It's not about creating a customer base anymore, that was the old company mission. Now they have all the customers, and they need to keep them. Aggressive business tactics only get you so far. Now Microsoft has to do what the customers want or they'll lose them to some new "Microsoft" up-start (like Google).
They're making some pretty major changes in Office 12 to keep it going strong. The Office Server System and the XML file formats are just the tip of the iceberg.
ASP.Net 2.0
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 3, Informative
ASP.NET 2.0 does this also. You can define client callbacks on web controls which let you run code on the server-side and get the results back without reposting the page. http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/35068 96
Heh well, I'm just an intern. As for the site, thanks for pointing that out. If it means anything, it's not my code that's broken. I blame my hosting provider. It looks like someone tried to post a comment and it never flushed the XML back to disk right.
Well, I just got paid to participate in a 5 hour Halo 2 tournament. =) Like most hi-tech companies there isn't any defined working hours. It's just do what it takes to get your shit done.
Virtually every niche and cranny in Windows is getting some sort of makeover. Not everything is big enough to deserve new acronyms but the sum is much more important than its parts. The motto behind Longhorn is "make it just work" and so every function of Windows is being reexamined to make it fit in with that philosophy.
There are many internal improvements. Changes to caching and scheduling. Lots of things you will never see reported or expierence directly.
With MSH they want EVERY option you can set in the Windows UI to have a command-line equivalent. Which is a big undertaking.
This is not a rival to Adobe products, definetly not Photoshop. It's primarily a vector graphics program with some unique features in that area. It was orignally a program Creative House Expressions which Microsoft bought in 2003.
"Creature House Expression (formerly Fractal Design Expression) is a vector-based drawing tool featuring "skeletal strokes," a 2D drawing primitive which offers complete editability and scalability." http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/illustration/gr/e xpression.htm
This new Acrylic beta is essential version 4 of that program.
Giving the timing of the release of a program that Microsoft had seemingly killed off years ago. I'd say they were planing to use it for vector creation in Avalon.
...but I'm pretty keen as to what's going into IE7. There are some really nice features in this browser. If I said what they were the Firefox team would no doubt copy them in them in a heartbeat. There's an anti-URL-spoofing feature that's clever and effective but really simple. It effectively stops virtually all URL spoofs.
Everyone knows IE7 has tabbed browsing but what they don't know is how great the implementation is. It doesn't feel tacked on but more like a native part of the interface. It has features that you may have seen before (*cough* Opera) and some new innovations too. Plus it fits in with the interface paradigms you'd expect to be able to do in Windows.
Actually the anti-spoofing features they're adding take care of this. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but there's a very simple and clever idea to prevent URL spoofing.
How is this clever? The industry players they monitor are Microsoft's competitors. You think they're ever going to be happy until they get a huge advantage over Microsoft? Real Networks for example, sure Microsoft ships Windows with Media Player, but it's not like Real's product would have beaten it anyway. Real Player is an ad-ridden piece of crap in comparison.
At least in the US it's understood that when you have a REAL free market economy, you have to allow for winners from time to time. It's not like Microsoft will have the market majority FOREVER. Empires rise and fall regardless of how big they are.
There are many things that IIS has done better than Apache. Take user file permissions for example. On Apache a user can authenticate against, say a passwd file, but Apache still ignores the file permissions of the file system. On IIS, when you authenticate to the server the server impersonates your user account when it accesses files and so the file permissions (ACLs) still apply as they would when accessing files on the OS normally.
Another advantage of IIS is it's ability to isolate applications running on it. If an application crashes on IIS, it dies within its own isolated process and doesn't affect other applications or the core. Apache does this to an extent and will usually at least keep the core running if a module crashes, but there are still instances where it may need a restart. This is also the same reason Apache needs a restart to change configuration settings while IIS does not (although.htaccess helps).
Microsoft gives a crapload of money to different causes though. In fact I think they're number one when it comes to philanthropy. For example, if an employee donates to a charity the company will give twice that.
Especially with the liberal area the Microsoft headquarters is in, it's almost a given that they give tons of money to "disadvantaged" groups.
Being a millionaire isn't that special when you're in the Seattle area and you can get a run-down shack for about $1 million. On the other hand, you can buy a crapload of lattes.
Do you really think those people are going to buy a Longhorn update in a box? You get Longhorn when you buy a new computer after 2006. And, on average, people buy a new computer every four years. There's your market.
You're right, there's a market for new software on old software. In the news there was recently a new version of Windows announced that would be designed to run on older machines.
Exactly what does it violate? The bill of rights doesn't say anything about a right to privacy. It comes down to what is in the majority interests of Americans. I'm sure most would agree a national ID is worth it for a more secure nation. We already have social security IDs, this is more of a 21st century version.
The article cites several countries where the.NET identity solution by HP is already in use. Obviously there has been no news about any security problems with these systems. You should be far more worried about simply losing your wallet than this system getting hacked.
This might sound totally crazy to a lot of you, but this is one way Microsoft stays in business, they respond to customer feedback. Tons of people are demanding tabs, and there you go. It doesn't matter if they make sense from a rational standpoint or not.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the main goals of Longhorn is to require that any configuration in the UI has a CLI equivalent.
It's not about creating a customer base anymore, that was the old company mission. Now they have all the customers, and they need to keep them. Aggressive business tactics only get you so far. Now Microsoft has to do what the customers want or they'll lose them to some new "Microsoft" up-start (like Google).
I'm using IE7 which has full PNG support amoung other things I'm not talking about.
They're making some pretty major changes in Office 12 to keep it going strong. The Office Server System and the XML file formats are just the tip of the iceberg.
ASP.NET 2.0 does this also. You can define client callbacks on web controls which let you run code on the server-side and get the results back without reposting the page.8 96
http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/3506
Heh well, I'm just an intern. As for the site, thanks for pointing that out. If it means anything, it's not my code that's broken. I blame my hosting provider. It looks like someone tried to post a comment and it never flushed the XML back to disk right.
Well, I just got paid to participate in a 5 hour Halo 2 tournament. =)
Like most hi-tech companies there isn't any defined working hours. It's just do what it takes to get your shit done.
So there.
Look at the Longhorn driver development page for insight as to what's going on:m spx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/WDK/default.
Virtually every niche and cranny in Windows is getting some sort of makeover. Not everything is big enough to deserve new acronyms but the sum is much more important than its parts. The motto behind Longhorn is "make it just work" and so every function of Windows is being reexamined to make it fit in with that philosophy.
There are many internal improvements. Changes to caching and scheduling. Lots of things you will never see reported or expierence directly.
With MSH they want EVERY option you can set in the Windows UI to have a command-line equivalent. Which is a big undertaking.
Sorry for the typos, was in a hurry.
This is not a rival to Adobe products, definetly not Photoshop. It's primarily a vector graphics program with some unique features in that area. It was orignally a program Creative House Expressions which Microsoft bought in 2003.
e xpression.htm
"Creature House Expression (formerly Fractal Design Expression) is a vector-based drawing tool featuring "skeletal strokes," a 2D drawing primitive which offers complete editability and scalability."
http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/illustration/gr/
This new Acrylic beta is essential version 4 of that program.
Giving the timing of the release of a program that Microsoft had seemingly killed off years ago. I'd say they were planing to use it for vector creation in Avalon.
You can check out the scripting language spec here:. aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk/archive/category/9497
...but I'm pretty keen as to what's going into IE7. There are some really nice features in this browser. If I said what they were the Firefox team would no doubt copy them in them in a heartbeat. There's an anti-URL-spoofing feature that's clever and effective but really simple. It effectively stops virtually all URL spoofs.
Everyone knows IE7 has tabbed browsing but what they don't know is how great the implementation is. It doesn't feel tacked on but more like a native part of the interface. It has features that you may have seen before (*cough* Opera) and some new innovations too. Plus it fits in with the interface paradigms you'd expect to be able to do in Windows.
Actually the anti-spoofing features they're adding take care of this. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but there's a very simple and clever idea to prevent URL spoofing.
How is this clever? The industry players they monitor are Microsoft's competitors. You think they're ever going to be happy until they get a huge advantage over Microsoft? Real Networks for example, sure Microsoft ships Windows with Media Player, but it's not like Real's product would have beaten it anyway. Real Player is an ad-ridden piece of crap in comparison.
At least in the US it's understood that when you have a REAL free market economy, you have to allow for winners from time to time. It's not like Microsoft will have the market majority FOREVER. Empires rise and fall regardless of how big they are.
There are many things that IIS has done better than Apache. Take user file permissions for example. On Apache a user can authenticate against, say a passwd file, but Apache still ignores the file permissions of the file system. On IIS, when you authenticate to the server the server impersonates your user account when it accesses files and so the file permissions (ACLs) still apply as they would when accessing files on the OS normally.
.htaccess helps).
Another advantage of IIS is it's ability to isolate applications running on it.
If an application crashes on IIS, it dies within its own isolated process and doesn't affect other applications or the core. Apache does this to an extent and will usually at least keep the core running if a module crashes, but there are still instances where it may need a restart. This is also the same reason Apache needs a restart to change configuration settings while IIS does not (although
Microsoft gives a crapload of money to different causes though. In fact I think they're number one when it comes to philanthropy. For example, if an employee donates to a charity the company will give twice that.
Especially with the liberal area the Microsoft headquarters is in, it's almost a given that they give tons of money to "disadvantaged" groups.
Being a millionaire isn't that special when you're in the Seattle area and you can get a run-down shack for about $1 million. On the other hand, you can buy a crapload of lattes.
Do you really think those people are going to buy a Longhorn update in a box? You get Longhorn when you buy a new computer after 2006. And, on average, people buy a new computer every four years. There's your market.
You're right, there's a market for new software on old software. In the news there was recently a new version of Windows announced that would be designed to run on older machines.
Exactly what does it violate? The bill of rights doesn't say anything about a right to privacy. It comes down to what is in the majority interests of Americans. I'm sure most would agree a national ID is worth it for a more secure nation. We already have social security IDs, this is more of a 21st century version.
The article cites several countries where the .NET identity solution by HP is already in use. Obviously there has been no news about any security problems with these systems. You should be far more worried about simply losing your wallet than this system getting hacked.
How the hell is the parent insightful? This guy is spelling his 's's with dollar signs for crying out loud.
They have to draw the line somewhere, right?
This might sound totally crazy to a lot of you, but this is one way Microsoft stays in business, they respond to customer feedback. Tons of people are demanding tabs, and there you go. It doesn't matter if they make sense from a rational standpoint or not.