Seriously, calling Microsoft for $5 is the last thing on your mind after working on a project for a whole day and having Windows magically lose it. I was building a data parser for the raw outputs from a lab machine one time. The code was fairly simple and straight-forward, but it still took a day to build and ensure that it handled everything properly. After compiling at the end of the day, I went back to the source code to add a few more comments and it was gone. Just up and gone, no evidence of what had happened or anything. This was on my own personal computer that no one else uses, so no one else had messed with it. Immediately after it disapppeared I used some recovery tools, assuming a program had deleted it somehow. But nothing, not a single trace. It really baffled me for a while and I never did find it or figure out what had happened.
Simple. Your machine was infected with a one of the trojans/worms that were around at the time. One of them was designed to delete source files. Not exactly "Windows magically losing it".
Linux filesystems might do that a lot. A long long time ago, FAT might have done it. But you'd have to be a magician to have it happen on Windows today.
Unfortunately Borders haven't got a "pseudoscience" section for homeopathy, crystal healing and "Blink!" so it'll probably end up in the "popular science" section - thereby pissing off those of us who believe that books about science should bear some resemblance to the real world and use reasonably scientific methods.
Borders do - it's called the New Age section.
And Blink does indeed contain a lot of science - the FACS encoding system, for example, is well known and used around the world by (amongst others) animators, secret service agents, and many others.
There was nothing in the book which was unscientific - but if you're used to the hard sciences, then cognitive science is going to appear wishy-washy because we just don't know the underlying mechanisms for most of the effects we're seeing yet.
Given those statistics (source - netcraft) why is it then, that we dont see malware attacking apache on such a grand scale as we do IIS?
Those stats don't count the number of servers. They count the number of domain names.
For example, charlotte.redhat.com and people.redhat.com are viewed by netcraft as two different servers, but are in fact the same machine at the same IP address - the only difference is in the domain name used to access them.
Hell, even for existing XBox owners the decision will require some thought seeing as old games won't play on the new system (as far as I know).
Don't be too sure of that. Last year they were hiring JIT compiler authors for their XBOX division - and there's only one explanation that I can come up with for that, and that's they're working on an emulator.
Didn't hurt that they were describing the job as doing the "nearly impossible".
What he was takling about there is, IMO, irrelevant. It's clear that he has interest in programming on Linux from his other questions, so posting advice on a non-portable solution for anything is poor council unless there is no reasonable alternative.
In other words, the fact that he's complaining loudly about something, and then gets corrected about that thing he's complaining loudly about means nothing to you?
Of course not. It doesn't matter how misguided the reasoning, if you can push Linux on someone, do it, right?
Back to video games. Well, Sony is Sony. Think the installed base of Atari without the complacency. They are fully aware that you'll devour them if they slip up, so they are trying like hell not to. I would say they've done a good job so far. Nintendo has taken a different tack (though they are still beating you everywhere but here). While people denigrate them for being a "kiddy" platform, they forget that we have such a huge market for games now partly because of the success of the NES with us when we were kids.
Blah, whatever. I'd say it's much more because of the huge market of Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari system which were around back then.
I don't expect my Grandma to be able to run a set of developer tools. Understand the difference?
Besides, it sounds like you've never used Visual Studio - it's not exactly hard to find this out - there are only two ways to run an app you're developing anyway, and both are available from the Debug menu. This one's called "Start without Debugging" - the other mechanism is called "Start".
I'm taking a C++ class at the local college that's being taught by the Unix guru. The class is using Visual Studio.NET as the IDE (which the instructor is not familar with and is threatening to go to Linux instead). At home, I'm using Visual C++ 6.0 Learning Edition that was provided by the Deitel and Deitel book. Tried using Visual C++ Express edition but it seems more trouble to use (e.g., there's no automatic prompt to prevent the DOS box from disappearing).
That's because you're running it under the debugger, and the assumption is that if you want it to stick around, you most likely have a breakpoint set somewhere.
Run it outside of the debugger - namely, by hitting CTRL+F5, or the "!" icon - and it'll run and when it terminates it'll ask you to press a key before finishing.
There you go. Learn your tools, and you'll find it much easier to use them.
No, because bundling is only an unfair advantage. It's not a slam dunk. While the bundled player was useless for many people, particularly consumers of Internet content, just bundling it wasn't enough. When they copied the successful features of RealPlayer and others, they were able to compete with their bundling advantage. Bundling Calculator doesn't compete unfairly with RealPlayer, because it's not feature-competitive. If they made it play streams, it would be. So would you like to rephrase your request in such a way shows you understand what unfair competition is actually like?
Which features did they copy, in your estimation?
You see, I'm not entirely certain what "unfair competition" is. Especially as the reason RealPlayer hasn't done as well as they otherwise might has nothing to do with Microsoft - and has everything to do with the amount of spyware and advertising they shove down their users' throats. They even used to design their UI to deliberately mislead users as to exactly what mailing lists they were being signed up for - it would show a page of unchecked checkboxes. If you scrolled down, you'd see all these other mailing lists and privacy invading options were checked - but only if you scrolled past the part designed to make you think you were safe.
Oh, I'm sorry... you see you seemed to be indicating that Microsoft included Windows Media Player as a response to RealPlayer, when in fact Windows has had a Media Player in it since well before RealPlayer existed.
So would you like to rephrase your argument in such a way that you take this fact into account? That Windows has had a media player since pretty much forever?
Do you recall the issue where Sun complained that Microsoft was undermining Java by using its own polluted and incompatible version of the JRE - which (funnily enough) had security holes in it which Sun's JRE didn't?
Microsoft announced that it would elliminate a JRE from WinXP altogether.
Microsoft stated - to justify what it was doing - that it didn't feel bundling gave an advantage, and that it was easy enough for anybody to download Sun's JRE.
I seem to recall that a bigger issue that Microsoft had with Sun at the time was that Sun was demanding that they not ship their own JVM, while at the same time refusing to let Microsoft ship any version of Sun's JVM past 1.1.4. Which, if you think about it, is kind of stupid - why force them to ship an out-of-date version?
So Microsoft did the only smart thing - they just stepped away from the table entirely.
You're confusing "can't" with "won't". Microsoft is quite capable of removing IE from Windows and letting the user choose which browser to use, but that would mean an end to ActiveX, the poor CSS support, and other proprietary extensions because they would actually have to follow public standards. There is no technical reason that Microsoft can't provide users with the ability to remove IE and point the OS at another browser for any of its HTML rendering needs
I'll give you one technical reason. It's a doozy.
Opera and Firefox don't both expose a standard API which third party apps can use to render HTML in their Window.
They don't expose a COM object model to drive their DOM with.
They don't expose a standard way to embed their browsers in your apps.
Where they do provide some of this, they don't do it the same way as the other browsers.
In other words, either you want to force 4 companies to all walk in the same direction, or you want 3rd party software authors to pick and choose which browser to support, forcing people to install ALL of them to get their software to work.
Nice going. Do you have any experience in software development? It certainly doesn't look like you've thought this through from that perspective. Not to mention that you've increased the amount of QA required for the 3rd party software developer by a factor of 4 because now everything has to be tested with every version of 3 other browsers that the user might have installed.
*sigh* You're joking. You just boot off the CD and go, and the thing explains everything and asks you friendly questions. Both of my parents and my two live grandparents have installed Windows just fine. The last time I tried to install Mandrake, it wanted to know my MONITOR TIMINGS to proceed.
I love the questions about whether you want APIC (or was it ACPI?) support. I write software for a living, and even I don't know the answer to that one. Why the hell can't it figure it out from the BIOS?
The point is that OEMs are now free to bundle a media player other than WMP, e.g. WinAMP or iTunes (or Joe's Hardware Store's Shiny Media Player Version 0.45BETA).
They have been free to bundle any media players that they want to for at least the past 7 years. Have you never bought a system and found that it comes with RealPlayer, MusicMatch Jukebox or any number of other players that you uninstall right after uninstalling AOL and a bunch of other useless crap that the OEM put on the system?
This is actually the reason I like deploying Linux desktops for employees... because I can control whether or not they get certain applications. If they need it, they'll have to ask for permission first, rather than have it in by default without any good reason.
Or, of course, you could spend a couple of hours learning how to do the same thing in Windows, but then you wouldn't be able to complain or promote Linux.
Look up Group Policy Editor and Local Policy Editor. You'll learn a lot, apparently.
4. Gaming. The XBox seems like a contender, but only because it has been propped up by the profits from other divisions. MS blew it in the first generation - using PC components sealed their fate - the machine was too big for the Japanese market and too expensive to make a profit on. Xbox would have tanked long ago if the division was actually dependent on making money.
Last time I checked, the XBOX division is profitable.
That's because the MSDN guys don't appear to give a flying tinker's toss about real-world performance, whereas the Raymond Chens of the world do.
Call me when an app written in.NET can compete perf-wise with a well written win32 app - with a similar memory footprint and at the same or better speed.
Use Microsoft's simple instructions to remove messenger. Glad they made it so point-and-click for those end users!They obfuscated it because Messenger is such an important part of the lock-i... er operating system. Never mind that editing your registry may void your tech support, destroy your install, burn your clothes, hit your dog. I guess I'll be getting more calls from my family if disabling Messenger gets recommended in the press. Whenever they see that "Warning If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk." they ask me to fix it. I guess I should put together a.reg and a.vbs file for them now.
You don't need to remove Messenger. It already has been fixed, and the patch was pushed out to all Messenger users two days ago. You can't log into Messenger without installing it.
Jeez... you people. Maybe if you actually used the systems you bitch about you wouldn't be so far off base all the time.
I know I saw that in one of the Firefox betas long before I saw it in IE... definitely long before XP SP2, but I can't remember which update brought the feature to IE, if it was before SP2 or not... can anyone confirm who copied who?
The Firefox developers can confirm that they copied IE. It appeared in the XP SP2 betas, and the Firefox guys copied it while XP SP2 was still in beta. I should know; I was on the XP SP2 beta.
They were added to the nightly builds on July 13th of last year.
XP SP2 was in beta in February of last year.
But hey, don't take my word for it... ask the Mozilla/Firefox developers:
The most recent Firefox nightlies feature a new user-interface to manage the XPInstall whitelist. When a user tries to install software from a site that is not on the whitelist, a thin non-modal yellow bar appears at the top of the content area, informing the user that the install has been blocked (bug 241705). A button allows the user to add the site to the whitelist if they choose. Testers of the beta release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will probably find the yellow bar familiar: it's almost a carbon copy of the new Internet Explorer Information Bar that appears when an ActiveX control is blocked. If you cannot wait for Firefox 1.0 to try this feature, grab a nightly build from the 0.9 branch but remember that there may be bugs.
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Seriously, calling Microsoft for $5 is the last thing on your mind after working on a project for a whole day and having Windows magically lose it. I was building a data parser for the raw outputs from a lab machine one time. The code was fairly simple and straight-forward, but it still took a day to build and ensure that it handled everything properly. After compiling at the end of the day, I went back to the source code to add a few more comments and it was gone. Just up and gone, no evidence of what had happened or anything. This was on my own personal computer that no one else uses, so no one else had messed with it. Immediately after it disapppeared I used some recovery tools, assuming a program had deleted it somehow. But nothing, not a single trace. It really baffled me for a while and I never did find it or figure out what had happened.
Simple. Your machine was infected with a one of the trojans/worms that were around at the time. One of them was designed to delete source files. Not exactly "Windows magically losing it".
Linux filesystems might do that a lot. A long long time ago, FAT might have done it. But you'd have to be a magician to have it happen on Windows today.
Unfortunately Borders haven't got a "pseudoscience" section for homeopathy, crystal healing and "Blink!" so it'll probably end up in the "popular science" section - thereby pissing off those of us who believe that books about science should bear some resemblance to the real world and use reasonably scientific methods.
Borders do - it's called the New Age section.
And Blink does indeed contain a lot of science - the FACS encoding system, for example, is well known and used around the world by (amongst others) animators, secret service agents, and many others.
There was nothing in the book which was unscientific - but if you're used to the hard sciences, then cognitive science is going to appear wishy-washy because we just don't know the underlying mechanisms for most of the effects we're seeing yet.
Blink! isn't a self-help book. It falls into the category of "popular science."
Given those statistics (source - netcraft) why is it then, that we dont see malware attacking apache on such a grand scale as we do IIS?
Those stats don't count the number of servers. They count the number of domain names.
For example, charlotte.redhat.com and people.redhat.com are viewed by netcraft as two different servers, but are in fact the same machine at the same IP address - the only difference is in the domain name used to access them.
Understand now?
My monitor is amber. I don't have color. How will this work for me?
Simple: you can't run Mozilla on an IBM XT anyway, so it doesn't affect you.
Hell, even for existing XBox owners the decision will require some thought seeing as old games won't play on the new system (as far as I know).
Don't be too sure of that. Last year they were hiring JIT compiler authors for their XBOX division - and there's only one explanation that I can come up with for that, and that's they're working on an emulator.
Didn't hurt that they were describing the job as doing the "nearly impossible".
What he was takling about there is, IMO, irrelevant. It's clear that he has interest in programming on Linux from his other questions, so posting advice on a non-portable solution for anything is poor council unless there is no reasonable alternative.
In other words, the fact that he's complaining loudly about something, and then gets corrected about that thing he's complaining loudly about means nothing to you?
Of course not. It doesn't matter how misguided the reasoning, if you can push Linux on someone, do it, right?
Back to video games. Well, Sony is Sony. Think the installed base of Atari without the complacency. They are fully aware that you'll devour them if they slip up, so they are trying like hell not to. I would say they've done a good job so far. Nintendo has taken a different tack (though they are still beating you everywhere but here). While people denigrate them for being a "kiddy" platform, they forget that we have such a huge market for games now partly because of the success of the NES with us when we were kids.
Blah, whatever. I'd say it's much more because of the huge market of Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari system which were around back then.
I thought they stepped awya because they were pushing .NET and it was so much more convenient if Java didn't work.
Sure. Go for the conspiracy theory view if you want. After all, there's no evidence to the contrary, so you can believe whatever you like, right?
And people complain about Unix arcania.....
I don't expect my Grandma to be able to run a set of developer tools. Understand the difference?
Besides, it sounds like you've never used Visual Studio - it's not exactly hard to find this out - there are only two ways to run an app you're developing anyway, and both are available from the Debug menu. This one's called "Start without Debugging" - the other mechanism is called "Start".
I'm taking a C++ class at the local college that's being taught by the Unix guru. The class is using Visual Studio .NET as the IDE (which the instructor is not familar with and is threatening to go to Linux instead). At home, I'm using Visual C++ 6.0 Learning Edition that was provided by the Deitel and Deitel book. Tried using Visual C++ Express edition but it seems more trouble to use (e.g., there's no automatic prompt to prevent the DOS box from disappearing).
That's because you're running it under the debugger, and the assumption is that if you want it to stick around, you most likely have a breakpoint set somewhere.
Run it outside of the debugger - namely, by hitting CTRL+F5, or the "!" icon - and it'll run and when it terminates it'll ask you to press a key before finishing.
There you go. Learn your tools, and you'll find it much easier to use them.
No, because bundling is only an unfair advantage. It's not a slam dunk. While the bundled player was useless for many people, particularly consumers of Internet content, just bundling it wasn't enough. When they copied the successful features of RealPlayer and others, they were able to compete with their bundling advantage. Bundling Calculator doesn't compete unfairly with RealPlayer, because it's not feature-competitive. If they made it play streams, it would be. So would you like to rephrase your request in such a way shows you understand what unfair competition is actually like?
Which features did they copy, in your estimation?
You see, I'm not entirely certain what "unfair competition" is. Especially as the reason RealPlayer hasn't done as well as they otherwise might has nothing to do with Microsoft - and has everything to do with the amount of spyware and advertising they shove down their users' throats. They even used to design their UI to deliberately mislead users as to exactly what mailing lists they were being signed up for - it would show a page of unchecked checkboxes. If you scrolled down, you'd see all these other mailing lists and privacy invading options were checked - but only if you scrolled past the part designed to make you think you were safe.
The one that worked, that came with Windows 98
Oh, I'm sorry... you see you seemed to be indicating that Microsoft included Windows Media Player as a response to RealPlayer, when in fact Windows has had a Media Player in it since well before RealPlayer existed.
So would you like to rephrase your argument in such a way that you take this fact into account? That Windows has had a media player since pretty much forever?
Do you recall the issue where Sun complained that Microsoft was undermining Java by using its own polluted and incompatible version of the JRE - which (funnily enough) had security holes in it which Sun's JRE didn't?
Microsoft announced that it would elliminate a JRE from WinXP altogether.
Microsoft stated - to justify what it was doing - that it didn't feel bundling gave an advantage, and that it was easy enough for anybody to download Sun's JRE.
I seem to recall that a bigger issue that Microsoft had with Sun at the time was that Sun was demanding that they not ship their own JVM, while at the same time refusing to let Microsoft ship any version of Sun's JVM past 1.1.4. Which, if you think about it, is kind of stupid - why force them to ship an out-of-date version?
So Microsoft did the only smart thing - they just stepped away from the table entirely.
RealMedia got started, and substantial proprietary format momentum, before Microsoft locked up the market with their own bundled player.
Which bundled player? The one that came with Windows 3.0? Or are we talking about another one here?
You're confusing "can't" with "won't". Microsoft is quite capable of removing IE from Windows and letting the user choose which browser to use, but that would mean an end to ActiveX, the poor CSS support, and other proprietary extensions because they would actually have to follow public standards. There is no technical reason that Microsoft can't provide users with the ability to remove IE and point the OS at another browser for any of its HTML rendering needs
I'll give you one technical reason. It's a doozy.
Opera and Firefox don't both expose a standard API which third party apps can use to render HTML in their Window.
They don't expose a COM object model to drive their DOM with.
They don't expose a standard way to embed their browsers in your apps.
Where they do provide some of this, they don't do it the same way as the other browsers.
In other words, either you want to force 4 companies to all walk in the same direction, or you want 3rd party software authors to pick and choose which browser to support, forcing people to install ALL of them to get their software to work.
Nice going. Do you have any experience in software development? It certainly doesn't look like you've thought this through from that perspective. Not to mention that you've increased the amount of QA required for the 3rd party software developer by a factor of 4 because now everything has to be tested with every version of 3 other browsers that the user might have installed.
*sigh* You're joking. You just boot off the CD and go, and the thing explains everything and asks you friendly questions. Both of my parents and my two live grandparents have installed Windows just fine. The last time I tried to install Mandrake, it wanted to know my MONITOR TIMINGS to proceed.
I love the questions about whether you want APIC (or was it ACPI?) support. I write software for a living, and even I don't know the answer to that one. Why the hell can't it figure it out from the BIOS?
The point is that OEMs are now free to bundle a media player other than WMP, e.g. WinAMP or iTunes (or Joe's Hardware Store's Shiny Media Player Version 0.45BETA).
They have been free to bundle any media players that they want to for at least the past 7 years. Have you never bought a system and found that it comes with RealPlayer, MusicMatch Jukebox or any number of other players that you uninstall right after uninstalling AOL and a bunch of other useless crap that the OEM put on the system?
Oh, my mistake. Apparently you already know that they exist, you just don't appear to know how to use them.
This is actually the reason I like deploying Linux desktops for employees... because I can control whether or not they get certain applications. If they need it, they'll have to ask for permission first, rather than have it in by default without any good reason.
Or, of course, you could spend a couple of hours learning how to do the same thing in Windows, but then you wouldn't be able to complain or promote Linux.
Look up Group Policy Editor and Local Policy Editor. You'll learn a lot, apparently.
4. Gaming. The XBox seems like a contender, but only because it has been propped up by the profits from other divisions. MS blew it in the first generation - using PC components sealed their fate - the machine was too big for the Japanese market and too expensive to make a profit on. Xbox would have tanked long ago if the division was actually dependent on making money.
Last time I checked, the XBOX division is profitable.
Perhaps you shouldn't be such a blatant fanboy.
But the Raymond Chens in Redmond always win out.
.NET can compete perf-wise with a well written win32 app - with a similar memory footprint and at the same or better speed.
That's because the MSDN guys don't appear to give a flying tinker's toss about real-world performance, whereas the Raymond Chens of the world do.
Call me when an app written in
Use Microsoft's simple instructions to remove messenger. Glad they made it so point-and-click for those end users!They obfuscated it because Messenger is such an important part of the lock-i... er operating system. Never mind that editing your registry may void your tech support, destroy your install, burn your clothes, hit your dog. I guess I'll be getting more calls from my family if disabling Messenger gets recommended in the press. Whenever they see that "Warning If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk." they ask me to fix it. I guess I should put together a .reg and a.vbs file for them now.
You don't need to remove Messenger. It already has been fixed, and the patch was pushed out to all Messenger users two days ago. You can't log into Messenger without installing it.
Jeez... you people. Maybe if you actually used the systems you bitch about you wouldn't be so far off base all the time.
The Firefox developers can confirm that they copied IE. It appeared in the XP SP2 betas, and the Firefox guys copied it while XP SP2 was still in beta. I should know; I was on the XP SP2 beta.
They were added to the nightly builds on July 13th of last year.
XP SP2 was in beta in February of last year.
But hey, don't take my word for it... ask the Mozilla/Firefox developers:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=
The Firefox designers 'got it right' with their popup blocker window thing that appears on the top. ... which they copied from IE.