I've seen this conspiracy theory pop up several times now. Everything i've read says they started this work back in about 2002, long before OpenOffice was even a blip on the radar. From the articles linked to, they claim that their first iteration was the Outlook 2003 interface (which was a major change)
You know, you might at least give it a chance before condemning it. Maybe it actually IS an improvement, but deciding before you've even used it seems a little.. i don't know, prejudicial?
I suppose people like you also complained about how horses were what you liked, and that newfangled auto-mo-beel was crap.
While I agree that a lot of stuff is annoying, I at least like to give new features a chance to grow on me before I bin them. It sounds like you simply don't like change, in which case maybe computers is the wrong industry to be in.
Well, saving money is not a valid argument. It saves money to skip adding wheelchair accessibility to public buildings as well, but you don't see anyone arguing that.
Eh? It IS interesting how everyone complains about how broken Windows is... until time comes to upgrade, and then "Well, the old Windows is good enough for my needs".
I didn't say your job was impossible, but your job is only testing a small subset of reliability. Reliability is also whether or not the OS stays up for a year at a time, or whether it has long term memory leaks. Reliability also has to do with weird race conditions that only show up after several programs interact for a significant amount of time, etc...
What you're testing is simple stuff, stuff that's easy to identify. There's a whole other class of reliability testing that's far more long term.
Most people are really not going to know which processes are affected by a given fix. Most people may not even know WHY there's a new update to a file on their apt/you/portage/whatever. They're just going to apply it.
The prudent thing to do, unless you want to spend a ton of time researching the fixes, and what they effect, and what programs are using those features, is simply to reboot.
So, yeah, you don't HAVE to reboot, but I always will. I've got better things to do with my time.
This kind of selective security is a serious problem in the Linux/Unix world. The assumption is that "Oh, that service isn't exposed to the internet, so I don't need to worry about it. I don't give anyone shell access".
This ignores the possibility of exposure by a different (non-root) vulnerability.
Suppose you decide not to update your kernel for a local root vulnerability. Now, suppose a new vulnerability is discovered in an internet facing daemon like Apache or SSL. Even though those services may run as an unpriviledged user, a vulnerability in those services could allow an attacker to utilize the local root vulnerability in the kernel that you neglected to patch (becuase you thought it didn't matter) to gain root access.
Simply put, there's no such thing as a security patch that doesn't apply (other than for software that isn't installed). You're fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
While technically, reboots are not required for anything other than kernel patches, there are lots of situations where it's easier to reboot than to restart every application (which might as well be a reboot anyways). For example, glibc updates will require almost every application to be restarted, or you risk exposing vulnerabilities.
Well, that's sort of to be expected. Stability is not as easy to measure as other things, since you need benchmarks over a long period of time. Further, since it's still a research OS, it's likely in constant flux and doesn't have the same kind of stability hardening of a retail OS.
The part you keep missing is that you have the overhead of IE when using a java applet anyways, so the memory footprint of IE is irrelevant, you have it either way.
No, Microsoft used AJAX YEARS ago, exactly like google is using it today. They just didn't give it a fancy name. OWA has used it extensively for years, as has the Microsoft tree view control used in the MSDN web site.
A JavaScript interpreter is quite tiny. Java is somthign totally different. AJAX sites may use more memory, but that's because they're cacheing a lot of stuff in most cases.
Microsoft basically invented AJAX, yet they're the ones behind the curve.
Microsoft invented the XmlHttpRequest functionality, AND they've been using AJAX (before that's what it was called) in Outlook Web Access (OWA) for years. Nobody else in the company seemed to have caught on to it though.
The problem is that hardware companies often hide things in their drivers. For example, certain video cards can be "upgraded" strictly through drivers. The driver turns off a given feature in a low end model and turns it on in a high end model, an open source driver would make that strategy useless.
Many hardware vendors also believe that you can learn things about the hardware by examining the driver, and thus give away trade secrets.
While that may be true today, the stage is set to completely reverse that in the next couple of years. Intel has not been idle, they've been working on a very major overhaul of their chips that will likely leapfrog above AMD, and AMD will be in the position Intel is in now (an older architecture that can't compete well).
I'm sure AMD is working on its next generation as well, but for years now Intel sat on it's laurels, content to tweak its existing designs. That changed about 2 years ago, and Intel has been in full bore R&D mode.
Intel has a lot of things AMD doesn't. Superior supply channels, for instance, and the ability to produce much more product than AMD currently can. That's important to a company like Dell. It means you can get enough chips when you need them.
I really think YOU need to consider the context in which your message was written. The context was that Microsoft is in a lose-lose situation because if they implement a feature someone else has, they're called copy cats, but if they do something new they're called "non-standard".
Neither of those situations have anything to do with antitrust sanctions or them being a monopoly, but you chose instead to write that they aren't allowed to "win" (ie they're forced to lose no matter what) because they should compete fairly.
In other words, you are saying that you can't win if you compete fairly.
The context doesn't support your comment, which is why it was so stupid.
While I certainly agree that it's perfectly valid to call them on anything they call Innovative if it's not, that's not what's going on here.
I've seen nowhere that Microsoft has called this feature innovative. It's only people who like to bitch that are creating the impression that Microsoft is.
Actually, some of the stuff you mention *IS* innovative. XAML, for instance, is predated by XUL, but XUL only does some of what XAML can do. For example, you can't do 3D modeling with XUL, but you can with XAML.
Also, while OSX Tiger has the equivelent of Virtual Folders, OSX just beat MS to the punch. MS has been talking about this for 3 years, and their tardiness allowed Apple to copy the idea and beat them to market. In fact, MS was talking about this very concept as far bask as 1995, when the "Cairo" version of NT was suppoed to have it.
Not that I think MS was the first to envision it, though, i'm sure others thought of it even earlier.
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I've seen this conspiracy theory pop up several times now. Everything i've read says they started this work back in about 2002, long before OpenOffice was even a blip on the radar. From the articles linked to, they claim that their first iteration was the Outlook 2003 interface (which was a major change)
You know, you might at least give it a chance before condemning it. Maybe it actually IS an improvement, but deciding before you've even used it seems a little.. i don't know, prejudicial?
I suppose people like you also complained about how horses were what you liked, and that newfangled auto-mo-beel was crap.
While I agree that a lot of stuff is annoying, I at least like to give new features a chance to grow on me before I bin them. It sounds like you simply don't like change, in which case maybe computers is the wrong industry to be in.
Well, saving money is not a valid argument. It saves money to skip adding wheelchair accessibility to public buildings as well, but you don't see anyone arguing that.
Eh? It IS interesting how everyone complains about how broken Windows is... until time comes to upgrade, and then "Well, the old Windows is good enough for my needs".
It's a weird dichotomy.
I didn't say your job was impossible, but your job is only testing a small subset of reliability. Reliability is also whether or not the OS stays up for a year at a time, or whether it has long term memory leaks. Reliability also has to do with weird race conditions that only show up after several programs interact for a significant amount of time, etc...
What you're testing is simple stuff, stuff that's easy to identify. There's a whole other class of reliability testing that's far more long term.
Most people are really not going to know which processes are affected by a given fix. Most people may not even know WHY there's a new update to a file on their apt/you/portage/whatever. They're just going to apply it.
The prudent thing to do, unless you want to spend a ton of time researching the fixes, and what they effect, and what programs are using those features, is simply to reboot.
So, yeah, you don't HAVE to reboot, but I always will. I've got better things to do with my time.
This kind of selective security is a serious problem in the Linux/Unix world. The assumption is that "Oh, that service isn't exposed to the internet, so I don't need to worry about it. I don't give anyone shell access".
This ignores the possibility of exposure by a different (non-root) vulnerability.
Suppose you decide not to update your kernel for a local root vulnerability. Now, suppose a new vulnerability is discovered in an internet facing daemon like Apache or SSL. Even though those services may run as an unpriviledged user, a vulnerability in those services could allow an attacker to utilize the local root vulnerability in the kernel that you neglected to patch (becuase you thought it didn't matter) to gain root access.
Simply put, there's no such thing as a security patch that doesn't apply (other than for software that isn't installed). You're fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
While technically, reboots are not required for anything other than kernel patches, there are lots of situations where it's easier to reboot than to restart every application (which might as well be a reboot anyways). For example, glibc updates will require almost every application to be restarted, or you risk exposing vulnerabilities.
Well, that's sort of to be expected. Stability is not as easy to measure as other things, since you need benchmarks over a long period of time. Further, since it's still a research OS, it's likely in constant flux and doesn't have the same kind of stability hardening of a retail OS.
The part you keep missing is that you have the overhead of IE when using a java applet anyways, so the memory footprint of IE is irrelevant, you have it either way.
No, Microsoft used AJAX YEARS ago, exactly like google is using it today. They just didn't give it a fancy name. OWA has used it extensively for years, as has the Microsoft tree view control used in the MSDN web site.
A JavaScript interpreter is quite tiny. Java is somthign totally different. AJAX sites may use more memory, but that's because they're cacheing a lot of stuff in most cases.
That would be the same ActiveX control Google and everyone else that wants to use AJAX on IE uses.
AJAX is a technique, and that technique was used by Microsoft long before the name AJAX was coined.
You seem to be confused about what XUL is. It's simply an XML format for defining user interfaces. Not exactly "rich web apps".
Yes, under IE it uses AJAX, but it doesn't under Firefox. The mechanisms are slightly different, and MS hasn't bothered to support it under FF.
Even the tiniest Java applet loads the runtime into memory, and that's about 30MB of memory footprint.
You've got to be kidding me. Think loading a giant mega memory footprint runtime library to do some simple updating on the client is "better"?
Microsoft basically invented AJAX, yet they're the ones behind the curve.
Microsoft invented the XmlHttpRequest functionality, AND they've been using AJAX (before that's what it was called) in Outlook Web Access (OWA) for years. Nobody else in the company seemed to have caught on to it though.
The problem is that hardware companies often hide things in their drivers. For example, certain video cards can be "upgraded" strictly through drivers. The driver turns off a given feature in a low end model and turns it on in a high end model, an open source driver would make that strategy useless.
Many hardware vendors also believe that you can learn things about the hardware by examining the driver, and thus give away trade secrets.
While that may be true today, the stage is set to completely reverse that in the next couple of years. Intel has not been idle, they've been working on a very major overhaul of their chips that will likely leapfrog above AMD, and AMD will be in the position Intel is in now (an older architecture that can't compete well).
I'm sure AMD is working on its next generation as well, but for years now Intel sat on it's laurels, content to tweak its existing designs. That changed about 2 years ago, and Intel has been in full bore R&D mode.
Intel has a lot of things AMD doesn't. Superior supply channels, for instance, and the ability to produce much more product than AMD currently can. That's important to a company like Dell. It means you can get enough chips when you need them.
I really think YOU need to consider the context in which your message was written. The context was that Microsoft is in a lose-lose situation because if they implement a feature someone else has, they're called copy cats, but if they do something new they're called "non-standard".
Neither of those situations have anything to do with antitrust sanctions or them being a monopoly, but you chose instead to write that they aren't allowed to "win" (ie they're forced to lose no matter what) because they should compete fairly.
In other words, you are saying that you can't win if you compete fairly.
The context doesn't support your comment, which is why it was so stupid.
While I certainly agree that it's perfectly valid to call them on anything they call Innovative if it's not, that's not what's going on here.
I've seen nowhere that Microsoft has called this feature innovative. It's only people who like to bitch that are creating the impression that Microsoft is.
Actually, some of the stuff you mention *IS* innovative. XAML, for instance, is predated by XUL, but XUL only does some of what XAML can do. For example, you can't do 3D modeling with XUL, but you can with XAML.
Also, while OSX Tiger has the equivelent of Virtual Folders, OSX just beat MS to the punch. MS has been talking about this for 3 years, and their tardiness allowed Apple to copy the idea and beat them to market. In fact, MS was talking about this very concept as far bask as 1995, when the "Cairo" version of NT was suppoed to have it.
Not that I think MS was the first to envision it, though, i'm sure others thought of it even earlier.
Umm.. I think you failed economics somewhere. You seem to imply that you can't "Win" if you compete fairly. That's kind of stupid.