No, I wasn't on the team, but I did read interviews with both Mark Lucovsky and Dave Cutler where they both mentioned this. The Wikipedia article is accurate.
"Finally, it was time to start writing some code. "We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members."
And in case you don't trust Paul Thurrott, here's slides from one of Locovsky's presentations:
Actually, no. "New Technology" was actually the second name of the code name. It was originally derived from the first CPU they wrote NT for, the Intel N-Ten, which eventually became the i860 Risc CPU.
When they ported NT to x86, they changed the name to "new technology", then later claimed it didn't stand for anything anymore (because it's harder to trademark an acronym).
Win16 to Win32 was a huge deal. Though Win32 retained a large number of 32 bit versions of 16 bit API's that allowed developers to (largely) just recompile their apps with only about 10% or less work, there was also a significant number of new API's... more actually, than the Win16 API's.
Win64, however, is largely just extending the Win32 API's to 64 bits and adding a few new memory management API's. So the two transitions can't really be compared.
While it's true that some stuff may not work correctly under Vista, I can assure you that SQL 2000 installs and runs. Every task I've ever given it on Vista has worked fine without issue. I'm not saying there aren't any, but the claim that SQL 2000 "will NEVER work with Vista" is a bit, well, exagerated.
Even the link you give says this about MSDE (which is a version of SQL 2000)
"Limited testing indicates that MSDE 2000 may install on Windows Vista, but this is not supported and Microsoft does not guarantee that it will install under all circumstances."
This is basically "We're not doing anything to make sure it works, but it probably will".
Also, the FAQ says this:
"SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Service Pack 1 will run on Windows Vista but has known issues with User Access Control."
You're forgetting that obscurity didn't prevent IIS 6 from being one of the most targeted services. Remember Code Red? Nimda? IIS was actively being probed and assaulted looking for flaws, and that didn't just stop. It stopped because IIS6 was basically rewritten from scratch and was configured by default in a secure way.
Maybe there are flaws waiting to be discovered, but it doesn't change the point I was making, which is that the original post I responded to claimed that Apache hasn't had security flaws, but it has.. lots of them. And compared to the competitors products, especially when that competitor is Microsoft... that's just crazy.
The Apache code is also available, and it doesn't have these problems.
Have you noticed how many sever security flaws have been reported in Apache in the last few years?
Here's an exercise. Count the number of severe (or even not severe) flaws in IIS6 over the last 3 years, then compare that number to the number of severe (not even counting non-severe) flaws in Apache in the last year alone. Then compare the number of severe flaws in PHP this year and compare them to the total number of flaws in ASP.NET since it's inception 4 years ago.
I think this is, at best, word play semantics. I'm completely on the defendants side, feeling the RIAA shouldn't be suing people, but this is just ridiculous nit picking.
Let's do this:
"RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account[,] through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' "
The simple addition of a comma changes the meaning. The letter confirms the defendant owned an access account, and the RIAA claims they can prove that access acount downloaded copyrighted sound recordings. Not that AOL confirmed that the account downloaded copyrighted sounds and recordings.
This is trying to use word semantics for it's argument, which I don't really condone either. I think the judge will see through this.
IF you have a stable API. IF you have a documented API. Neither is the case with windows
Not true at all, Microsoft *HAS* to document the API, otherwise nobody can use it in their applications. Further, COM interfaces, which is the API that's used are self-documenting, in that the very specification requires IDL which defines that API to be present or else the whole subsystem can't work.
And microsoft has gone out of it's way to make it much more than just "nearly impossible"
I think you've been listening to too much urban legend.
In this, you're absolutely right. But they also don't have to go out of their way to make it IMPOSSIBLE, either.... do they?
If it was impossible, why was it already done once?
You can replace entire subsections of a "Linux" system, and still have a fully functional system.
The key word here is "replace". You can replace anything you like in Windows as well, but you have to replace it, that is, put another piece of code that provides the same function with the same interface in place. With few exceptions, it's nearly impossible not to be able to do this with any software.
In fact, many years ago there was a project to replace IE's rendering engine with a shim to use the Gecko engine, and it worked... but nobody apparently had any use for it, and it faded away.
The thing is, Microsoft does not have to support such a configuration.
It IS a problem with software engineering.... because the decision to make that part of the OS
A decision that Apple and KDE both made. A decision that BeOS made. Providing functionality for end user applications is what an OS does, and HTML rendering is just another function.
You keep getting hung up on the phrase "part of the OS". We're not talking about the kernel here. We're talking about the OS as a complete usable distribution of software. The only reason you can't say the same about "Linux" is because "Linux" is just a kernel.
Even Richard Stallman argues that an OS is more than just the kernel.
So if I screw up an upgrade to my word processor, my OS is broken?
No. I'm saying, if you remove a part of the OS, and it doing so will break a bunch of other apps besides what you removed, then you've basically broken the OS in some way. Like it or not, HTML rendering is a part of the OS that is depended upon by several parts of the OS and third party apps, removing it breaks things.
Let's say you remove glibc from your Linux distro. Sure, the kernel may boot, and you could probably get to a shell, and even many apps that are statically linked will continue to work, but I'd call that a broken OS.
If I determine that khtml contains so many security risks that I don't want it on my system, I can remove it - and use Firefox, Mozilla, or whatever.
Not if you want to use Konqueror as a file manager. Not if you want to read the KDE help system.
If I determin the same about Firefox, I can remove it and install khtml instead.
Firefox is just a browser, it's not componentized like KHTML or MSHTML is.
Or, if I'm REALLY anal, I can say "web sucks"... and delete ALL rendering programmes & systems from my machine entirely.
At the cost of many kinds of apps that depend on it from working. You realize that HTML rendering is more than just web browsing, right?
My computer will still run. My O/S will not be broken.
Depends entirely on what you define "broken" as. I'd say that if *ANY* functionality other than the web browser itself is broken by doing so, then the OS is broken.
Keep in mind that Microsoft was called a Monopoly only by excluding all of their competitors. The judge explicitly said the Mac wasn't a competitor because it ran on different hardware (which isn't the case anymore), and the judge ruled that Linux wasn't a viable competitor (also not the case anymore). I really don't know if Microsoft would be considered a monopoly today.
Also, you can't remove the components at your leisure. If you remove KHTML from a KDE system, you break a number of parts of KDE, likewise if you remove Webkit from a Mac, you can't read help files or do a number of other things because they depend on Webkit.
You have a pretty warped sense of history. Microsoft supported IE on Mac until last year. Safari has been the default browser on OSX for years. This "Oh waaaaaaahhhh.. microsoft dropped support for IE so apple had to create it's own browser" argument is fictitious. Apple created their own browser years before.
Also, I don't recall Microsoft ever saying, anywhere, that tying IE to the shell was necessary. In fact, in Vista, they've removed this tie. Being integrated in the shell had little to do with removing IE. The problem was that all kinds of stuff in the OS and in third party apps would break if you did, because apps had been written to assume that the rendering libraries were a part of the OS and would be available. Microsoft's position was that they didn't consider the OS usable if these things were broken, thus removing IE made the OS unusable, a position the judge agreed with when Microsoft removed IE and proved it's point.
Netscape was never, in reality, a commercial product. Yes, you could buy it in stores, but you could do the same for IE at one point. Netscape was free for the first year of its existence, and then we "effectively" free after that, since anyone could download an unexpiring copy and use it. Technically, you were only supposed to do that to "try" it, or for educational use, but there was no enforcement. And, if you wanted to be legal about it, they always had a freely downloadable beta version available.
Actually, that is exactly what "fast user switching on Domains" is, a version of SU. WTF took them so long?
Uhh... no. su has been in windows for about 6 years. It's called "run as". You can do it either from the GUI or the command line.
fast user switching is more like virtual consoles. Windows has had this technology for a long time, but you've never been able to use it this way. Yes, it took them forever.
I think the problem here is the definition of the word "innovation". By the definition that everyone seems to apply to Microsoft, *NOTHING* in the computer industry in the last 10 years has been "innovative". Nothing. Everything can be traced back to some other technique that appeared before.
I don't think that's particularly useful.
Instead, we should consider that "innovation" is "standing on the shoulders of giants". Creating a new way to do something, possibly based on an old technique, but still different enough to warrent an "innovation". ie, not simply putting together pre-existing parts in an obvious way.
By that definition, Microsoft (and Sun and Red Hat and others) Innovate all the time.
You're reading a lot into the article. For instance, the section you quoted about the file extension is only when you are highlighting multiple files and renaming. If you want to change the extension of a file, you single select it. And "user mode applications" in this sense means applications running without administrative privilges. Unsigned drivers are not allowed in the 64 bit version, but are allowed in the 32 bit. The theory there is that all drivers are new for 64 bit, while 32 bit may still have a great deal of legacy drivers. Also, the "up button" has been replaced with the breadcrumbs view in explorer. Want to go up one level? Just click the previous folder in the breadcrumb address bar.
Oh, give me a break. It's really very simple. If DRM is too intrusive, people just won't buy it. Content providers will get the hint. Vote with your wallet, not your axe. Just because Vista has DRM features doesn't mean you have to buy media that uses them.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the "copy protect content" checkbox in WMP9/WMP10 is automatically checked on install
"Apparently"? No, it's not. It is off by default. She must have checked it when she set it up.
Who said anything about today? It's unlikely that you should upgrade today, or much of anyone else. It's not even released to the public market yet.
Lots of people are still happy with their Commodore 64's (well, maybe lots is pushing it...).
Let's see what you say when the next worm comes along and crashes your computer every 10 seconds.
Here's a good reason. Support will end for Windows 2000 in 2 years. That means no security patches, which makes you vulnerable.
No, I wasn't on the team, but I did read interviews with both Mark Lucovsky and Dave Cutler where they both mentioned this. The Wikipedia article is accurate.
g old1.asp
e dtalks/lucovsky_html/tsld006.htm
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winserver2k3_
"Finally, it was time to start writing some code. "We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members."
And in case you don't trust Paul Thurrott, here's slides from one of Locovsky's presentations:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix-win2000/invit
Actually, no. "New Technology" was actually the second name of the code name. It was originally derived from the first CPU they wrote NT for, the Intel N-Ten, which eventually became the i860 Risc CPU.
When they ported NT to x86, they changed the name to "new technology", then later claimed it didn't stand for anything anymore (because it's harder to trademark an acronym).
Win16 to Win32 was a huge deal. Though Win32 retained a large number of 32 bit versions of 16 bit API's that allowed developers to (largely) just recompile their apps with only about 10% or less work, there was also a significant number of new API's... more actually, than the Win16 API's.
Win64, however, is largely just extending the Win32 API's to 64 bits and adding a few new memory management API's. So the two transitions can't really be compared.
While it's true that some stuff may not work correctly under Vista, I can assure you that SQL 2000 installs and runs. Every task I've ever given it on Vista has worked fine without issue. I'm not saying there aren't any, but the claim that SQL 2000 "will NEVER work with Vista" is a bit, well, exagerated.
Even the link you give says this about MSDE (which is a version of SQL 2000)
"Limited testing indicates that MSDE 2000 may install on Windows Vista, but this is not supported and Microsoft does not guarantee that it will install under all circumstances."
This is basically "We're not doing anything to make sure it works, but it probably will".
Also, the FAQ says this:
"SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Service Pack 1 will run on Windows Vista but has known issues with User Access Control."
Which means if you turn off UAC, it works fine.
that should be "didn't prevent IIS < 6" ....
You're forgetting that obscurity didn't prevent IIS 6 from being one of the most targeted services. Remember Code Red? Nimda? IIS was actively being probed and assaulted looking for flaws, and that didn't just stop. It stopped because IIS6 was basically rewritten from scratch and was configured by default in a secure way.
Maybe there are flaws waiting to be discovered, but it doesn't change the point I was making, which is that the original post I responded to claimed that Apache hasn't had security flaws, but it has.. lots of them. And compared to the competitors products, especially when that competitor is Microsoft... that's just crazy.
The Apache code is also available, and it doesn't have these problems.
Have you noticed how many sever security flaws have been reported in Apache in the last few years?
Here's an exercise. Count the number of severe (or even not severe) flaws in IIS6 over the last 3 years, then compare that number to the number of severe (not even counting non-severe) flaws in Apache in the last year alone. Then compare the number of severe flaws in PHP this year and compare them to the total number of flaws in ASP.NET since it's inception 4 years ago.
Report back your results.
I think this is, at best, word play semantics. I'm completely on the defendants side, feeling the RIAA shouldn't be suing people, but this is just ridiculous nit picking.
Let's do this:
"RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account[,] through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' "
The simple addition of a comma changes the meaning. The letter confirms the defendant owned an access account, and the RIAA claims they can prove that access acount downloaded copyrighted sound recordings. Not that AOL confirmed that the account downloaded copyrighted sounds and recordings.
This is trying to use word semantics for it's argument, which I don't really condone either. I think the judge will see through this.
IF you have a stable API. IF you have a documented API. Neither is the case with windows
.... do they?
Not true at all, Microsoft *HAS* to document the API, otherwise nobody can use it in their applications. Further, COM interfaces, which is the API that's used are self-documenting, in that the very specification requires IDL which defines that API to be present or else the whole subsystem can't work.
And microsoft has gone out of it's way to make it much more than just "nearly impossible"
I think you've been listening to too much urban legend.
In this, you're absolutely right. But they also don't have to go out of their way to make it IMPOSSIBLE, either
If it was impossible, why was it already done once?
You can replace entire subsections of a "Linux" system, and still have a fully functional system.
The key word here is "replace". You can replace anything you like in Windows as well, but you have to replace it, that is, put another piece of code that provides the same function with the same interface in place. With few exceptions, it's nearly impossible not to be able to do this with any software.
In fact, many years ago there was a project to replace IE's rendering engine with a shim to use the Gecko engine, and it worked... but nobody apparently had any use for it, and it faded away.
The thing is, Microsoft does not have to support such a configuration.
It IS a problem with software engineering .... because the decision to make that part of the OS
A decision that Apple and KDE both made. A decision that BeOS made. Providing functionality for end user applications is what an OS does, and HTML rendering is just another function.
You keep getting hung up on the phrase "part of the OS". We're not talking about the kernel here. We're talking about the OS as a complete usable distribution of software. The only reason you can't say the same about "Linux" is because "Linux" is just a kernel.
Even Richard Stallman argues that an OS is more than just the kernel.
So if I screw up an upgrade to my word processor, my OS is broken?
No. I'm saying, if you remove a part of the OS, and it doing so will break a bunch of other apps besides what you removed, then you've basically broken the OS in some way. Like it or not, HTML rendering is a part of the OS that is depended upon by several parts of the OS and third party apps, removing it breaks things.
Let's say you remove glibc from your Linux distro. Sure, the kernel may boot, and you could probably get to a shell, and even many apps that are statically linked will continue to work, but I'd call that a broken OS.
If I determine that khtml contains so many security risks that I don't want it on my system, I can remove it - and use Firefox, Mozilla, or whatever.
... and delete ALL rendering programmes & systems from my machine entirely.
Not if you want to use Konqueror as a file manager. Not if you want to read the KDE help system.
If I determin the same about Firefox, I can remove it and install khtml instead.
Firefox is just a browser, it's not componentized like KHTML or MSHTML is.
Or, if I'm REALLY anal, I can say "web sucks"
At the cost of many kinds of apps that depend on it from working. You realize that HTML rendering is more than just web browsing, right?
My computer will still run. My O/S will not be broken.
Depends entirely on what you define "broken" as. I'd say that if *ANY* functionality other than the web browser itself is broken by doing so, then the OS is broken.
Keep in mind that Microsoft was called a Monopoly only by excluding all of their competitors. The judge explicitly said the Mac wasn't a competitor because it ran on different hardware (which isn't the case anymore), and the judge ruled that Linux wasn't a viable competitor (also not the case anymore). I really don't know if Microsoft would be considered a monopoly today.
Also, you can't remove the components at your leisure. If you remove KHTML from a KDE system, you break a number of parts of KDE, likewise if you remove Webkit from a Mac, you can't read help files or do a number of other things because they depend on Webkit.
You have a pretty warped sense of history. Microsoft supported IE on Mac until last year. Safari has been the default browser on OSX for years. This "Oh waaaaaaahhhh.. microsoft dropped support for IE so apple had to create it's own browser" argument is fictitious. Apple created their own browser years before.
Also, I don't recall Microsoft ever saying, anywhere, that tying IE to the shell was necessary. In fact, in Vista, they've removed this tie. Being integrated in the shell had little to do with removing IE. The problem was that all kinds of stuff in the OS and in third party apps would break if you did, because apps had been written to assume that the rendering libraries were a part of the OS and would be available. Microsoft's position was that they didn't consider the OS usable if these things were broken, thus removing IE made the OS unusable, a position the judge agreed with when Microsoft removed IE and proved it's point.
Netscape was never, in reality, a commercial product. Yes, you could buy it in stores, but you could do the same for IE at one point. Netscape was free for the first year of its existence, and then we "effectively" free after that, since anyone could download an unexpiring copy and use it. Technically, you were only supposed to do that to "try" it, or for educational use, but there was no enforcement. And, if you wanted to be legal about it, they always had a freely downloadable beta version available.
This "commercial" product argument is a strawman.
Yes, run as can be similar to su, but if you "run as" cmd.exe, you get the same thing.
Actually, that is exactly what "fast user switching on Domains" is, a version of SU. WTF took them so long?
Uhh... no. su has been in windows for about 6 years. It's called "run as". You can do it either from the GUI or the command line.
fast user switching is more like virtual consoles. Windows has had this technology for a long time, but you've never been able to use it this way. Yes, it took them forever.
I think the problem here is the definition of the word "innovation". By the definition that everyone seems to apply to Microsoft, *NOTHING* in the computer industry in the last 10 years has been "innovative". Nothing. Everything can be traced back to some other technique that appeared before.
I don't think that's particularly useful.
Instead, we should consider that "innovation" is "standing on the shoulders of giants". Creating a new way to do something, possibly based on an old technique, but still different enough to warrent an "innovation". ie, not simply putting together pre-existing parts in an obvious way.
By that definition, Microsoft (and Sun and Red Hat and others) Innovate all the time.
You're reading a lot into the article. For instance, the section you quoted about the file extension is only when you are highlighting multiple files and renaming. If you want to change the extension of a file, you single select it. And "user mode applications" in this sense means applications running without administrative privilges. Unsigned drivers are not allowed in the 64 bit version, but are allowed in the 32 bit. The theory there is that all drivers are new for 64 bit, while 32 bit may still have a great deal of legacy drivers. Also, the "up button" has been replaced with the breadcrumbs view in explorer. Want to go up one level? Just click the previous folder in the breadcrumb address bar.
Oh, give me a break. It's really very simple. If DRM is too intrusive, people just won't buy it. Content providers will get the hint. Vote with your wallet, not your axe. Just because Vista has DRM features doesn't mean you have to buy media that uses them.