Why would they need patience if you provide them with immediate verification of who they're talking to, if they're affiliated with who they claim, and if what they are doing is a normal procedure or something strange?
How do you propose we identify whether the software is doing "something normal" or "something strange" ? How are you going to define these things ? How are you going to account for situations where the definitions are wrong ?
No it wasn't. WinFS was never a filesystem, it was a database layer sitting on top of a filesystem. The idea has been being bounced around Microsoft since the early '90s.
It's evil (typical of Microsoft that had a mission to kill competitors). The US DOJ and EU Commission didn't drag Microsoft into antitrust lawsuits just for fun. They are a dishonest company. NT 6.1 named "seven" is a lie.
Wow. It's kind of hard to do anything but laugh at calling a company "evil" because they have a slightly schizophrenic product naming scheme.
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever.
And if it is on your Desktop, that's exactly what happens. However, if it's it's not on your desktop, but onthe All Users desktop, then for obvious reasons you will get a UAC prompt.
Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
So, just like Windows then ?
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
How is the All Users desktop a design flaw ? I could certainly see how a UI tweak that overlayed a small icon over the top of anything on the All Users Desktop, but that's an implementation semantic, not a design issue.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it.
This is what already happens. The All Users desktop is then layered over the top (along with the All Users Start Menu), to offer a central point of management for the system.
New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
What the installer does is the installer's business, not the OS's. The same is true of every platform.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on.
If you can elaborate on how the All Users and individual user Desktops are different in design principle to, say,/etc/profile and ~/.profile, or in any way not something that fits into a multiuser system, I'd be quite interested.
That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
No, it's not. NT was multiuser from day one. The only thing that "needs admin privileges so much" is badly written applications (and the last time a developer had an excuse for releasing one of those was about 1996).
It's NT 6.0 to NT 6.1 - it's pisspoor to call it "seven" when it's actually six-point-one.
It's marketing. No different to the one that spawned "Windows Vista" instead of "Windows 2006".
IMHO it won't be a truly new OS until we make the jump to NT 7..... as happened when we jumped from 4 to 5 (xp) or 5 to 6 (vista).
Neither of those were "a truly new OS". Major revisions, to be sure - but not even close to "a truly new OS". Nor are we likely to see "a truly new OS" anytime in the next decade.
No I had it right the first time. When Apple jumps from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, it's truly a new OS, with major changes to the software.
Rubbish. *OS X itself* isn't a "new OS", it's NeXTSTEP 5 (an update from NeXTSTEP 4 strikingly similar in nearly every way to NT 5.0 -> NT 6.0). Apple's x.1 updates vary in how much they change, but they are on the same scale as Vista to 7 (or Windows 2000 to 2003).
If your benchmark of "truly a new OS" is an OS X.1 update, then you've no business whatsoever calling Windows 7 "Vista SP1".
Apple's next major update (akin to XP -> Vista or NT 4.0 -> NT 5.0) will be OS XI (though it'll be interesting to see if they go with that, since most people call it "OS Ex", not "OS Ten").
When Microsoft jumped from NT 6 to NT 6.1 (vista to seven), it was more akin to Apple's 10.6.0 to 10.6.1 revisions. Or XP-SP2 to XP-SP3.
Not even remotely true. There were numerous non-trivial updates with Windows 7. Vista to Windows 7 is quite comparable to, say, Leopard to Snow Leopard.
The other one you got wrong was "98 is to 98SE". Windows 95 to Windows 98 is the more accurate comparison.
Your rational thought is failing you. The reason you can't come up with any examples of natural monopolies is that there aren't any. It's a mostly a theoretical problem because it simply does not happen in practice.
Why do I get the feeling that this would rapidly devolve into a circular definition ?
Cartels are inherently unstable and rarely form at all.
Right. That's why they're controlling things like oil supplies, entertainment and memory chips.
Why would anyone argue a cartel is "inherently unstable and rarely forms". That's like trying to argue a team (or partnership, if you prefer) is "inherently unstable and rarely forms" - it's ridiculous, since we see such things happening all the time, in all aspects of life.
What is the advantage to the most efficient company in a particular market in joining a cartel with less efficient ones when it can beat them in the competition and take their market share?
What is the advantage in multiple companies producing the same product *NOT* sharing their resources to improve efficiency and increase profits ?
Even when a cartel does form (say to fix the price to a higher level) a strong incentive is always there for each of its members to undercut the others and take their market share.
What incentive is that ? To annoy the other members so they undercut with loss-leaders and drive the misbehaving entity out of business, or start a smear campaign, or any of a number of other destructive moves ?
If the monopoly is setting the price to high (say 30% profit margin) then it is presenting an incentive for every investor, every company in a similar industry which might already have infrastructure in place, and every foreign company in the same industry to enter into the market and set its margin to 20% and steal much it the monopoly's market share while still raking in a large profit.
You mean an incentive for them to throw away their initial investment after the monopoly (or cartel) drops its profits to 19% for as long as takes the new player to run out of money ?
Your theory works when barriers to entry are low. Unfortunately, when barriers to entry are low, profit margins typically are as well, which is a much bigger discouragement to enter the market. (Assuming the market is established, if it's still forming it's a different matter.)
At some point pretty soon the monopoly will not be able to buy them all out.
Why not ?
If the monopoly is setting the price very low in order to discourage competition then where is the problem? The free market is working through the possibility of competition if not actual competition.
Because as soon as there isn't competition, prices go back up again.
Instead of just telling me that SOMETHING needs escalation, give me enough information to make an informed decision on whether or not I should escalate.
You get the program name, its publisher and the path to the executable. That's more information than 90% of people are even going to consider.
Create a folder called "1 Explore" in the start menu directory. [...]
That's a lot of work to go through when you could just hit Win+E then click on whichever of those locations you wanted in the left pane (even add whatever specific ones you want to "Favourites").
Both companies got the code. IBM turned into OS/2. MS made NT. The original project was called NT OS/2.
This is not correct. One need only take a cursory glance at the architecture of OS/2 compared to NT to see they're not even remotely related (let alone "forks").
OS/2 was a joint project between Microsoft and IBM. Around 1988 Microsoft started working on its replacement - called OS/2 NT at the time - that was going to be the "professional" OS. In parallel, they continued to work with IBM developing OS/2 1.x into 2.x (to be the "home" OS).
(And further in parallel, they were working on Windows 3.x, which became a surprise success, causing....)
After the infamous IBM/Microsoft "divorce", "OS/2 NT" went on to become Windows NT (which is why the whole "VMS+1" thing doesn't work - the project didn't start as "Windows NT"). Since IBM didn't really have any rights to that code (as it was almost entirely Microsoft's work) they had to go back to the OS/2 2.x codebase to further develop Warp, eCS, etc (a codebase Microsoft also had rights to, hence the reason IBM were paying Microsoft royalties on every copy of OS/2 for the components they wrote - one of the most high profile being HPFS).
Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Windows 7 is not any easier to use for a newbie than windows 3.11. Ive been along since Windows 3.11 and i think some things are really much harder to do in Windows 7.
I want to delete a shortcut on MY desktop, which prompts a UAC dialog, which I must address, despite the fact that I'm not changing the desktop for other users.
No, it doesn't.
It *does* prompt you if you're deleting an icon off the All Users Desktop which (for obvious reasons) will appear to be on your Desktop.
After I confirm that, Windows prompts me yet again, asking if this is something I really want to do.
The first prompt is to elevate. It's generic ("this task needs elevated privileges, do you want to continue"). The second prompt is whether or not you actually want to delete that file and specific to the action of deleting.
How can you defend that design?
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
If I have an encrypted laptop, I can't hand over the password to anyone, and yet Australia will demand I do exactly that.
Or turn around and go back to where you came from.
There is nothing unusual about Australia in this. Every country in the world sets the terms upon which you can enter. If you can't agree to those terms, you don't come in.
How much it already happens even with regulation in place, plus a reasonable helping of rational thought.
How would your big monopoly stop competitors from emerging?
Often they wouldn't need to - the simple costs of market entry would be sufficient. If that was not, then some loss-leader products would hammer the last few nails into the coffin.
Care to provide any examples of where such huge monopolies did happen and survived for any length of time?
Monopolies are typically broken up by government intervention. I'm not sure I can think of any examples of them being broken up any other way.
What would _stop_ a cartel or monopoly from forming ? Once a few companies have gotten together, or a single one has gotten large enough, how is a new competitor going to enter the market when the established ones can either buy it out, or just undercut it until it runs out of cash ?
Say what ? Price fixing is *absolutely* "free market". Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation.
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Why would they need patience if you provide them with immediate verification of who they're talking to, if they're affiliated with who they claim, and if what they are doing is a normal procedure or something strange?
How do you propose we identify whether the software is doing "something normal" or "something strange" ? How are you going to define these things ? How are you going to account for situations where the definitions are wrong ?
I believe Visual Studio is the only major product that Microsoft has developed in house.
Er, what ? Maybe you've heard of this little thing they sell called "Windows".
Until a few years ago, Microsoft was best understood as a stock pyramid scheme rather than a software company.
What changed ?
WinFS was supposed to replace NTFS
No it wasn't. WinFS was never a filesystem, it was a database layer sitting on top of a filesystem. The idea has been being bounced around Microsoft since the early '90s.
It's evil (typical of Microsoft that had a mission to kill competitors). The US DOJ and EU Commission didn't drag Microsoft into antitrust lawsuits just for fun. They are a dishonest company. NT 6.1 named "seven" is a lie.
Wow. It's kind of hard to do anything but laugh at calling a company "evil" because they have a slightly schizophrenic product naming scheme.
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever.
And if it is on your Desktop, that's exactly what happens. However, if it's it's not on your desktop, but onthe All Users desktop, then for obvious reasons you will get a UAC prompt.
Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
So, just like Windows then ?
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
How is the All Users desktop a design flaw ? I could certainly see how a UI tweak that overlayed a small icon over the top of anything on the All Users Desktop, but that's an implementation semantic, not a design issue.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it.
This is what already happens. The All Users desktop is then layered over the top (along with the All Users Start Menu), to offer a central point of management for the system.
New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
What the installer does is the installer's business, not the OS's. The same is true of every platform.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on.
If you can elaborate on how the All Users and individual user Desktops are different in design principle to, say, /etc/profile and ~/.profile, or in any way not something that fits into a multiuser system, I'd be quite interested.
That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
No, it's not. NT was multiuser from day one. The only thing that "needs admin privileges so much" is badly written applications (and the last time a developer had an excuse for releasing one of those was about 1996).
It's NT 6.0 to NT 6.1 - it's pisspoor to call it "seven" when it's actually six-point-one.
It's marketing. No different to the one that spawned "Windows Vista" instead of "Windows 2006".
IMHO it won't be a truly new OS until we make the jump to NT 7..... as happened when we jumped from 4 to 5 (xp) or 5 to 6 (vista).
Neither of those were "a truly new OS". Major revisions, to be sure - but not even close to "a truly new OS". Nor are we likely to see "a truly new OS" anytime in the next decade.
Having a monopoly is, in itself, legal.
No, it's not.
Practically speaking, it's nearly impossible to be a monopoly and not violate antitrust law, but being a monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal.
My intelligent designer says canine teeth were originally invented for tearing fruit apart.
What does he have to say about a digestive system capable of processing meat and nutritional requirements best served by meat ?
While you're at it, ask him how many tequilas he'd had before coming up with the reproductive system.
No I had it right the first time. When Apple jumps from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, it's truly a new OS, with major changes to the software.
Rubbish. *OS X itself* isn't a "new OS", it's NeXTSTEP 5 (an update from NeXTSTEP 4 strikingly similar in nearly every way to NT 5.0 -> NT 6.0). Apple's x.1 updates vary in how much they change, but they are on the same scale as Vista to 7 (or Windows 2000 to 2003).
If your benchmark of "truly a new OS" is an OS X.1 update, then you've no business whatsoever calling Windows 7 "Vista SP1".
Apple's next major update (akin to XP -> Vista or NT 4.0 -> NT 5.0) will be OS XI (though it'll be interesting to see if they go with that, since most people call it "OS Ex", not "OS Ten").
When Microsoft jumped from NT 6 to NT 6.1 (vista to seven), it was more akin to Apple's 10.6.0 to 10.6.1 revisions. Or XP-SP2 to XP-SP3.
Not even remotely true. There were numerous non-trivial updates with Windows 7. Vista to Windows 7 is quite comparable to, say, Leopard to Snow Leopard.
The other one you got wrong was "98 is to 98SE". Windows 95 to Windows 98 is the more accurate comparison.
Your rational thought is failing you. The reason you can't come up with any examples of natural monopolies is that there aren't any. It's a mostly a theoretical problem because it simply does not happen in practice.
Why do I get the feeling that this would rapidly devolve into a circular definition ?
Cartels are inherently unstable and rarely form at all.
Right. That's why they're controlling things like oil supplies, entertainment and memory chips.
Why would anyone argue a cartel is "inherently unstable and rarely forms". That's like trying to argue a team (or partnership, if you prefer) is "inherently unstable and rarely forms" - it's ridiculous, since we see such things happening all the time, in all aspects of life.
What is the advantage to the most efficient company in a particular market in joining a cartel with less efficient ones when it can beat them in the competition and take their market share?
What is the advantage in multiple companies producing the same product *NOT* sharing their resources to improve efficiency and increase profits ?
Even when a cartel does form (say to fix the price to a higher level) a strong incentive is always there for each of its members to undercut the others and take their market share.
What incentive is that ? To annoy the other members so they undercut with loss-leaders and drive the misbehaving entity out of business, or start a smear campaign, or any of a number of other destructive moves ?
If the monopoly is setting the price to high (say 30% profit margin) then it is presenting an incentive for every investor, every company in a similar industry which might already have infrastructure in place, and every foreign company in the same industry to enter into the market and set its margin to 20% and steal much it the monopoly's market share while still raking in a large profit.
You mean an incentive for them to throw away their initial investment after the monopoly (or cartel) drops its profits to 19% for as long as takes the new player to run out of money ?
Your theory works when barriers to entry are low. Unfortunately, when barriers to entry are low, profit margins typically are as well, which is a much bigger discouragement to enter the market. (Assuming the market is established, if it's still forming it's a different matter.)
At some point pretty soon the monopoly will not be able to buy them all out.
Why not ?
If the monopoly is setting the price very low in order to discourage competition then where is the problem? The free market is working through the possibility of competition if not actual competition.
Because as soon as there isn't competition, prices go back up again.
Spamming unncessary prompts is poor design.
They're not unnecessary.
Instead of just telling me that SOMETHING needs escalation, give me enough information to make an informed decision on whether or not I should escalate.
You get the program name, its publisher and the path to the executable. That's more information than 90% of people are even going to consider.
Create a folder called "1 Explore" in the start menu directory. [...]
That's a lot of work to go through when you could just hit Win+E then click on whichever of those locations you wanted in the left pane (even add whatever specific ones you want to "Favourites").
Since when has Microsoft started to innovate?
First, can you define "innovate" ? Examples would be helpful.
Both companies got the code. IBM turned into OS/2. MS made NT. The original project was called NT OS/2.
This is not correct. One need only take a cursory glance at the architecture of OS/2 compared to NT to see they're not even remotely related (let alone "forks").
OS/2 was a joint project between Microsoft and IBM. Around 1988 Microsoft started working on its replacement - called OS/2 NT at the time - that was going to be the "professional" OS. In parallel, they continued to work with IBM developing OS/2 1.x into 2.x (to be the "home" OS).
(And further in parallel, they were working on Windows 3.x, which became a surprise success, causing....)
After the infamous IBM/Microsoft "divorce", "OS/2 NT" went on to become Windows NT (which is why the whole "VMS+1" thing doesn't work - the project didn't start as "Windows NT"). Since IBM didn't really have any rights to that code (as it was almost entirely Microsoft's work) they had to go back to the OS/2 2.x codebase to further develop Warp, eCS, etc (a codebase Microsoft also had rights to, hence the reason IBM were paying Microsoft royalties on every copy of OS/2 for the components they wrote - one of the most high profile being HPFS).
NT3.51 was MS's fork of OS2.
It was not.
While it sucked when compared to modern OS's, it was still much better than any MS OS to date.
Which "modern OSes" are you referring to ? What defines "modern" ?
Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Can you offer some examples ?
Windows 7 is not any easier to use for a newbie than windows 3.11. Ive been along since Windows 3.11 and i think some things are really much harder to do in Windows 7.
For example...?
7 is just Vista SP2, a very extensive SP for sure, but a SP none the less
What defines a SP vs a point update ?
No it isn't. UAC just trains them to confirm everything.
As does any equivalent system. There's not really any way to implement least privilege principles without doing so.
I want to delete a shortcut on MY desktop, which prompts a UAC dialog, which I must address, despite the fact that I'm not changing the desktop for other users.
No, it doesn't.
It *does* prompt you if you're deleting an icon off the All Users Desktop which (for obvious reasons) will appear to be on your Desktop.
After I confirm that, Windows prompts me yet again, asking if this is something I really want to do.
The first prompt is to elevate. It's generic ("this task needs elevated privileges, do you want to continue"). The second prompt is whether or not you actually want to delete that file and specific to the action of deleting.
How can you defend that design?
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
[...] or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1
No, as 10.5 is to 10.6.
If I have an encrypted laptop, I can't hand over the password to anyone, and yet Australia will demand I do exactly that.
Or turn around and go back to where you came from.
There is nothing unusual about Australia in this. Every country in the world sets the terms upon which you can enter. If you can't agree to those terms, you don't come in.
And what evidence do you base that on?
How much it already happens even with regulation in place, plus a reasonable helping of rational thought.
How would your big monopoly stop competitors from emerging?
Often they wouldn't need to - the simple costs of market entry would be sufficient. If that was not, then some loss-leader products would hammer the last few nails into the coffin.
Care to provide any examples of where such huge monopolies did happen and survived for any length of time?
Monopolies are typically broken up by government intervention. I'm not sure I can think of any examples of them being broken up any other way.
What would _stop_ a cartel or monopoly from forming ? Once a few companies have gotten together, or a single one has gotten large enough, how is a new competitor going to enter the market when the established ones can either buy it out, or just undercut it until it runs out of cash ?
price fixing is not free market, nub.
Say what ? Price fixing is *absolutely* "free market". Huge cartels (if not just one big monopoly) is exactly where the "free market" would end up without this sort of regulation.