no, Sinofsky realised they had this mess and did what he could to consolidate it - by scrapping the WPF team in devdiv and bringing the technology into the base platform division - so all the other layers on top of Windows could use it, rather than have it as a layer that sat between windows and the rest of the system. He also created the WinRT API to replace win32 - which was necessary as the dev div had gone off and made their own APIs that all the dev tools worked against - ie yet another layer. If they weren't part of Microsoft I'd swear the dev div was trying to become platform independent and provide dev tools for Mac or Linux, that's pretty much the direction they were working towards!
Sure, he also was responsible for the new UI that is Metro, but I can't help thinking that was a mistake driven by morons from marketing, not engineering.
It is normal for a lot of companies, but most companies are not so huge that they are about to topple over under their own weight of different, and incompatible, divisions layered side by side fighting for position.
It also matters because Microsoft is still a very important company.
Its things like this that I, as a manger, would like to hear - sure its all venting anger, but there's always some grains of truth behind it. And my job would partly be to figure out those grains and fix the problems causing them. FYI Microsoft, those problems look to be too many people not working together, effectively acting to make Windows the kind of system that will eventually fall apart under its own bloat of incompatible APIs and subsystems that seem to continually appear.
Its a shame they got rid of Sinofsky as it seemed like he was someone who had noticed this and was trying to pull things tighter together.
But you'd expect a company that is joined-up, has significant managerial talent and expects to produce a good, core product to do a little better than continually produce internally-incompatible extras - what he said about cmd.exe not being upgraded and getting powershell instead rings too true for everything at Microsoft (he did forget cscript that appeared in between them, and no doubt there will be another one sooner or later). The same definitley applies to serious system components, I know the dev div wrote WPF/Xaml becuase they just didn't want to work with the Windows team - think about that, a graphics display system that sits on top of Windows and appears to all Windows APIs as a black-dialog-box. things like that need to be part of the core system. not something totally incompatible slapped on top. And that's not the only one.
I understand Sinofsky got this abd tried to make things work, but I wonder how much politics supporting the status quo got in the way there and did for him? That's the biggest problem Microsoft has today - not technical but organisational.
Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin both connect to gmail calendar and email and work just as much as you'd expect from Outlook. I don't notice any significant difference, even though I generally use both from my phone nowadays.
Only you don't get the social-networking integration and cloud storage hell that Outlook 2013 wants you to have, and you can see tomorrow's meetings in your todo list. Crazily enough, the gmail option is a lot better than the exchange one from v2013 onwards. Just you wait and see when you get the Outlook 'upgrade'
As for admin - you get to outsource that to Google, for free. As long as you have internet (and frankly, if the internet goes down at your offices, people will either sit there not knowing what to do with themselves, or go to the pub anyway)
Link the calendar with gmail calendar, and the email with gmail emails... you've got pretty much 100% of the functionality Outlook gives you. (without the flipping Facebook integration Outlook 2013 now shoves at you, or the integration with skydrive). I use it (when I can't be bothered to read my mail using my phone, which seems to be my default view of Gmail nowadays) and it just works.
If you need centralised user accounts, OpenLDAP does that, though its tricky to make that work with a bunch of Windows clients, it does work though its not out-of-the-box. This is how it should be, after all AD is just a fancy LDAP server anyway, but with a special Windows-only protocol that Microsoft had to hand over as part of their agreement with the EU (IIRC). Good to see the Samba team has finally waded through the walls MS must have put up and got samba 4 working as a full AD server.
a lot of Vampire ones no doubt - The Hunger was particularly relevant in that Bowie ends up drained and old which ties in with other comments about potential accelerated ageing of the young donors.
Very stylish film too, lovingly shot with lots of fabulous lighting.
Why on earth would I want to cram everything into a central repository?
because its then much easier to find what you're looking for, compared to having configs scattered all over the place. (eg the mysql config being 'somewhere else' that I can never remember)
However, there is no reason why that central repository cannot be a directory called/etc with every config as a file! Simple, effective and all the benefits of a centralised repo.
calls to win32 that are "unmanaged" and so often lead to memory leaks even when you diligently try to do garbage collection
there's your problem - trying to use the native, OS from a managed sandbox environment. The dev div at MS really wanted to write everything themselves and ignore the actual platform. Trouble is, they did a piss poor job of it (read Chris Brumme's blog posts for examples, and he was the guy who write it!). If they had co-operated with the Windows division, they might have done something good, but no.. ego got in the way.
So, keep using your managed environment and good luck to you - but the problem is the detached environment layer you're using.
TBH you don't even need to do that - you have the same UI mechanisms for both, only on the phone you run your programs in full-screen, maximised style and on the desktop you run them in overlapped, windowed style.
Changing the buttons so they are bigger on the phone might be something you want to do, but then we also already have different pixel ratio screens to resize windows/fonts/etc so the same system could be used there too.
What the answer is not however, is to put the phone UI on the desktop and say "job done".
except that they occasionalyl do not - I've seen packages suplied that expect a version of a dependancy that is not available on the distro I'm installing to, and the answer on the web is always - well get the source and build it. It's happened often enough for me to worry about installing some things.
Now, when the packages are available, all is well and apt or yum works beautifully. The trouble is that the real world complexity sometimes breaks it. This can also strike when you have an incompatible version already installed.
So in this case, I think what they're doing is saying - you deliver for the packages already installed in the base OS, and any special dependancies must be packaged up with your app. In a way, its the best of both worlds - 'guaranteed' system dependancies plus a way to easily slip your own in as well.
Maybe they could have updated the existing ones, but I doubt that would be politically possible - your comment shows why.
KDE has the "plasmoids" which are panels you can put on your desktop to contain groups of icons. Not sure about the autohiding, but I guess its the closest you'll get unless you install MATE.
I rather think you mean "what programmers want and expect". CSS obviously can do great things for a designer - as showcased by CSS Zen Garden! So if they can do that (and it doesn't seem particularly too way out for clever programmers) how come that said clever programmers can't do it?
I blame the tools, if all you do is slap together some server-side presentation and display it all on the client as a pre-formatted page, with absolute coordinates, then yes - you deserve to keep doing that. If you wanted to split design from content and ship both of them for the browser to display.. then you'll have a much easier time. Too bad the tooling pretty much demands you generate those pre-formatted pages.
Maybe things will change now the browsers are a lot more compatible.
BT admits that it can also affect activities such as online gaming
whoops, sure many old grannies won't notice but a lot of people are going to notice if their xbox doesn't connect anymore. Good job Microsoft never, ever wanted it online all the time:)
Also, as the people using the CGNat system are grouped together in a group of 10 (in the trial), I wonder if the RIAA will be concerned that any one of them could download whatever they liked and blame it on one of the others, who n doubt would deny all knowledge of illegal downloading.
So no online gaming with your friends, as much illegal movies and music as you like... I guess CGNat isn't such a bad idea after all!
the overlap solution is already with us - its called a laptop because no matter how you tart up the idea of a tablet with a keyboard, you end up with something that has a screen and a keyboard and if they're not tied together, you have a tablet.
Printing is easy from a tablet - I do it from my Epson printer... thing is, I have to use the Epson app to do the printing, but I don;t really see what else I should expect, knowing my phone is not a PC like my desktop. Mobiles are relatively new technology and there's going to be areas that do not match what we want - TBH I'm not sure anyone really cares that much about printing from them.
exactly, and those Windows users who do want change - have already changed to iOS or Android. They don't want Windows again, not if it doesn't do what it used to do.
We have this in that the cabinets and cables are owned by the infrastructure company and leased out to whoever wants it. Competing ISPs can also install their kit in the exchanges and use the cables to the homes. Competing ISPs can also install their own cables (eg fibre) to the homes as well (but this tends to be very expensive).
The UK telecom situation is rather good, prices are cheap enough and service good enough to make our American cousins cry... just like our mobile ISPs.
that is global warming - unless you're one of the idiots who think GW means sunny days on a beach forever.
Here in the UK we've been having crazy weather, snow in April, rain like we've never experienced, etc.. all because the gulf stream has shifted south (meaning countries like Spain have gotten even warmer weather making them hotter and drier than usual) and the reason the gulf stream has gone south is because the Arctic ice is melting and producing cold air in the north.
Everything is connected, you're seeing something similar - like the farmers in the midwest who are seeing flood conditions, or the Indiana farmers getting desert conditions instead of the rain they usually get.
what happens is we continue to convert carbon from lumps of matter stuck safely away under the ground to free floating carbon in the atmosphere and we slowly cook ourselves in a greenhouse of our own making, of the additional energy absorbed in the atmosphere doesn't cause such dramatic weather extremes that we starve/drown/fight each other to death first!
1. doubt many people have a paypal card, and many people don;t trust them.
2. anonymous transactions are overrated, but as long as its not an online transaction that is subject to all sorts of vetting, I'm ok with it.
3. just like cash, no fees, except what you pay in taxes in order to run the treasury and the mint.
4. Try going to a market stall and buy something really cheaply, if you get home and find its bust, you have yourself to blame. No big deal, you entered into the transaction knowing the risk. I'm sure you wouldn't pay cash for a new car, for example, but how about a bag of sweets or some fruit?
Cash works, just in a different way to credit, and I think we're good to have the option. Making cash electronic sounds sensible too, as long as its under the control of the government and not a private for-profit company that will have a different agenda to your transactions.
Conficker.... suddenly it becomes clear. I know an organisation that was infected, and they ended up spending 2 weeks with a Microsoft consultant to clear everything up. The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one. Silly old Microsoft.
So, if they upgraded their PCs too.... makes perfect sense. I wouldn't have binned the old ones though, I'd have wiped the HDDs and sold them or given them away.
amen. The thing with old guys is that we've seen the fads come and go - did you jump to learn Silverlight, Linq2SQL, etc? Yes, well, fool you. The old dogs take their time to see if a tech is actually any good and worthwhile before going crazy for it - unlike a lot of younger guys who seem to think that if they haven't completed a project they can move to a different tech and then fail to complete that too, but without anyone noticing!
Its the same with a lot of stuff-.net moves so quickly that no-one really became a true expert in it, as soon as you learned one tech, it was scrapped and a different one with the same name and different version came along - ho hum. The old guys remember when you made things properly first time (or, if a MS dev, waited for version 3 before taking notice of it)
or maybe "Wizard" means "the guy who just quietly knows what to do and gets it done", no fuss, no drama, no "ooh we must do a total rewrite in Silverlight".
When you get to this status, you are a bit burned out - but only by playing office politics with ambitious morons, and playing chase-the-latest-tech-fashion. When you get to this stage you're more interested in making things work instead of just playing with the cool tech toys.
I know, I used to be a tech guy who did it all in the evenings, and wanted a job where I was just a techie doing pretty much the same... today, I don't give a fig about tech for its own sake, I just care about making the solutions to peoples problems.
their other core market was kids who wanted a secure messaging platform, apparently this is the killer feature everyone wants as its also more of a group messaging thing rather than a one-to-one text approach (ie so keeping in touch with a load of mates is easier, like the IRC chat version of sms text messages).
I don't think BB is the only choice of work phone anymore as you can get secure message apps for Android or iPhone nowadays, but now they're back,maybe IT depts will not bother to look for alternatives and will simply upgrade everyone who used to have an old BB with a new BB.
I've seen people use the BB keyboards, they use their thumbs to press the keys, feeling the bumps to decide which key to press. Our fingers are very sensitive, so can pick out one tiny key from another like this. Where you go wrong is to assume you have to peck at each key with pinpoint accuracy, you don't, you just need to feel the key to press it.
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no, Sinofsky realised they had this mess and did what he could to consolidate it - by scrapping the WPF team in devdiv and bringing the technology into the base platform division - so all the other layers on top of Windows could use it, rather than have it as a layer that sat between windows and the rest of the system. He also created the WinRT API to replace win32 - which was necessary as the dev div had gone off and made their own APIs that all the dev tools worked against - ie yet another layer. If they weren't part of Microsoft I'd swear the dev div was trying to become platform independent and provide dev tools for Mac or Linux, that's pretty much the direction they were working towards!
Sure, he also was responsible for the new UI that is Metro, but I can't help thinking that was a mistake driven by morons from marketing, not engineering.
It is normal for a lot of companies, but most companies are not so huge that they are about to topple over under their own weight of different, and incompatible, divisions layered side by side fighting for position.
It also matters because Microsoft is still a very important company.
Its things like this that I, as a manger, would like to hear - sure its all venting anger, but there's always some grains of truth behind it. And my job would partly be to figure out those grains and fix the problems causing them. FYI Microsoft, those problems look to be too many people not working together, effectively acting to make Windows the kind of system that will eventually fall apart under its own bloat of incompatible APIs and subsystems that seem to continually appear.
Its a shame they got rid of Sinofsky as it seemed like he was someone who had noticed this and was trying to pull things tighter together.
But you'd expect a company that is joined-up, has significant managerial talent and expects to produce a good, core product to do a little better than continually produce internally-incompatible extras - what he said about cmd.exe not being upgraded and getting powershell instead rings too true for everything at Microsoft (he did forget cscript that appeared in between them, and no doubt there will be another one sooner or later). The same definitley applies to serious system components, I know the dev div wrote WPF/Xaml becuase they just didn't want to work with the Windows team - think about that, a graphics display system that sits on top of Windows and appears to all Windows APIs as a black-dialog-box. things like that need to be part of the core system. not something totally incompatible slapped on top. And that's not the only one.
I understand Sinofsky got this abd tried to make things work, but I wonder how much politics supporting the status quo got in the way there and did for him? That's the biggest problem Microsoft has today - not technical but organisational.
Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin both connect to gmail calendar and email and work just as much as you'd expect from Outlook. I don't notice any significant difference, even though I generally use both from my phone nowadays.
Only you don't get the social-networking integration and cloud storage hell that Outlook 2013 wants you to have, and you can see tomorrow's meetings in your todo list. Crazily enough, the gmail option is a lot better than the exchange one from v2013 onwards. Just you wait and see when you get the Outlook 'upgrade'
As for admin - you get to outsource that to Google, for free. As long as you have internet (and frankly, if the internet goes down at your offices, people will either sit there not knowing what to do with themselves, or go to the pub anyway)
I don't know - Thunderbird and the Lightning calendar plugin do me just as well as Outlook and its inbuilt calendar does (better actually, since Outlook decided you didn't need to know what appointments you had coming up tomorrow something I found useful for early meetings)
Link the calendar with gmail calendar, and the email with gmail emails... you've got pretty much 100% of the functionality Outlook gives you. (without the flipping Facebook integration Outlook 2013 now shoves at you, or the integration with skydrive). I use it (when I can't be bothered to read my mail using my phone, which seems to be my default view of Gmail nowadays) and it just works.
If you need centralised user accounts, OpenLDAP does that, though its tricky to make that work with a bunch of Windows clients, it does work though its not out-of-the-box. This is how it should be, after all AD is just a fancy LDAP server anyway, but with a special Windows-only protocol that Microsoft had to hand over as part of their agreement with the EU (IIRC). Good to see the Samba team has finally waded through the walls MS must have put up and got samba 4 working as a full AD server.
a lot of Vampire ones no doubt - The Hunger was particularly relevant in that Bowie ends up drained and old which ties in with other comments about potential accelerated ageing of the young donors.
Very stylish film too, lovingly shot with lots of fabulous lighting.
Why on earth would I want to cram everything into a central repository?
because its then much easier to find what you're looking for, compared to having configs scattered all over the place. (eg the mysql config being 'somewhere else' that I can never remember)
However, there is no reason why that central repository cannot be a directory called /etc with every config as a file! Simple, effective and all the benefits of a centralised repo.
calls to win32 that are "unmanaged" and so often lead to memory leaks even when you diligently try to do garbage collection
there's your problem - trying to use the native, OS from a managed sandbox environment. The dev div at MS really wanted to write everything themselves and ignore the actual platform. Trouble is, they did a piss poor job of it (read Chris Brumme's blog posts for examples, and he was the guy who write it!). If they had co-operated with the Windows division, they might have done something good, but no.. ego got in the way.
So, keep using your managed environment and good luck to you - but the problem is the detached environment layer you're using.
TBH you don't even need to do that - you have the same UI mechanisms for both, only on the phone you run your programs in full-screen, maximised style and on the desktop you run them in overlapped, windowed style.
Changing the buttons so they are bigger on the phone might be something you want to do, but then we also already have different pixel ratio screens to resize windows/fonts/etc so the same system could be used there too.
What the answer is not however, is to put the phone UI on the desktop and say "job done".
except that they occasionalyl do not - I've seen packages suplied that expect a version of a dependancy that is not available on the distro I'm installing to, and the answer on the web is always - well get the source and build it. It's happened often enough for me to worry about installing some things.
Now, when the packages are available, all is well and apt or yum works beautifully. The trouble is that the real world complexity sometimes breaks it. This can also strike when you have an incompatible version already installed.
So in this case, I think what they're doing is saying - you deliver for the packages already installed in the base OS, and any special dependancies must be packaged up with your app. In a way, its the best of both worlds - 'guaranteed' system dependancies plus a way to easily slip your own in as well.
Maybe they could have updated the existing ones, but I doubt that would be politically possible - your comment shows why.
KDE has the "plasmoids" which are panels you can put on your desktop to contain groups of icons. Not sure about the autohiding, but I guess its the closest you'll get unless you install MATE.
I rather think you mean "what programmers want and expect". CSS obviously can do great things for a designer - as showcased by CSS Zen Garden! So if they can do that (and it doesn't seem particularly too way out for clever programmers) how come that said clever programmers can't do it?
I blame the tools, if all you do is slap together some server-side presentation and display it all on the client as a pre-formatted page, with absolute coordinates, then yes - you deserve to keep doing that. If you wanted to split design from content and ship both of them for the browser to display.. then you'll have a much easier time. Too bad the tooling pretty much demands you generate those pre-formatted pages.
Maybe things will change now the browsers are a lot more compatible.
sure about that, from TFA:
BT admits that it can also affect activities such as online gaming
whoops, sure many old grannies won't notice but a lot of people are going to notice if their xbox doesn't connect anymore. Good job Microsoft never, ever wanted it online all the time :)
Also, as the people using the CGNat system are grouped together in a group of 10 (in the trial), I wonder if the RIAA will be concerned that any one of them could download whatever they liked and blame it on one of the others, who n doubt would deny all knowledge of illegal downloading.
So no online gaming with your friends, as much illegal movies and music as you like... I guess CGNat isn't such a bad idea after all!
who plugs a mouse in anymore - surely you have a bluetooth one. I mean I even have a wireless mouse on my desktop.
the overlap solution is already with us - its called a laptop because no matter how you tart up the idea of a tablet with a keyboard, you end up with something that has a screen and a keyboard and if they're not tied together, you have a tablet.
Printing is easy from a tablet - I do it from my Epson printer... thing is, I have to use the Epson app to do the printing, but I don;t really see what else I should expect, knowing my phone is not a PC like my desktop. Mobiles are relatively new technology and there's going to be areas that do not match what we want - TBH I'm not sure anyone really cares that much about printing from them.
exactly, and those Windows users who do want change - have already changed to iOS or Android. They don't want Windows again, not if it doesn't do what it used to do.
We have this in that the cabinets and cables are owned by the infrastructure company and leased out to whoever wants it. Competing ISPs can also install their kit in the exchanges and use the cables to the homes. Competing ISPs can also install their own cables (eg fibre) to the homes as well (but this tends to be very expensive).
The UK telecom situation is rather good, prices are cheap enough and service good enough to make our American cousins cry... just like our mobile ISPs.
that is global warming - unless you're one of the idiots who think GW means sunny days on a beach forever.
Here in the UK we've been having crazy weather, snow in April, rain like we've never experienced, etc.. all because the gulf stream has shifted south (meaning countries like Spain have gotten even warmer weather making them hotter and drier than usual) and the reason the gulf stream has gone south is because the Arctic ice is melting and producing cold air in the north.
Everything is connected, you're seeing something similar - like the farmers in the midwest who are seeing flood conditions, or the Indiana farmers getting desert conditions instead of the rain they usually get.
what happens is we continue to convert carbon from lumps of matter stuck safely away under the ground to free floating carbon in the atmosphere and we slowly cook ourselves in a greenhouse of our own making, of the additional energy absorbed in the atmosphere doesn't cause such dramatic weather extremes that we starve/drown/fight each other to death first!
1. doubt many people have a paypal card, and many people don;t trust them.
2. anonymous transactions are overrated, but as long as its not an online transaction that is subject to all sorts of vetting, I'm ok with it.
3. just like cash, no fees, except what you pay in taxes in order to run the treasury and the mint.
4. Try going to a market stall and buy something really cheaply, if you get home and find its bust, you have yourself to blame. No big deal, you entered into the transaction knowing the risk. I'm sure you wouldn't pay cash for a new car, for example, but how about a bag of sweets or some fruit?
Cash works, just in a different way to credit, and I think we're good to have the option. Making cash electronic sounds sensible too, as long as its under the control of the government and not a private for-profit company that will have a different agenda to your transactions.
Conficker.... suddenly it becomes clear. I know an organisation that was infected, and they ended up spending 2 weeks with a Microsoft consultant to clear everything up. The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one. Silly old Microsoft.
So, if they upgraded their PCs too.... makes perfect sense. I wouldn't have binned the old ones though, I'd have wiped the HDDs and sold them or given them away.
amen. The thing with old guys is that we've seen the fads come and go - did you jump to learn Silverlight, Linq2SQL, etc? Yes, well, fool you. The old dogs take their time to see if a tech is actually any good and worthwhile before going crazy for it - unlike a lot of younger guys who seem to think that if they haven't completed a project they can move to a different tech and then fail to complete that too, but without anyone noticing!
Its the same with a lot of stuff- .net moves so quickly that no-one really became a true expert in it, as soon as you learned one tech, it was scrapped and a different one with the same name and different version came along - ho hum. The old guys remember when you made things properly first time (or, if a MS dev, waited for version 3 before taking notice of it)
or maybe "Wizard" means "the guy who just quietly knows what to do and gets it done", no fuss, no drama, no "ooh we must do a total rewrite in Silverlight".
When you get to this status, you are a bit burned out - but only by playing office politics with ambitious morons, and playing chase-the-latest-tech-fashion. When you get to this stage you're more interested in making things work instead of just playing with the cool tech toys.
I know, I used to be a tech guy who did it all in the evenings, and wanted a job where I was just a techie doing pretty much the same... today, I don't give a fig about tech for its own sake, I just care about making the solutions to peoples problems.
their other core market was kids who wanted a secure messaging platform, apparently this is the killer feature everyone wants as its also more of a group messaging thing rather than a one-to-one text approach (ie so keeping in touch with a load of mates is easier, like the IRC chat version of sms text messages).
I don't think BB is the only choice of work phone anymore as you can get secure message apps for Android or iPhone nowadays, but now they're back,maybe IT depts will not bother to look for alternatives and will simply upgrade everyone who used to have an old BB with a new BB.
I've seen people use the BB keyboards, they use their thumbs to press the keys, feeling the bumps to decide which key to press. Our fingers are very sensitive, so can pick out one tiny key from another like this. Where you go wrong is to assume you have to peck at each key with pinpoint accuracy, you don't, you just need to feel the key to press it.