Wow, you run dozens, maybe hundreds of different hardware configurations on a single Linux system for testing purposes? Doesnt seem a good way to test your app compatability.
And believe it or not, but some people at Microsoft actually run Linux too. This smart one is even in the CREDITS file.
No, its not really excessive. When I worked there, I usually had 4 machines for myself, in my office, and I did development work. Oh, and I had a laptop as well. Testers often used, many, many more machines.
Then add the build machines, servers, a laptop for many people, machines for temp/consultants, people VPN'ing in from home, and it easily makes 300k.
No, you dont have to purchase anything, you just need to download and run the MSN Messenger software.
You could run the software on your friends computer, a computer given to you freely, or the unlocked down PC at your internet cafe, etc etc.
The contest may be limited to the people that run Windows already on their computer, but no judge is going to accept some argument that this messenger contest is out there causing people to buy a copy of Windows so they can run MSN Messenger and thus its gambling.
MSFT has plenty of lawyers, and I'm sure they've already considered this issue.
Once the protocol is understood, this shouldn't be too difficult to do. Likely it'll be on a secure site, maybe password protected. Doesn't matter. The modified web browser waits until the user visits http://vote.us.gov or wherever, watches the variables being passed, and simply modifies them.
It needs to be more complex than that.
Presumeably the system atleast returns a confirmation page saying "You voted for X", and they'd noticed it read "Bush" rather than "Gore". A hack would have to find the correct occurance here and fix that too.
This device also answers the question "should I go now" (vs. later or not at all)
Presumeable you're asking whether you should leave when you're still at the home or office, where I'm guessing a geek with one of these would have net access, and thus able to answer the question better, in color and free at http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/pugetsoundtraffic/cameras/
> Why doesn't he just quit? I'm sure he got some $ when AOL acquired nullsoft, and now they are curbing a great mind.
> He should go on his own again. He already founded one successful company and 3 great technologies.
You dont know the terms of his buyout.
I was at a company bought out by MSFT and there were terms for atleast one critical person that made sure they remained for 2 years to vest a large chunk of stock.
4 years seems like a long time, but maybe they viewed his programming of Nullsoft products as so essential to the company that terms were written requiring him to be there a number of years to full vest some large chunk of stock.
It is a good thing. But OS X doesn't try and prevent you from removing those tools and replacing them.
And the value of this is what?
If you want to use another tool, you can install it and use it on Windows XP as well. But you cant remove the HTML renderer because Windows needs it to access Windows Update and a number of other core OS features. I'm sure if you removed Quartz libraries, OS X would have some problems as well. MS has used the "browser" as simply another GUI toolkit.
I'm suggesting that users should be able to cleanly replace the implementations shipped in favour of their chosen implementations if they so choose.
As a user, your free to replace whatever you'd like on your copy of Windows. Purchase Eudora if you'd like. Or Word. Having a copy of Outlook Express or Wordpad installed doesnt stop you from doing that.
If you use another browser, why do you care some components of IE are installed, doing rendering for parts of the OS UI? Or do you just want to dictate what technologies MS can use to build its OS (but other companies are able to choose freely)?
That's a totally different case from IE, where a great deal of time has obviously been spent pulling all kinds of bullshit to make it as difficult as possible to remove it and replace it with Mozilla. There is no technical reason it should be difficult
Thats bullshit. I've built non-web application UI in HTML, and its hard enough making it work in multiple versions of IE, much less Mozilla.
Go try and write a Microsoft's Add/Remove Programs, or the Organize Favorites feature of MSN Explorer so that it doesnt matter if Mozilla or IE is the underlying engine and tell me its not difficult.
Do you understand the difference between an OS and an application?
And do you understand the difference between a usable consumer desktop and something that boots to an empty shell?
I think an OS that is useful without additional commercial software is valuable. OS X has a browser, email, text editor out of the box. And free dev tools. As a consumer, I think thats a *good* thing.
As a developer, OS X would be better if there was a standard HTML widget that I could depend on. I presume Apple will fix that soon enough. Microsoft did that long ago.
By your logic, should't all common applications be "integrated" with the OS?
Not common, but essential ones. Like a browser, text editor, email reader, media viewer, and the like. And that list evolves over time. Today it includes a browser, 8 years ago it didnt. What about other applications, like email, TCP/IP or disk defraggers? Are you suggesting we should all be buying our email app, our TCP/IP stack, or our disk defragger like we did 10 years ago, rather than having it come with the OS?
MSOffice could be a system component too.
There is already Wordpad/Notepad and Outlook Express for the essential functions. But if integrating Office gave me spellcheck in every text area rather than just Office apps, I'd love it.
How many "consumer" computers are used without an internet connection? Maybe MSN should just be integrated into the OS too?
Windows XP ships with MSN. AOL still sees plenty of use though.
An OS isn't an application program. OSs which work well are designed by those who understand that fact. They provide a critical abstraction layer between applications and the hardware, enabling the users to run the applications they choose with the minimal of unecessary effort. That's ALL they do. "Integrating" applications is bad design, from a technical point of view.
An OS has all kinds of applications, and nothing in Windows keeps you from running the browser of your choice.
A simplified example is suggesting you prefer 'pine' to 'mail' and want to remove the 'mail' application from a linux machine. But various other applications require 'mail' for certain shell scripts to work. A web browser is alot more complicated than a simple MUA (and thus more likely to break something if you swap in a different one), but both can certainly have real reasons for being 'integrated'.
The problem wasn't just giving the browser away, it was leveraging their OS monopoly to obtain a browser monopoly. Yes, legally, if you have a monopoly there are some things you can't do that everyone else can do.
Of course Microsoft was not declared a monopoly until after these decisions were made. You cant suggest that their decisions on pricing of IE should have been made with the forsight that they'd later be declared a monopoly.
It's never been 'a Technically Right Choice' in any sense of the word, that's just horseshit. It's been done for one reason and one reason only - to sabotage the consent decree.
How many consumer desktop OS's ship without a browser? Its clearly a key feature for any OS - so key that its an essential part, like email. You cant deliver a consumer OS w/o it.
So if a browser is a key feature, why not use its functions elsewhere in the OS? Particularly as a way to work toward next generation UI? Doing things like Add/Remove Programs or file Explorer sidebars in HTML has real use. And its a good way to for your dev team learn how future UI is going to be built and what features and tools you'll need to create. More and more 'apps' are web sites with HTML UI, its logical that UI on the desktop might be developed with similar technology.
> haha - $8 - you are fucking kidding me? > I havent seen a movie in YEARS worth eight > fucking dollars > See my post about my 3 12:01 am DLP > showing tickets for AotC > I paid $4 a peice
Thats because you live in the middle of fucking nowhere.
"Wichita" as you pointed out in your other post.
You can probably buy land there at 10 cents an acre or something. Where I live in Manhattan, land is a bit more expensive and so movies are $10 a pop. But then I've also got the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and half a dozen movie theaters within 6 blocks, where you're lucky if you have a Gas-n-Go less than a couple miles.
> I find it amazing how many people don't > want to *login* to their computers.
Yes, because most of these people just want to use the computer to get something done, and its the job of the computer to make that easier, rather than toss more obstacles to getting things done.
Because they didnt have to login, or didnt have to su to get things done in the past, they see this extra work as a waste and thus want to avoid it.
Computers should be smart enough to handle these things. Like auto updating patches to the OS or virus signatures, or compressing big files, or other 'routine' stuff.
Maybe extend the analogy to 'have the computer auto-empty the trash for you'. Most people can see that this might be a bad idea, because sometimes you mistakenly delete the wrong file. Then tell them that having to sudo for things rather than always being root is the same - it keeps you from making they types of mistakes that are difficult to recover from.
Anyway, everyone has a certain ammount of customization to their car. They use their favorite radio station.
I play my mp3's someone else plays their CD on my PC. Thats not UI, thats application usage.
They adjust the seat. They roll down the windows. They adjust the mirrors.
Some use large fonts, some use high contrast. Those have been parts of the OS long before themeing. Those are things to allow use reasonable use, not personal preference.
In general, themes dont make a system more usable, they just swap one color for another or bit maps that people choose "because they look cool" or "i like it" not because they cant reach the My Documents folder with one vs. the other.
Should these things be standardized? Absolutely not. Sure, I found it a pain to have to adjust the seat after my girlfriend drove me home, but it was definitely better than her driving without reaching the pedals.
But what if the difference wasnt the mirror angle, but the fact that the dashboard had animated blue dots on the speedometer rather than the traditional red lines? Or was set for meters/hr rather than miles/hr because she thought it'd be 'neat'?
Cars do not generally allow you to skin the speedometer or the oil light, or the brake warning or the blinker indicator. Someone decides that white or red are good markers for your speed, how big the notches should be and you are stuck. You dont go skinning them blue or using dots rather than lines, or animating the whole damn thing.
How much are you willing to pay to live in a
society where people worse off than you don't hunt you down for food? Don't you think it would be cheaper to spend some of your money on wealth redistribution rather than all of your money on fortress housing, private security, and corpse removal?
So paying what is essentially a bribe, so people dont rob/kill you is better than spending the money protecting yourself?
And a "Market" for governments assumes that people can freely choose which government they want. Thats not the case -- many people cant change citizenship to a nation that fits what they like.
Then you're horribly naive about software development. You can never just focus everything just on fixing bugs until they're all gone. Does Linux? No. Almost all software ships with bugs, its simply a matter of triaging the bugs and fixing the most important.
This announcement just shows that they're moving the bar a bit - spending more effort on fixing bugs.
And this bug fix month isnt anything new to Microsoft software development. I know, for example, the MSN Explorer group had regular "Bug Fix Thursdays" where all development for that day was on bug fixes - no new code.
They moved away from version numbers because supposedly the typical end user didnt really understand them, and that the 'year' names, like Windows 95, Office 97, Frontpage 2002 were something that could more easily be understood as 'new' or 'current'.
Also, going from 'Windows 3.1' / 'Windows NT 4' to 'Windows 98' / 'Windows2000' and then to something like 'Windows XP' they are more clearly able to market something as an entirely new product rather than just an upgrade of an existing product. This should make it easier to sell to the end user - its brand new, not just a fix of a few features.
> I'm not convinced that even MS software will work.
It will. Maybe not Netscape or Outlook, but Outlook Express will.
The mail system is built using the same infrastructure as Hotmail, and so I presume it will eventually be accessable via Outlook, and possibly the web site.
And this solution makes sense. MS has a huge and very popular system for dealing with email - Hotmail, and it fits in well with their.Net plans. Why should they not use it?
No, its not refusing to buy exports from Ukraine, its imposing a 100% tariff. Read the actual release.
And the post to which I was replying indicated that we were refusing to allow them to buy goods ("deny a country supplies"), which is also incorrect. They can buy whatever they'd like, we're just imposing a very large tariff on what they export.
> This law, or any law the Ukraine makes on CD
piracy, is a law on paper only.
As are most Ukrainian laws, as the level of corruption there is insane.
> The gov't is more concerned with supplying
> food and utilities to their people
No, they are more concerned with murdering journalists and lining their pockets with bribes from those running the CD piracy industry.
> deny a country supplies
They're imposing a tarrif on exports, not denying imports.
Most Ukrainians cant afford many imported goods to begin with since their so expensive compared to the local economy. Many grow their own vegetables in their gardens, they dont import them from Europe.
Britney Spears and Microsoft make enough, but plenty of others dont. While Ukraine alone might not make the difference between life or death for a developer, piracy en total still redirects much $ from the developer to the duplicator.
China may be an issue, but it doesnt excuse Ukraine. If they continue to ignore the rights of content creators, they'll be unable to get more western businesses to move in and their economy will continue to flounder.
Corruption is a huge issue hurting the people of Ukraine and the support of piracy is just one example of it. They didnt thumb their noses at the US because of privacy issues, they did it because of the strength of the media piracy industry.
Journalists are already being killed for voicing opinions those in government dont like. Just a year back, 31-year-old journalist Georgy Gongadze was found headless in a ditch.
> Well, when it gets too repressive, now I know where I can go.
Yea, to a country that regulary kills those that speak out against the government?
I knew Georgy Gongadze and his wife briefly, and because of their wonderful government, he was beheaded. You want to explain to his two children, now living in the US, about how repressive our government is?
> They speak Russian in the Ukraine, right?
In the East. The official language is Ukrainian, but many in the eastern part generally speak Russian.
We have the luxury to argue about issues like this in the press. They dont.
Slashdot Mirror
Because of course when someone implemented this, they'd also show a "dont show me this warning again" and it would go away.
Or even come disabled by default in japanese installs.
duuuh.
Wow, you run dozens, maybe hundreds of different hardware configurations on a single Linux system for testing purposes? Doesnt seem a good way to test your app compatability.
And believe it or not, but some people at Microsoft actually run Linux too. This smart one is even in the CREDITS file.
No, its not really excessive. When I worked there, I usually had 4 machines for myself, in my office, and I did development work. Oh, and I had a laptop as well. Testers often used, many, many more machines.
Then add the build machines, servers, a laptop for many people, machines for temp/consultants, people VPN'ing in from home, and it easily makes 300k.
> Try these instructions: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=255 93
So you just didnt even bother to read the part where he said he did that,
"But on three different machines I've tried it on, Mail.app hangs soon as you click that icon."
Might be useful to actually read the post you reply to.
No, you dont have to purchase anything, you just need to download and run the MSN Messenger software.
You could run the software on your friends computer, a computer given to you freely, or the unlocked down PC at your internet cafe, etc etc.
The contest may be limited to the people that run Windows already on their computer, but no judge is going to accept some argument that this messenger contest is out there causing people to buy a copy of Windows so they can run MSN Messenger and thus its gambling.
MSFT has plenty of lawyers, and I'm sure they've already considered this issue.
Once the protocol is understood, this shouldn't be too difficult to do. Likely it'll be on a secure site, maybe password protected. Doesn't matter. The modified web browser waits until the user visits http://vote.us.gov or wherever, watches the variables being passed, and simply modifies them.
It needs to be more complex than that.
Presumeably the system atleast returns a confirmation page saying "You voted for X", and they'd noticed it read "Bush" rather than "Gore". A hack would have to find the correct occurance here and fix that too.
This device also answers the question "should I go now" (vs. later or not at all)
Presumeable you're asking whether you should leave when you're still at the home or office, where I'm guessing a geek with one of these would have net access, and thus able to answer the question better, in color and free at http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/pugetsoundtraffic/cameras/
You dont know the terms of his buyout.
I was at a company bought out by MSFT and there were terms for atleast one critical person that made sure they remained for 2 years to vest a large chunk of stock.
4 years seems like a long time, but maybe they viewed his programming of Nullsoft products as so essential to the company that terms were written requiring him to be there a number of years to full vest some large chunk of stock.
If you want to use another tool, you can install it and use it on Windows XP as well. But you cant remove the HTML renderer because Windows needs it to access Windows Update and a number of other core OS features. I'm sure if you removed Quartz libraries, OS X would have some problems as well. MS has used the "browser" as simply another GUI toolkit.
As a user, your free to replace whatever you'd like on your copy of Windows. Purchase Eudora if you'd like. Or Word. Having a copy of Outlook Express or Wordpad installed doesnt stop you from doing that.If you use another browser, why do you care some components of IE are installed, doing rendering for parts of the OS UI? Or do you just want to dictate what technologies MS can use to build its OS (but other companies are able to choose freely)?
Thats bullshit. I've built non-web application UI in HTML, and its hard enough making it work in multiple versions of IE, much less Mozilla.Go try and write a Microsoft's Add/Remove Programs, or the Organize Favorites feature of MSN Explorer so that it doesnt matter if Mozilla or IE is the underlying engine and tell me its not difficult.
I think an OS that is useful without additional commercial software is valuable. OS X has a browser, email, text editor out of the box. And free dev tools. As a consumer, I think thats a *good* thing.
As a developer, OS X would be better if there was a standard HTML widget that I could depend on. I presume Apple will fix that soon enough. Microsoft did that long ago.
Not common, but essential ones. Like a browser, text editor, email reader, media viewer, and the like. And that list evolves over time. Today it includes a browser, 8 years ago it didnt. What about other applications, like email, TCP/IP or disk defraggers? Are you suggesting we should all be buying our email app, our TCP/IP stack, or our disk defragger like we did 10 years ago, rather than having it come with the OS? There is already Wordpad/Notepad and Outlook Express for the essential functions. But if integrating Office gave me spellcheck in every text area rather than just Office apps, I'd love it. Windows XP ships with MSN. AOL still sees plenty of use though. An OS has all kinds of applications, and nothing in Windows keeps you from running the browser of your choice.A simplified example is suggesting you prefer 'pine' to 'mail' and want to remove the 'mail' application from a linux machine. But various other applications require 'mail' for certain shell scripts to work. A web browser is alot more complicated than a simple MUA (and thus more likely to break something if you swap in a different one), but both can certainly have real reasons for being 'integrated'.
So if a browser is a key feature, why not use its functions elsewhere in the OS? Particularly as a way to work toward next generation UI? Doing things like Add/Remove Programs or file Explorer sidebars in HTML has real use. And its a good way to for your dev team learn how future UI is going to be built and what features and tools you'll need to create. More and more 'apps' are web sites with HTML UI, its logical that UI on the desktop might be developed with similar technology.
> haha - $8 - you are fucking kidding me?
> I havent seen a movie in YEARS worth eight
> fucking dollars
> See my post about my 3 12:01 am DLP
> showing tickets for AotC
> I paid $4 a peice
Thats because you live in the middle of fucking nowhere.
"Wichita" as you pointed out in your other post.
You can probably buy land there at 10 cents an acre or something. Where I live in Manhattan, land is a bit more expensive and so movies are $10 a pop. But then I've also got the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and half a dozen movie theaters within 6 blocks, where you're lucky if you have a Gas-n-Go less than a couple miles.
Quality of life. Enjoy your $4 movies.
> I find it amazing how many people don't
> want to *login* to their computers.
Yes, because most of these people just want to use the computer to get something done, and its the job of the computer to make that easier, rather than toss more obstacles to getting things done.
Because they didnt have to login, or didnt have to su to get things done in the past, they see this extra work as a waste and thus want to avoid it.
Computers should be smart enough to handle these things. Like auto updating patches to the OS or virus signatures, or compressing big files, or other 'routine' stuff.
Maybe extend the analogy to 'have the computer auto-empty the trash for you'. Most people can see that this might be a bad idea, because sometimes you mistakenly delete the wrong file. Then tell them that having to sudo for things rather than always being root is the same - it keeps you from making they types of mistakes that are difficult to recover from.
Anyway, everyone has a certain ammount of customization to their car. They use their favorite radio station.
I play my mp3's someone else plays their CD on my PC. Thats not UI, thats application usage.
They adjust the seat. They roll down the windows. They adjust the mirrors.
Some use large fonts, some use high contrast. Those have been parts of the OS long before themeing. Those are things to allow use reasonable use, not personal preference.
In general, themes dont make a system more usable, they just swap one color for another or bit maps that people choose "because they look cool" or "i like it" not because they cant reach the My Documents folder with one vs. the other.
Should these things be standardized? Absolutely not. Sure, I found it a pain to have to adjust the seat after my girlfriend drove me home, but it was definitely better than her driving without reaching the pedals.
But what if the difference wasnt the mirror angle, but the fact that the dashboard had animated blue dots on the speedometer rather than the traditional red lines? Or was set for meters/hr rather than miles/hr because she thought it'd be 'neat'?
Cars do not generally allow you to skin the speedometer or the oil light, or the brake warning or the blinker indicator. Someone decides that white or red are good markers for your speed, how big the notches should be and you are stuck. You dont go skinning them blue or using dots rather than lines, or animating the whole damn thing.
The car analogy is a poor one.
So paying what is essentially a bribe, so people dont rob/kill you is better than spending the money protecting yourself?
And a "Market" for governments assumes that people can freely choose which government they want. Thats not the case -- many people cant change citizenship to a nation that fits what they like.
Your users would scream long before MS did.
Then you're horribly naive about software development. You can never just focus everything just on fixing bugs until they're all gone. Does Linux? No. Almost all software ships with bugs, its simply a matter of triaging the bugs and fixing the most important.
This announcement just shows that they're moving the bar a bit - spending more effort on fixing bugs.
And this bug fix month isnt anything new to Microsoft software development. I know, for example, the MSN Explorer group had regular "Bug Fix Thursdays" where all development for that day was on bug fixes - no new code.
They moved away from version numbers because supposedly the typical end user didnt really understand them, and that the 'year' names, like Windows 95, Office 97, Frontpage 2002 were something that could more easily be understood as 'new' or 'current'.
Also, going from 'Windows 3.1' / 'Windows NT 4' to 'Windows 98' / 'Windows2000' and then to something like 'Windows XP' they are more clearly able to market something as an entirely new product rather than just an upgrade of an existing product. This should make it easier to sell to the end user - its brand new, not just a fix of a few features.
> Does it work with outlook express?
Yes, it does.
> I'm not convinced that even MS software will work.
It will. Maybe not Netscape or Outlook, but Outlook Express will.
The mail system is built using the same infrastructure as Hotmail, and so I presume it will eventually be accessable via Outlook, and possibly the web site.
And this solution makes sense. MS has a huge and very popular system for dealing with email - Hotmail, and it fits in well with their .Net plans. Why should they not use it?
No, its not refusing to buy exports from Ukraine, its imposing a 100% tariff. Read the actual release.
And the post to which I was replying indicated that we were refusing to allow them to buy goods ("deny a country supplies"), which is also incorrect. They can buy whatever they'd like, we're just imposing a very large tariff on what they export.
As are most Ukrainian laws, as the level of corruption there is insane.
No, they are more concerned with murdering journalists and lining their pockets with bribes from those running the CD piracy industry.
They're imposing a tarrif on exports, not denying imports.
Most Ukrainians cant afford many imported goods to begin with since their so expensive compared to the local economy. Many grow their own vegetables in their gardens, they dont import them from Europe.
Britney Spears and Microsoft make enough, but plenty of others dont. While Ukraine alone might not make the difference between life or death for a developer, piracy en total still redirects much $ from the developer to the duplicator.
China may be an issue, but it doesnt excuse Ukraine. If they continue to ignore the rights of content creators, they'll be unable to get more western businesses to move in and their economy will continue to flounder.
Corruption is a huge issue hurting the people of Ukraine and the support of piracy is just one example of it. They didnt thumb their noses at the US because of privacy issues, they did it because of the strength of the media piracy industry.
Unfortunatley, Ukraine already has this problem.
Journalists are already being killed for voicing opinions those in government dont like. Just a year back, 31-year-old journalist Georgy Gongadze was found headless in a ditch.
> Well, when it gets too repressive, now I know where I can go.
Yea, to a country that regulary kills those that speak out against the government?
I knew Georgy Gongadze and his wife briefly, and because of their wonderful government, he was beheaded. You want to explain to his two children, now living in the US, about how repressive our government is?
> They speak Russian in the Ukraine, right?
In the East. The official language is Ukrainian, but many in the eastern part generally speak Russian.
We have the luxury to argue about issues like this in the press. They dont.