I find it hard to believe MS has implemented some sort of packet prioritization into their TCP/IP stack/windows update to allow downloads in other apps to remain unaffected...
It's called the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (aka BITS) and it's quite clever. Do a google search for it and learn something.
Why do I have to replace system level drivers for Sqlserver?
So that it runs faster.
Why should I have to install the latest IE for a non-internet facing repository? I've never seen a beta of postgres/mysql demand that linux/bsd kernel drivers be replaced.
Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms, and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used for educational and recreational use only.
The specific patents are referenced here, in an excerpt from the comp.compression FAQ:
LZ77 Patents
Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent 5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of court.)
To be fair, Kaplan would not dispute that his company was doomed anyway for at least two reasons: mismanagement by GO, and the fact that pen computing was probably ahead of its time.... and they were designing their own Hardware, and their own OS, and only wanted Microsoft to write Apps for them.
You might want to read Barbarians Led By Bill Gates for some insight. Or search on Amazon for it, and search inside it for "Furthermore, Go was building its software".
Eolas is rather questionable but that doesn't mean this case is without merit. MS has done kind of thing before. For example, Stacker and Goldtouch.
Stacker was a case of patent collision. The same algorithm was independently patented by two people, and the patent office gave out TWO separate patents. Microsoft got the rights to one, Stacker got the rights to the other.
So I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Microsoft has done this kind of thing before".
There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.
Encoding as MPEG2 would also have been very unprofessional, as it doesn't qualify as a "quality source". At the very least, the color resolution has been halved from the original source material.
Which reminds me of an amusing story. My company had a third party do a web video for us at one point. The third party then asked us what format we wanted it in. I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard.
Pity it won't play on most systems because you need a licensed decoder to be able to play MPEG2.
This is exactly the reason I can't get myself to accept the Xbox. They are catering to, as Penny Arcade put it nicely, the Generic Frat Fuck.
How do you figure? What about the XBOX, exactly, caters only to "the Generic Frat Fuck"? What's different here to what Sony's doing? And how the hell did you get modded insightful? Because your post shows nearly zero insight - just a link to penny arcade.
Apparently, the BBC managed to completely blow a huge surprise which was planned for this season of Doctor Who - which was that at the end of this season, the Doctor would die.
So Eccleston was only ever meant to be around for one season - and it was meant to be a huge shocker.
Isn't that a security problem though? Being able to see which other apps have files open lets you know which other apps are on the system. For the military security specs, that might be an issue - which may explain why they do it that way.
I think that the naming convention defined by the EU was to insure that there would be no confusion between the versions of windows with or without WMP. Otherwise the EU commission could get blamed for consumer confusion if the naming convention was not considered clear and concise (just the kind of FUD that MS might do to make the commission look bad).
You'd be wrong.
Microsoft's proposed name: Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.
EU Dictated name: Windows XP N
Which do you think gives less confusion over what it is? Me, personally, I think that Microsoft's name is just a smidge more obvious.
The difference is that Xerox let Apple use their ideas, in exchange for Apple stock.
And later sued Apple for stealing their ideas. Apple then paid them more money to settle a number of lawsuits that Xerox brought. Read "Bringers of Lightning" if you want to know more about that, sparky.
Microsoft still likes to pretend they're not copying Apple. They certainly don't pay Apple for the ideas they use.
Funny... Mac users claim that all the time, but forget that Microsoft also paid Xerox to use their ideas.
Apple purchased intellectual property from Xerox: "However, a significant change occurred in 1979 when Xerox bought a large chunk of Apple stock. In return for being allowed this stock purchase, Xerox allowed some of their research ideas to be used in designing an office computer."
Xerox were so happy about this course of events - after all, Apple did things the proper way - that Xerox sued Apple in 1989 for stealing the GUI from them.
So please, don't paint Apple with a halo and Microsoft with horns. Because you're basing your position on false information.
Apple later settled with Xerox, paying them several million dollars in damages.
(I worked at Xerox on Star/Viewpoint from early '83 to '89.) This was true of the first version of Star, but this problem was recognized very early, perhaps even before the first shipment of Star. A new project, known internally as Phoenix (although spelled "fnx") was designed to solve this problem. It drew from the Mesa Development Environment (known informally as Tajo) which originated on the Alto (I think first release was in 1977). The result was an open toolkit known as BasicWorkstation (desktop) and a compound document editor which had a "generic frame" mechanism. The Viewpoint Document Editor (as it was known) continued to use much of the Star code (including Traits), but reworked.
It was "closed" in that Mesa wasn't widely used in industry, although we gave several universities grants of hardware and software, the Xerox Development Environment (public brand of Tajo). Mesa was very similiar to Modula-3, and like any system with a large number of libraries (e.g. Smalltalk-80) it took months of learning before a programmer could be productive.
Interesting note about the wastebasket. When Macintosh came out Xerox bought a couple. I remember people being annoyed about this. I was told that an early design of Star included a trashcan, but it was decided that it was unnecessary in the version that was shipped. In Viewpoint (1985) we added a trashcan, but felt that we should use a "wastebasket" icon.
The document centric model (not knowing about applications, no quit) came from Star. In Viewpoint you had control over apps launching, but once launched they didn't quit. Most apps were launched at boot time -- hence the 3+ minute boot! As a result of this painfully long boot, a colleague (Makota Mita) invented a sleep/quick restart feature that took about 30 seconds to put the sytem to sleep and awake again after poweroff.
Star had "stationary" as well, although it didn't have the double-click-to-tear-off UI. Instead, users would open the Prototypes container (see icon in lower right of this image)
This prototypes container (labeled OSBU here because the photo was taken of someone's workstation who worked in the OSBU network) had one copy of every object available to the user -- blank compound docs, compound doc with lots of graphics examples, folders, networks (where you found printers, file servers, mail servers, address book/directory server), small database (aka record file), etc.
Note: I'm not saying that Xerox invented everything. I think Lisa and Mac introduced several ideas (e.g. the suspend/resume for each file in Lisa is a GREAT idea) that we didn't do, but there are more similarities than people sometimes think.
And it was only *after* Apple and Google presented competing products that Microsoft decided to make it a core feature of Longhorn. WinFS is still not going to be in Longhorn, but now this "fast searching" thing *is*.
Microsoft started working on this stuff with their Cairo OS, in 1990. Just FYI.
Depends on the DLL doesn't it? If for example the DLL couples a DOM and ECMAScript implementation to the oeprating system, in detriment to existing competing implementations, I'd say the judge is justified.
Yeah, but you're a kneejerk anti-Microsoft bigot and not a software developer.
You can't have it both ways - either they remove everything, and other apps break, and you complain that they're doing it to spite the judge, or they just remove the IExplore.exe shell and leave the rest in, don't break anything, and then they're in "unfair competition" with rival DLLs.
Clue for you: People used to sell TCPIP implementations for Windows. There were lots of "existing competing implementations". The idea of not having TCPIP built in today is ludicrous. But it flies in the face of your idea of "detrimental to existing competing implementations" - and a good thing too, because it's sound engineering practice, good for consumers, and is expected in a modern OS.
On the surface, this appears to be the same BS that MS tried to play off in the US antitrust case regarding the bundling of IE. MS purposely chose a twisted interpretation of the scope of "Internet Explorer" to claim that IE was inseparable from the rest of the OS. That is, they chose to interpret "remove IE" to mean removal of not just the top-level application and/or icon, but of all related architectural components. That alleged inseparability was a mind-numbingly stupid claim to anyone with an iota of actual software development knowledge.
They offered to remove just the top level application and icon. The judge told them to go to hell and remove everything.
You might want to read the court transcripts, not just the crap the media pumps out.
Except that Microsoft developers get access to the people who wrote the specifications. They can influence the specifications to change. In fact, according to a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, they have a tool which highly optimizes their code after compilation, by, among other things, moving the infrequently used code like error handling routines to the back of their DLL's, etc.
The fact that this tool hasn't been released to other developers is proof that they unfairly compete.
That tool has been released to other developers, and no, it's not proof that they "unfairly compete". You could do this too - all you need to do is write your own linker order file.
Anyway... here's some tools that do this for you. They've been around for (in some cases) 5 years - in other cases (Working Set Tuner) longer.
But you forgot the Microsoft Defense: "Your honor, we're too incompetent to write modular software. Take one piece out and the whole house of cards comes crashing down."
You seem to forget. They did offer to remove iexplore.exe from the OS for the antitrust trial - the judge threw a hissy fit, and claimed he wanted everything removed. Every DLL, the works.
If you're willing to waste time reading slashdot, you might want to enlighten yourself and read the court trial documents as well. They're very interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it hard to believe MS has implemented some sort of packet prioritization into their TCP/IP stack/windows update to allow downloads in other apps to remain unaffected...
It's called the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (aka BITS) and it's quite clever. Do a google search for it and learn something.
What is this? Windows??
No, because Windows has had all of those inotify features for about 9 years now.
Why do I have to replace system level drivers for Sqlserver?
So that it runs faster.
Why should I have to install the latest IE for a non-internet facing repository? I've never seen a beta of postgres/mysql demand that linux/bsd kernel drivers be replaced.
They run slower.
The Shamen. Oh, sorry, you must be from America, the birthplace of all culture. Never mind.
Do me a favor - broaden your horizons a bit.
VH1: The Shamen
Techno Guide: The Shamen
The Shamen did it with Move any Mountain - they released all of their component pieces, so you could remix it to your heart's content.
Dr. Ross's Compression Crypt
The introduction states:
The specific patents are referenced here, in an excerpt from the comp.compression FAQ:
Is that sufficient proof?
To be fair, Kaplan would not dispute that his company was doomed anyway for at least two reasons: mismanagement by GO, and the fact that pen computing was probably ahead of its time. ... and they were designing their own Hardware, and their own OS, and only wanted Microsoft to write Apps for them.
You might want to read Barbarians Led By Bill Gates for some insight. Or search on Amazon for it, and search inside it for "Furthermore, Go was building its software".
Eolas is rather questionable but that doesn't mean this case is without merit. MS has done kind of thing before. For example, Stacker and Goldtouch.
Stacker was a case of patent collision. The same algorithm was independently patented by two people, and the patent office gave out TWO separate patents. Microsoft got the rights to one, Stacker got the rights to the other.
So I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Microsoft has done this kind of thing before".
There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.
Encoding as MPEG2 would also have been very unprofessional, as it doesn't qualify as a "quality source". At the very least, the color resolution has been halved from the original source material.
Which reminds me of an amusing story. My company had a third party do a web video for us at one point. The third party then asked us what format we wanted it in. I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard.
Pity it won't play on most systems because you need a licensed decoder to be able to play MPEG2.
This is exactly the reason I can't get myself to accept the Xbox. They are catering to, as Penny Arcade put it nicely, the Generic Frat Fuck.
How do you figure? What about the XBOX, exactly, caters only to "the Generic Frat Fuck"? What's different here to what Sony's doing? And how the hell did you get modded insightful? Because your post shows nearly zero insight - just a link to penny arcade.
Apparently, the BBC managed to completely blow a huge surprise which was planned for this season of Doctor Who - which was that at the end of this season, the Doctor would die.
So Eccleston was only ever meant to be around for one season - and it was meant to be a huge shocker.
Isn't that a security problem though? Being able to see which other apps have files open lets you know which other apps are on the system. For the military security specs, that might be an issue - which may explain why they do it that way.
WinNT with NTFS arrived before Win9x/FAT32. It's just that most users were running Win9x.
I think that the naming convention defined by the EU was to insure that there would be no confusion between the versions of windows with or without WMP. Otherwise the EU commission could get blamed for consumer confusion if the naming convention was not considered clear and concise (just the kind of FUD that MS might do to make the commission look bad).
You'd be wrong.
Microsoft's proposed name:
Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.
EU Dictated name:
Windows XP N
Which do you think gives less confusion over what it is? Me, personally, I think that Microsoft's name is just a smidge more obvious.
The difference is that Xerox let Apple use their ideas, in exchange for Apple stock.
And later sued Apple for stealing their ideas. Apple then paid them more money to settle a number of lawsuits that Xerox brought. Read "Bringers of Lightning" if you want to know more about that, sparky.
Microsoft still likes to pretend they're not copying Apple. They certainly don't pay Apple for the ideas they use.
Funny... Mac users claim that all the time, but forget that Microsoft also paid Xerox to use their ideas.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Apple purchased intellectual property from Xerox: "However, a significant change occurred in 1979 when Xerox bought a large chunk of Apple stock. In return for being allowed this stock purchase, Xerox allowed some of their research ideas to be used in designing an office computer."
Xerox were so happy about this course of events - after all, Apple did things the proper way - that Xerox sued Apple in 1989 for stealing the GUI from them.
So please, don't paint Apple with a halo and Microsoft with horns. Because you're basing your position on false information.
Apple later settled with Xerox, paying them several million dollars in damages.
The wastebasket was in the version of the OS that Apple saw on their "visit" to Xerox's HQ. They took it out before the Star's launch.
From someone who worked at Xerox:
(I worked at Xerox on Star/Viewpoint from early '83 to '89.)
This was true of the first version of Star, but this problem was recognized very early, perhaps even before the first shipment of Star. A new project, known internally as Phoenix (although spelled "fnx") was designed to solve this problem. It drew from the Mesa Development Environment (known informally as Tajo) which originated on the Alto (I think first release was in 1977). The result was an open toolkit known as BasicWorkstation (desktop) and a compound document editor which had a "generic frame" mechanism. The Viewpoint Document Editor (as it was known) continued to use much of the Star code (including Traits), but reworked.
It was "closed" in that Mesa wasn't widely used in industry, although we gave several universities grants of hardware and software, the Xerox Development Environment (public brand of Tajo). Mesa was very similiar to Modula-3, and like any system with a large number of libraries (e.g. Smalltalk-80) it took months of learning before a programmer could be productive.
Interesting note about the wastebasket. When Macintosh came out Xerox bought a couple. I remember people being annoyed about this. I was told that an early design of Star included a trashcan, but it was decided that it was unnecessary in the version that was shipped. In Viewpoint (1985) we added a trashcan, but felt that we should use a "wastebasket" icon.
The document centric model (not knowing about applications, no quit) came from Star. In Viewpoint you had control over apps launching, but once launched they didn't quit. Most apps were launched at boot time -- hence the 3+ minute boot! As a result of this painfully long boot, a colleague (Makota Mita) invented a sleep/quick restart feature that took about 30 seconds to put the sytem to sleep and awake again after poweroff.
Star had "stationary" as well, although it didn't have the double-click-to-tear-off UI. Instead, users would open the Prototypes container (see icon in lower right of this image)
This prototypes container (labeled OSBU here because the photo was taken of someone's workstation who worked in the OSBU network) had one copy of every object available to the user -- blank compound docs, compound doc with lots of graphics examples, folders, networks (where you found printers, file servers, mail servers, address book/directory server), small database (aka record file), etc.
Note: I'm not saying that Xerox invented everything. I think Lisa and Mac introduced several ideas (e.g. the suspend/resume for each file in Lisa is a GREAT idea) that we didn't do, but there are more similarities than people sometimes think.
Dave
And it was only *after* Apple and Google presented competing products that Microsoft decided to make it a core feature of Longhorn. WinFS is still not going to be in Longhorn, but now this "fast searching" thing *is*.
Microsoft started working on this stuff with their Cairo OS, in 1990. Just FYI.
/me looks at the "Recycle Bin" on his Windows desktop and shakes his head at the obviousness of its origin...and the rest of the operating system...
I hope you're not stupid enough to think that Apple was the origin of that concept.
Note the wastebasket, bottom right.
This is on a Xerox Star system.
Depends on the DLL doesn't it? If for example the DLL couples a DOM and ECMAScript implementation to the oeprating system, in detriment to existing competing implementations, I'd say the judge is justified.
Yeah, but you're a kneejerk anti-Microsoft bigot and not a software developer.
You can't have it both ways - either they remove everything, and other apps break, and you complain that they're doing it to spite the judge, or they just remove the IExplore.exe shell and leave the rest in, don't break anything, and then they're in "unfair competition" with rival DLLs.
Clue for you: People used to sell TCPIP implementations for Windows. There were lots of "existing competing implementations". The idea of not having TCPIP built in today is ludicrous. But it flies in the face of your idea of "detrimental to existing competing implementations" - and a good thing too, because it's sound engineering practice, good for consumers, and is expected in a modern OS.
On the surface, this appears to be the same BS that MS tried to play off in the US antitrust case regarding the bundling of IE. MS purposely chose a twisted interpretation of the scope of "Internet Explorer" to claim that IE was inseparable from the rest of the OS. That is, they chose to interpret "remove IE" to mean removal of not just the top-level application and/or icon, but of all related architectural components. That alleged inseparability was a mind-numbingly stupid claim to anyone with an iota of actual software development knowledge.
They offered to remove just the top level application and icon. The judge told them to go to hell and remove everything.
You might want to read the court transcripts, not just the crap the media pumps out.
Except that Microsoft developers get access to the people who wrote the specifications. They can influence the specifications to change. In fact, according to a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, they have a tool which highly optimizes their code after compilation, by, among other things, moving the infrequently used code like error handling routines to the back of their DLL's, etc.
The fact that this tool hasn't been released to other developers is proof that they unfairly compete.
That tool has been released to other developers, and no, it's not proof that they "unfairly compete". You could do this too - all you need to do is write your own linker order file.
Anyway... here's some tools that do this for you. They've been around for (in some cases) 5 years - in other cases (Working Set Tuner) longer.
Smooth Working Set article 1
Smooth Working Set article 2
But you forgot the Microsoft Defense: "Your honor, we're too incompetent to write modular software. Take one piece out and the whole house of cards comes crashing down."
You seem to forget. They did offer to remove iexplore.exe from the OS for the antitrust trial - the judge threw a hissy fit, and claimed he wanted everything removed. Every DLL, the works.
If you're willing to waste time reading slashdot, you might want to enlighten yourself and read the court trial documents as well. They're very interesting.
Try this too...
... then enter the name of the folder of your choice.
Windows+R
Sneaky, huh?
Or Windows + E to open Explorer quick.