
Wow. How utterly stupid. Thx for the info
Not in the metadata, but the patent doesn't specify. Digimarc does this; they try to embed information into the image via stenography. However, it must be quite redundant, cover the entire image, and not affect the output, through all kinds of filters that post processing entails. This is a difficult problem, IMO.
For example, jpg and several other popular formats allow for pixel info that is not displayed, but that is an easy target. in true steg, the information is interwoven with part of an image which are "busy" as so bits flipped expressing for encoding - or spread so widely that single,subtle shifts - are not intrusive. Filters can reduce the number of matching bits down to a statistical norm, but the image quality changes. Also, the steg must be impervious to cropping, rotation and flipping.
I can see this being viable for commercial uses, but then again, if you're caught with unlicensed photos, all revenue from things they are attached to are on the table for awards. Most pros do not steal commercial images - one's reputation is finished.
Online, I think if you succeed in finding your photos via a crawler that matches based on this info, you're then left splitting fair use from not. Most online uses are fair, actually, since they're not for profit. Now remember, you can crawl images now and sniff out similars - its painful and error-prone, and this doesn't make it easier.
So then after you dice through all your hits, you find your photo being used [for example] to sell Cisco hardware for billions, you then write and ask for compensation, showing them the proof. And...up to this point, people were stopped at this last step? Courts look at the two images now and didn't believe they were the same? Smells like gimmick.
How often are images stolen and used for commercial purposes? I really dont know.
Not if they want to save face. This is a proud and stubborn family, you see. You cannot release Office, start saving a whole bunch of new files for it, then start changing for format too soon. Too much trouble, pklus people's backup have to still work. You have to slowly migrate the features in. Those features are polled and polled from feedback, security, and corporate wallets. Some never make it.
Really, your best best is to write an Office plugin/addon thingy that makes ODF the default and sticks it into all the menus, doing the conversion in the background live. That tools would make a bundle.
The horse has left without the cart. Office already saves thousands, if not millions, of documents in OOXML - today. MS cannot change their format - the spec is in the field. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't taken some things into consideration for future releases, but frankly the reality set.
OOXML is not a standard. It cannot be used to shield any entity from MS's product changes. Also, OOXML extends into nebulous areas where other implementors or translators will be unable to replicate the viewers or editors like Office. Governments or corporations must take it or leave it.
PS
I recently received a DOCX from an MS rep and wrote back asking for a DOC format (we've not upgraded). They sent me a PDF. Moral: OOXML isn't a standard. There's no turning back - its a conversion world, not an interoperable one.
MSFT doesn't sound much different than the larger corps i've been in (meetings upon meetings, lots of slow coordination). It may simply be a side-effect of having any property that is high-value suddenly puts a lot of opinions and organizers around it. i've seen it happen even when its not software, but just data itself (customer lists, etc). It seems to grow organically, and becomes a circular pattern of "we're so busy, we need someone to organize the..." and another body is added that isn't really solving tech issues and developing, but just organizing.
;)
I would really appreciate an environment of smart technical people like I read about on some of MS's blogs. I'm envious of places that have "labs" and similar, and constantly try to build that around me, even if we simply have to admit we're not smart [yet] and get crackin' on a problem.
Re. your other comments: I sometimes forget the sheer age of MSFT today. They have a ton of history using their own...well, everything. But if not the kernel, at least the filesystems and exe wrappers for *Nix formats would go a long way. eh, there's a lot of issue I have with the unix platform as well, but the consolidation - from a MSFT view - just seems like a huge liberating experience.
I see your point about the emotion, though. I have felt the same about some of my own flawed designs
Wow - I wanna see the meetup of that 6% of tiny-penis, high-quality-meds-taking, fake-watch-wearing, lottery-ticket-holding, nigerian-bank-account-holders who are all chatting about the sexy-bored-housewife they met via their inbox.
i'll being my perpetual motion machine and some investment stock certs.
Actually, I have never, and do not, work at MS. I could enjoy it, for sure (I am fan of the .NET framework, in its place) - but I dont want to live in Redmond. I am a fan of some of the dev blogs, and I'm constantly googling issues during my integration work, hitting their sites (codeplex, blogs, msdn).
Like any large company, MS has some interesting work (labs) and some great concepts (.net, silverlight) and some duds (msn) but some of the exec-level minding the Office/OS/IE stuff is overbearing. Its really too bad that Vista continued the large-kernel, tightly-bound-system-service idea. I would rather a much smaller OS and easier layering of the services, but the modern OS is a wild beast with many masters.
Honestly, I think they should build everything on top of a BSD kernel and join the world of Simply Great Applications, much like Apple. The amount of overhead in designing/maintaining/servicing their own kernel is a huge money loser. There's some sort of wacky notion that OS's design and system services are a "secret sauce" that must be kept in-house - but it is a fallacy. OS's are quickly becoming a cheap commodity, and all the interfaces are slowly edging towards public and standardized. If they directed all of the OS folks into wrapping a *nix-like kernel and building from existing, they'd instantly qualify for lots of other-OS software, closer standards to qualify at governments, interop with all file formats, etc. It's a no-brainer to me.
I think MS still wants to compete via tie-in. But I believe this is hurting them more than its worth. EU Lawsuits, standards bodies questioning them, strange/bad old Win32 constructs hiding in the closet - enabling ReallyBadSoftware to be written, and completely unique management platform. Sadly, they'd be able to leverage much more of their braintrust into making great *user experiences* than coming up with InventedOnlyHere tech for their OS. And still, all the real money would flow in from their licenses for corp servers and office (the big $).
But what do I know. I'm a developer guy. I just read the trades.
No, I can't. I've just not read any more personal blogs about ex/current MS emp's talking about the current development strategies. Plus I may be naive, but someone somewhere had to learn a lesson about Vista "cloud" of dysfunction internally.
What you imply may be true - more of the same, since there's certainly an undercurrent of "success" on the Vista line at places in the company.
Anyone inside the project teams on the vista push knew many of the work patterns were B-A-D. teams had a top-down requirement change almost daily. they fought for changes via up-one-flagpole-down-another. The schedule cut all kinds of scope while the new features were "must haves". the security initiative, the team patterns, the scope dictation and the requirements "volleyball" were terrible at ever "finishing" a concept. Each team with any kind of pull would demand all others conform to the request they wanted, and the winning concept were decided in the mgmt level, not knowing the real impact of their decisions until afterwards.
Add in ideas that nobody had really tackled before, like the secure channel for content, driver signing, legacy app security rights vs. UAC, etc and you're bound to have a lot of latent problems that demand a longer period of testing. But this was after the 1st "scrap" so there really wasn't time to push the market off any longer, MS's ability to deliver was already in question.
it had many flavors of dysfunctional. but they've changed a lot and are starting differently with the next gen OS.
I play using the quake raytracing engine and my benchmarks are sec/frame, not frame/sec.
ok true story.
We once had to port live data from Texas to Oregon from giant tables repeatedly, not too well built. So we looked to send XML, enforcing a DTD/schema on the sender teams. We ended up writing the encoders because we used an early and crude compression scheme:
We took the source table and counted the number of duplicate sets per column, then returned sorted data in order of highest duplicates to lowest.
Then, we encoded in XML using a column, then row order. Scanning downward, if rows duplicated > 2x, we merely attributed the R tag with repeats="xx"
Additionally, if the sender detected non-duplicate columnar data, but could find repeating sets, there were more attributes for that.
This could be expanded into sequences, dictionary schemes, etc. This was 1998 and all the world was XML. I'm glad this concept died with web services, bandwidth, etc.
Essentially, the transfer of all this data as XML was interesting and fast(er) but didn't sacrifice the universality of being able to generate ascii-based text files from multiple (and divergent) sources. I came to see how XML could in fact be an OK choice for some communication formats.
Overall, it was a pleasant experience - but I've had too many others where folks wanted to shove XML into serialized objects for some strange reason (with no need for communication or human-readability).
Why not just make it a single rocker button instead of two? ouch
you may want to check your facts, but the institutional members - not local priests,etc - have also been implicated with "forgiving" the abusers and basically acting outside the law of the host countries.
this is an institutional problem, and the "standard" for the church was to move the abuser away, try to reform them internally, and place them in a new location under "probation"
Wouldn't you like that treatment if you committed a crime? Not a minor crime either, but a rape.
This is why they lose in the courts almost immediately, if not settling beforehand. They have been operating under a flawed "fraternal" concept for, well, centuries.
You should really question being associated with such a group, regardless of your relationship to the deity of your choice.
no. i'm seeing it as well. caught me off-guard, but i'm waiting to see if its a fluke or a permanent change.
error strings.