"This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it"
This is not petty at all, it is the right thing to do. People have always claimed that Microsoft trapped people with file formats, so now those file formats will be free and in the public domain - now people will have to come up with another excuse.
Most importantly: Renegade government agencies will not be able to dictate what software their citizens can use based on file-formats.
If you actually read the.pdf file you will see that, thread/wait (synchronization) (which is the most important component of any high-perfromance multi-thread server application) operations are faster than on windows than linux or freeBsd.
I don't know what those 5m vs 1m cycles are doing. But what I do know that fundamentally Windows was designed with high-performance threading/wait operations and high-performance asynchronous operations, whereas Unix and its derivates rely on high performance process-creation, blocking I/O for sever applications.
I.e. Apache 1.3x series performs poorly on windows because it was a straight copy of the Unix edition - using processes rather than threads.
Call me cynical but this just looks like a cheap method of advertising for the two porn websites.
Slashdot should not have linked to the Wired article and and Wired should not have linked to porn sites, however i suspect they are being paid to do so.
For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer..
Actually it remains to be seen how widely OpenDocument will be actually be deployed on the ground - as of now we only have the equivalent of a papal bull decreeing this is to be so. I suspect that there will be considerable push-back from the business (especially multi-state, multinational business) community which interacts with Massachusetts if this politicised OpenDocument requirement is applied too religiously.
Microsoft is not in business to give a new format a free-ride into ubiquity.
Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere"...
Nearly all the members of the OpenDocument collective are Microsoft enemies and many of them are know to have launched lawsuits against Microsoft in the past. Some have even done this multiple times.
Any deviation from the standard would be regarded as "Intentional", "In order to break the" "Write Once Read Everywhere" standard.
The members of the OpenDocument format group should be forced to signed a "NO Lawsuits" contract before its supported in Office.
hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change
One of the major charges brought against Microsoft vs. Sun in the JAVA case was the fact that Microsoft broke the Java potential by "intentionally" only supporting version Java 1.0.
Additionally what you are asking is for Microsoft to support and chase a format already widely discussed and described on the web as incomplete and broken.
It is perfectly satisfactory for independent ISV's and smaller developers to develop and provide a solution for the OpenDocument problem. It is actually a clear opportunity in the case Massachusetts.
Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field
Every edition of Office/Windows released in the past 8 years has the APIs, SDKs and documentation available to enable use (reading and writing) of custom file formats. Clearly if Microsoft were afraid of file formats, why would they do this, why would they also now be publishing royalty free XML schemas for all of their own native Office documents?
The OpenOffice formats support only a subset of the funtionality in Word format - therefore there is emphasis on Import. But that does not exclude Export.
Microsoft has a number other reasons why not to support OpenOffice file formats directly however, here are three:
* OpenDocument has next to 0% market share (when opendocument has market share comparable to PDF, or HTML or RTF support considerations should be made)
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format, any attempt my MS to Extend the format, or any perceived crippling of output (conversion from ms->opendocument --- downgrade) will leave Microsoft wide open to billion dollar anti-trust, anti-competitive, lawsuits from all the other members of the OpenDocument committee - please remember Ms had to pay Sun Micrososystems 2Billion US (Sun is also OpenDocument committee Member).
* OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec and hence it is a moving target, and will probably go thru several revisions before the next Version of Ms office is released.
For the above reason it is appropriate to leave the implementation of OpenDocument support in Ms Office versions in the hands of small third-party developers.
Nonsense. The new.com.com. article was right on the money and in my opionion the information it exposed about the google CEO is rather mild - certainly it didn't warrent the response.
I believe all operating systems which have device drivers are vulnerable exploition if the device drivers are written incorrectly.
If the underlying Windows USB subsystem wasn't flawed it wouldn't allow buffer overflows in device drivers to compromise the system.
Please remember that windows XP SP2/2003 and x64 and Itanium editions of Windows have built in protection against buffer overflows in software. Its not 100% perfect but is their any widely used operating system with guranteed protection against buffer overflows?
... and buffer overflows are not the only way to exploit a flaws in software anyhow!!
As someone who's done USB device and driver development I can say that the Windows USB implementation is absolutely terrible. It comes as no suprise to me that a vulnerability was found.
I haven't seen any greater problems with the windows USB implementation as compared to for example Linux. From the users point (the user is the point afterall) of view USB inmplementation on windows is pretty dammed seamless. Linux USB on the other hand is as well, troublesome...
BTW - your websites certificates are nearly 6 months out of date...
Virtual Earth was live between 4 PM (PT) Saturday and 10 AM (PT) Sunday as part of our final cheks against our production systems; so we are now back offline as planned and be officially (beta) live on Monday. Our initial release is only limited to USA and we will follow up with other regions soon after that...
And they copied the most innovative part of Goggle maps - tile-based pre-built raster images to assemble dynamic... While the rest of the GIS community was happily working to make incremental improvements to the old paradigm, Google innovated a new paradigm. MSN just copied it.
I have to say that you are wrong about this being a google innovation, these ideas were developed and online well before either google maps or msn's virtual earth. map.search.ch is still in many ways better than what google or msn are offering - i really like th keyboard navigation.
Actually its a moderately critical flaw. You are at risk only if you have enabled Remote Desktop, and are not using NAT.
Remote Desktop is disabled by default in every version of XP. Including SP2.
To be clear. The bug is in Remote Desktop not the Firewall. A denial of service. The Firewall has an exceptions for Services like RDP, FTP, WWW, POP3 nearly all Firewalls have this except the most basic.
Given that slashdot has been reduced to trolling about moderate flaws in windows, i would say SP2 is a great success:)
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux - wrong!
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
Support for hardware acceleration is not pervasive with GDI and GDI+, this due to driver support, i believe Matrox provides full support for hardware accelerated GDI & GDI+.
The point is this, the operating system windows 2000 has supported pervasive hardware acceleration of the UI since 1999 (W2K was released in 1999). This means that windows supports hardware acceleration of the UI through the APIs of GDI, GDI+ and DirectX. This support was there before it was supported in the Apple OS.
Driver support for DirectX is pervasive, hardware acceleration with DirectX is pervasive. With longhorn the primary UI will be created through DirectX 10 (WGF).
GDI/GDI+ will remain but will no longer be used to generate the primary UI.
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux - wrong!
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
Wrong, theres nothing to stop you doing per-pixel alpha-blending with the windows API. Here are two examples (c++ & c#):
Given that the pre-requisite APIs (in the case of the C++ code) were available years before the release of OSX (2001) or any Linux-GUI system, then its clear that per-pixel alpha-blending was possible first with Windows GUI.
Windows media player is essentially only a Codec. The fact that microsoft does not produce supporting hardware actually cripples its acceptance in the market place.
WMP also has open interfaces allowing the playback of any other codec.
Interestingly. There is more codec development targeted at windows than any other platform, that includes Linux and OSX. This tells me that developers don't feel impeded or discouraged by the presence of native windows codec.
But codec playing is only a single layer in whole business of digital music.
you said: "Apple basically had to create a new platform"
You imply that this was a desperate move by apple. But history tells us that Apple always builds end-to-end closed solutions. They have a tendency to produce the hardware and software, and closing off access to the most profitable aspects from other developers.
Apple has a proprietary/closed version of AAC a closed hardware device, a closed iTunes, retail outlet. And NO developer interfaces for other codecs!
Luckily or unfortunately the iPod is a great device and has given apple the lead in digital music 90% share.
As for real, their failure (if you can describe a profitable dot-com business as a failure!) is entirely due to their lack of creativity. Real has had billions of cash thrown at it, an early lead and opportunity to do what apple did.
The funny thing is that in most cases AJAX is built on and largely relies in a proprietary Microsoft invented extension to DHTML. The XMLHttpRequest object.
Your argument about water is invalid. Did you know that the PC is not the most common or ubiquitous device for playing music? Digital music in particular, is dominated by the iPod.
I would also argue that Real has been damaging itself for a long time with its media player spy/payware tactics. And don't forget that Real was for a longtime distributed with windows.
What is clear, and what should be clear to you and what is in fact an observable market condition is that both content developers and consumers have choice here and are choosing without hindrance.
Given huge market penetration of Real Audio, Apple Quick Time and the widespread use of codecs like DivX, and iTunes version of AAC, i would say that that advantage you point to is theoretical and not based on reality.
I think you would have a very hard time demonstrating any competitor which has been excluded from the media playing/codec market.
Slashdot Mirror
"Give them Less Is certainly More profit" For Apple Computer, and its a stragegy that has worked well for them before.
CNN is right about this being "tiptoes into Media Center" domain.
"This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it"
This is not petty at all, it is the right thing to do. People have always claimed that Microsoft trapped people with file formats, so now those file formats will be free and in the public domain - now people will have to come up with another excuse.
Most importantly: Renegade government agencies will not be able to dictate what software their citizens can use based on file-formats.
Thats not true, the Open License gives you the option to upgrade to any new version after X number of years. You are never forced to upgrade.
You are confused.
I bet you wished Slashdot had an edit option.
The pertient word was keep not purchase
No
The fact the site has crashed already should have been enough to quell your enthusiam - and make you think twice.
If you actually read the .pdf file you will see that, thread/wait (synchronization) (which is the most important component of any high-perfromance multi-thread server application) operations are faster than on windows than linux or freeBsd.
Thread Synchronization -- MSDN Magazine, October 2005
I don't know what those 5m vs 1m cycles are doing. But what I do know that fundamentally Windows was designed with high-performance threading/wait operations and high-performance asynchronous operations, whereas Unix and its derivates rely on high performance process-creation, blocking I/O for sever applications.
I.e. Apache 1.3x series performs poorly on windows because it was a straight copy of the Unix edition - using processes rather than threads.
Call me cynical but this just looks like a cheap method of advertising for the two porn websites.
Slashdot should not have linked to the Wired article and and Wired should not have linked to porn sites, however i suspect they are being paid to do so.
For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer..
Actually it remains to be seen how widely OpenDocument will be actually be deployed on the ground - as of now we only have the equivalent of a papal bull decreeing this is to be so. I suspect that there will be considerable push-back from the business (especially multi-state, multinational business) community which interacts with Massachusetts if this politicised OpenDocument requirement is applied too religiously.
Microsoft is not in business to give a new format a free-ride into ubiquity.
Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere"...
Nearly all the members of the OpenDocument collective are Microsoft enemies and many of them are know to have launched lawsuits against Microsoft in the past. Some have even done this multiple times.
Any deviation from the standard would be regarded as "Intentional", "In order to break the" "Write Once Read Everywhere" standard.
The members of the OpenDocument format group should be forced to signed a "NO Lawsuits" contract before its supported in Office.
hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change
One of the major charges brought against Microsoft vs. Sun in the JAVA case was the fact that Microsoft broke the Java potential by "intentionally" only supporting version Java 1.0.
Additionally what you are asking is for Microsoft to support and chase a format already widely discussed and described on the web as incomplete and broken.
It is perfectly satisfactory for independent ISV's and smaller developers to develop and provide a solution for the OpenDocument problem. It is actually a clear opportunity in the case Massachusetts.
Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field
Every edition of Office/Windows released in the past 8 years has the APIs, SDKs and documentation available to enable use (reading and writing) of custom file formats. Clearly if Microsoft were afraid of file formats, why would they do this, why would they also now be publishing royalty free XML schemas for all of their own native Office documents?
The OpenOffice formats support only a subset of the funtionality in Word format - therefore there is emphasis on Import. But that does not exclude Export.
Microsoft has a number other reasons why not to support OpenOffice file formats directly however, here are three:
* OpenDocument has next to 0% market share (when opendocument has market share comparable to PDF, or HTML or RTF support considerations should be made)
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format, any attempt my MS to Extend the format, or any perceived crippling of output (conversion from ms->opendocument --- downgrade) will leave Microsoft wide open to billion dollar anti-trust, anti-competitive, lawsuits from all the other members of the OpenDocument committee - please remember Ms had to pay Sun Micrososystems 2Billion US (Sun is also OpenDocument committee Member).
* OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec and hence it is a moving target, and will probably go thru several revisions before the next Version of Ms office is released.
For the above reason it is appropriate to leave the implementation of OpenDocument support in Ms Office versions in the hands of small third-party developers.
WinFS has its origins with the Object File System of the Microsoft Cairo project circa 1992.
Nonsense. The new.com.com. article was right on the money and in my opionion the information it exposed about the google CEO is rather mild - certainly it didn't warrent the response.
Actually its been known for longer than that:
Monad Shell (MSH) Chat Transcript December 2004:t rans/windowsnet/wnet_120704.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/
If you look at the sandbox.msn.com homepage you can see Start.com/1 was launched in March. Theres also the video!.
I believe all operating systems which have device drivers are vulnerable exploition if the device drivers are written incorrectly.
If the underlying Windows USB subsystem wasn't flawed it wouldn't allow buffer overflows in device drivers to compromise the system.
Please remember that windows XP SP2/2003 and x64 and Itanium editions of Windows have built in protection against buffer overflows in software. Its not 100% perfect but is their any widely used operating system with guranteed protection against buffer overflows?
... and buffer overflows are not the only way to exploit a flaws in software anyhow!!
As someone who's done USB device and driver development I can say that the Windows USB implementation is absolutely terrible. It comes as no suprise to me that a vulnerability was found.
I haven't seen any greater problems with the windows USB implementation as compared to for example Linux. From the users point (the user is the point afterall) of view USB inmplementation on windows is pretty dammed seamless. Linux USB on the other hand is as well, troublesome...
BTW - your websites certificates are nearly 6 months out of date...
According the VE programmer:
Virtual Earth was live between 4 PM (PT) Saturday and 10 AM (PT) Sunday as part of our final cheks against our production systems; so we are now back offline as planned and be officially (beta) live on Monday. Our initial release is only limited to USA and we will follow up with other regions soon after that...
Chandu Thota's WebLog
And they copied the most innovative part of Goggle maps - tile-based pre-built raster images to assemble dynamic ... While the rest of the GIS community was happily working to make incremental improvements to the old paradigm, Google innovated a new paradigm. MSN just copied it.
I have to say that you are wrong about this being a google innovation, these ideas were developed and online well before either google maps or msn's virtual earth. map.search.ch is still in many ways better than what google or msn are offering - i really like th keyboard navigation.
map.search.ch was launched in october 2004 google maps came later in 2005.
Actually its a moderately critical flaw. You are at risk only if you have enabled Remote Desktop, and are not using NAT.
:)
Remote Desktop is disabled by default in every version of XP. Including SP2.
To be clear. The bug is in Remote Desktop not the Firewall. A denial of service. The Firewall has an exceptions for Services like RDP, FTP, WWW, POP3 nearly all Firewalls have this except the most basic.
Given that slashdot has been reduced to trolling about moderate flaws in windows, i would say SP2 is a great success
Support for hardware acceleration is not pervasive with GDI and GDI+, this due to driver support, i believe Matrox provides full support for hardware accelerated GDI & GDI+.
x
See: Matrox Parhelia
The point is this, the operating system windows 2000 has supported pervasive hardware acceleration of the UI since 1999 (W2K was released in 1999). This means that windows supports hardware acceleration of the UI through the APIs of GDI, GDI+ and DirectX. This support was there before it was supported in the Apple OS.
See: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/GDInext.msp
Driver support for DirectX is pervasive, hardware acceleration with DirectX is pervasive. With longhorn the primary UI will be created through DirectX 10 (WGF).
GDI/GDI+ will remain but will no longer be used to generate the primary UI.
Wrong, theres nothing to stop you doing per-pixel alpha-blending with the windows API. Here are two examples (c++ & c#):
http://www.codeproject.com/gdi/pxalphablend.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/perpxalpha_sha rp.asp
Given that the pre-requisite APIs (in the case of the C++ code) were available years before the release of OSX (2001) or any Linux-GUI system, then its clear that per-pixel alpha-blending was possible first with Windows GUI.
Windows media player is essentially only a Codec. The fact that microsoft does not produce supporting hardware actually cripples its acceptance in the market place.
WMP also has open interfaces allowing the playback of any other codec.
Interestingly. There is more codec development targeted at windows than any other platform, that includes Linux and OSX. This tells me that developers don't feel impeded or discouraged by the presence of native windows codec.
But codec playing is only a single layer in whole business of digital music.
you said: "Apple basically had to create a new platform"
You imply that this was a desperate move by apple. But history tells us that Apple always builds end-to-end closed solutions. They have a tendency to produce the hardware and software, and closing off access to the most profitable aspects from other developers.
Apple has a proprietary/closed version of AAC a closed hardware device, a closed iTunes, retail outlet. And NO developer interfaces for other codecs!
Luckily or unfortunately the iPod is a great device and has given apple the lead in digital music 90% share.
As for real, their failure (if you can describe a profitable dot-com business as a failure!) is entirely due to their lack of creativity. Real has had billions of cash thrown at it, an early lead and opportunity to do what apple did.
The funny thing is that in most cases AJAX is built on and largely relies in a proprietary Microsoft invented extension to DHTML. The XMLHttpRequest object.
e st.html
See: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/09/xml-http-requ
XMLHttpRequest is not part of any standard, and their is no real standards defined method of doing the equivalent.
Your argument about water is invalid. Did you know that the PC is not the most common or ubiquitous device for playing music? Digital music in particular, is dominated by the iPod.
I would also argue that Real has been damaging itself for a long time with its media player spy/payware tactics. And don't forget that Real was for a longtime distributed with windows.
What is clear, and what should be clear to you and what is in fact an observable market condition is that both content developers and consumers have choice here and are choosing without hindrance.
Given huge market penetration of Real Audio, Apple Quick Time and the widespread use of codecs like DivX, and iTunes version of AAC, i would say that that advantage you point to is theoretical and not based on reality.
I think you would have a very hard time demonstrating any competitor which has been excluded from the media playing/codec market.