Dude, thanks for spending the time at Techfest and for spending far more time editing the videos together. I know this was a huge amount of time and I really appreciate it.
It always pisses me off when people say that Microsoft hasn't commercialized its research. We've worked closely with our product gorups to transfer a ton of stuff over. What we haven't done is get in people's faces about it.
In Vista: the 3-D interface, the Sidebar, Superfetch, speech recognition. The network map autodetection. Ink parsing. IPv6 support. The IE7 phishing detector. The new HP photo format. MSR made significant contributions to all of these. In Office 2007, we helped with the new Ribbon UI, made improvmenets to search relevance in Sharepoint, improved chart labeling in Excel, and improved the spell checker. For the XBox we contributed graphics library for photorealistic functions, TrueSkill, geolocation for XBox live, the AI for Forza. Data mining algorithms in SQL Server came from MSR. We contributed to the spam filters in Hotmail, Exchange and Outlook. Several of the tools in Visual Studio Team Server came from MSR, as did the static driver verifier in the Vista DDK. There's MSR technology everywhere.
There are dozens and dozens of other examples. The Tablet PC came out of MSR. The first-generation Windows Media audio codec came out of MSR too. Our interactive TV work started in MSR.
So fine, if you want to beat us up for not blowing our own horn, I'll take that hit. But to say that we don't commercialize our research is just wrong.
Comment by Kevin Schofield -- March 20, 2007 @ 10:29 pm
As to Alex's question: there are several that we can identify now. Keeping in mind that most truly "groundbreaking" technologies take 10+ years before they're recognized as such, I'm sure that there are more that we haven't identified as such yet.
But some examples: - the foundations of image based rendering, by Hughes Hoppe - hardware support for graphics processing (aka "Talisman") by Jim Kajiya, Turner Whitted et al - ClearType (read the papers and the patent application before you judge; there's much more to this than is generally admitted) by John Platt - source code analysis, modeling and verification, by Jim Larus, Sriram Rajamani, and several others - public area wireless networks by Victor Bahl - support vector machines for spam filtering, by John Platt and David Heckerman - applying spam filtering algorithms to designing an HIV vaccine, by Heckerman and Jojic - functional programming language work by Luca Cardelli and Simon Peyton-Jones - performance optimizing a program by re-arranging its code and data segments based upon empirical observation, but Amitabh Srivastava et al. - 3-D information visualization papers by George Robertson - Mary Czerwinski's papers on understanding differences in spatial abilities between men and women - Cerwins
1. Vista isn't exactly in widespread use. The sort of people who poke holes in Windows and use it for spam bots etc will concentrate on XP for now as it is much easier. The anti-piracy and activation make pirating Vista a little harder, again this means the low life will not use it for a while.
What idiots modded the above lies as "3, Insightful"? Running Excel doesn't cause UAC dlg. The "trojan.exe" and "deleteallfiles.exe" things will if they tried modifying system-wide files. Which is when you do want UAC, right? It's sad when slashdotters resort to lies. And even sadder when such lies are modded up.
The words 'layers', 'services', 'modularity' are unknown to Microsoft...
Wow, righteous ignorance on full display. Windows is built on layers. You can go to the services control panel and turn off any services you want. You can also use the event logger to monitor what each service is doing. If you want to do "ad-hoc" repair work (such as described by the OP of this subthread), turn off and on services and/or drivers until you find the culprit. That'll be just as fast, if not faster than slogging through millions of lines of source code in vain attempt to find the source of a problem.
Here's a question for you: Which is the more "monolithic kernel", the one that allows adding CD-burning functionality (just picking one example) via Plug & Play, or the one that requires recompiling the kernel to add such functionality?
You ignore one small detail: Microsoft is a convicted criminal monopolist.
Microsoft has never even been charged with "criminal" activity, let alone "convicted" of such. Slashdotters that continue to repeat your nonsense only do themselves discredit. And your nonsense was actually modded "4, Informative". Since when is blatant falsehood "informative"? Truly pathetic groupthink in action.
UW has a huge waiting list and the campus is overcrowded as it is. Most students value their education more than the "right" to pirate music. Those that are screwed up in the head enought to think that this battle is on the level of marching regarding civil rights, women's rights, or Viet Nam back in the 60's, and drop out over this, well their seats will be filled with the quickness. And rightly so, people that stupid have no business occupying a valuable slot at the university in the first place.
When RIAA was suing Napster, slashdotters were advocating that RIAA go after individual pirates instead, because slashdotters didn't reall think RIAA would ever try that (slashdotters thought it wasn't feasible to sue individuals because there are too many to sue and it's too hard to identify individual pirates). Slashdotters were being disingenuous by advocating that RIAA do something slashdotters didn't think was actually possible. Now that RIAA is doing what slashdotters advocated, slashdotters are crying foul. It's pretty amusing on one hand, disgusting and pathetic on the other.
Lot's of universities get MS money. WTF does that have to do with RIAA? Universities aren't about protecting piracy or facilitating piracy over the universties' networks. Finally, universities have copyrighted works themselves that they want protected. Allowing their networks to be freely used for pirating the copyrighted works of others is the last thing on their minds.
According to your link, unauthorized reproduction or distribution of $1000 worth of works in a 180-day period crosses the line from civil infraction to criminal activity. That's not an "extreme case". Many pirates cross that line all the time. Hell, many people simply leave their music collection (which they mostly received thru piracy) open to P2P uploading 24/7. Even if your collection is only worth one dollar, 1000 people obtaining it over P2P during a 180-day period becomes criminal on your part (not theirs), since you've distributed $1000 worth of works.
Sure mapquest is an example that got hurt by google but at least Google makes great products and innovation.
Google makes barely good enough products, not great ones. The product in question in this particular case, Google Desktop Search, is horrible as desktop search (not remotely in the same league as Vista's desktop search), is spyware, and is installed thru malware means (piggybacking on the install programs of unrelated software).
I just clicked your link, and while MapQuest appears higher than Google Maps in the actual search results, above ALL search results is the "sponsored link", which happes to be Find Maps on Google. So, you only proved the GP's point. No matter how many people link to an alternative map service (which would affect its search result ranking), Google Maps always appears first via the "sponsored link".
And maps isn't the only area where Google does this.
"I just didn't realize they had been planning on achieving that goal by getting a bunch of OSS coders to do all their work for them for free."
That's the standard software development model now, and into the foreseeable future. That's the value of OSS. Get OSS devs to to your work for free. It's the reason IBM can layoff large portions of its AIX team, and tout Linux, since they don't have to pay development costs for the latter.
"Gives an insight into what Open Source is capable of."
We already knew that Open Source devs are capable of cloning the work of others.
Re:That's all very well...
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
"I don't think there has ever been a new MS OS release that has run faster on the same hardware than its predecessor."
Same can be said for.0 Mac OS releases (not counting 9.0, which was a.0 release in name-only). The all-time record for biggest performance drop off for a.0 release as compared to its predecessor is held by OSX 10.0. And although OSX's speed improved over time (it didn't get decent speed until 10.2), 9.0 would blow away even OSX 10.4 on the same hardware wrt speed.
But of course, Win3.x and Mac OS 7 would blow away today's Windows and Mac on today's hardware (once those old OSes went through any necessary recompilation), and DOS would, in turn, blow away Win 3.x and Mac OS 7, so who cares?
What you're saying isn't exactly new info. Microsoft already publicly claims that what you describe is the reason for WGA. Whether people believe that or not is another question, but your claim is already widely known because Microsoft themselves make the claim.
The article says that numerous security flaws have already been found in Safari 3. I have to wonder if this is the result of Apple's developers being accustomed to the "safe" Mac environment, where it makes little difference if there are any flaws in software, as the flaws won't be exploited anyway. The Windows environment is an entirely different situation, and Apple devs aren't used to it. (I know Apple makes QuickTime player and iTunes for Windows, but those are relatively closed systems compared to a general purpose web browser (although even QuickTime player has had security updates.) We know from the huge amount of security flaws Apple has had to address this year, that they've been used to releasing vulnerable software, and getting away with it. That doesn't play in the Windows world.
This is like alien of a germ-free planet, and therefore having no immune system, deciding to visit earth and getting infected with viruses, bacteria, germs, and whatnot, within minutes of his arrival.
"Google is also angry that there is not an easy way for them to hijack all the search boxes around the O/S. Is there an easy way for them to do that on OSX? Ubuntu?"
There's no easy way to hijack OSX's search boxes, but that's ok because Google and Apple colluded to lock Safari into allowing only Google in its search box, to hell with competing search engines. That's what Google considers to be "fair" competition.
"It makes me wonder if this is yet another example of them giving lower-quality products to the masses while keeping better tools for those who buy their products."
There's nothing preventing other developers from rolling their own UI widgets just like Microsoft's VS and Office teams did. Good grief, why does Microsoft have to hold developers hands for those devs to get anything done? Microsoft's VS and Office teams felt that the OS standard widgets didn't meet their needs, so they rolled their own just like any other competent developer could do. Incidentally, the VS team makes its widgets available to developers, so you don't know what you're talking about anyway.
Um, you do realize that Microsoft's push for WPE/XAML (aka Silverlight) already targets Windows IE, Windows Firefox, Mac Firefox, and Mac Safari, don't you? Adding support for Windows Safari will be trivial. Your post makes no sense at all.
Slashdot Mirror
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/20/one-thing-microso ft-does-way-better-than-google-research/#comment-3 00364
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/20/one-thing-microso ft-does-way-better-than-google-research/#comment-3 00607
It's in use way more than is Linux:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
Vista: 3.74%
Linux: 0.70%
And here are status for Germany, which would be more friendly to Linux than Vista:
http://www.webhits.de/webhits/browser.htm
Vista: 1.0%
Linux: 0.5%
I hate to break it to you, but Vista's userbase size has already passed Linux's, and it's not even close:= 2
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
What idiots modded the above lies as "3, Insightful"?
Running Excel doesn't cause UAC dlg.
The "trojan.exe" and "deleteallfiles.exe" things will if they tried modifying system-wide files. Which is when you do want UAC, right?
It's sad when slashdotters resort to lies. And even sadder when such lies are modded up.
Wow, righteous ignorance on full display.
Windows is built on layers.
You can go to the services control panel and turn off any services you want. You can also use the event logger to monitor what each service is doing.
If you want to do "ad-hoc" repair work (such as described by the OP of this subthread), turn off and on services and/or drivers until you find the culprit. That'll be just as fast, if not faster than slogging through millions of lines of source code in vain attempt to find the source of a problem.
Here's a question for you: Which is the more "monolithic kernel", the one that allows adding CD-burning functionality (just picking one example) via Plug & Play, or the one that requires recompiling the kernel to add such functionality?
Microsoft has never even been charged with "criminal" activity, let alone "convicted" of such.
Slashdotters that continue to repeat your nonsense only do themselves discredit.
And your nonsense was actually modded "4, Informative". Since when is blatant falsehood "informative"? Truly pathetic groupthink in action.
UW has a huge waiting list and the campus is overcrowded as it is.
Most students value their education more than the "right" to pirate music. Those that are screwed up in the head enought to think that this battle is on the level of marching regarding civil rights, women's rights, or Viet Nam back in the 60's, and drop out over this, well their seats will be filled with the quickness. And rightly so, people that stupid have no business occupying a valuable slot at the university in the first place.
When RIAA was suing Napster, slashdotters were advocating that RIAA go after individual pirates instead, because slashdotters didn't reall think RIAA would ever try that (slashdotters thought it wasn't feasible to sue individuals because there are too many to sue and it's too hard to identify individual pirates). Slashdotters were being disingenuous by advocating that RIAA do something slashdotters didn't think was actually possible. Now that RIAA is doing what slashdotters advocated, slashdotters are crying foul. It's pretty amusing on one hand, disgusting and pathetic on the other.
Lot's of universities get MS money. WTF does that have to do with RIAA?
Universities aren't about protecting piracy or facilitating piracy over the universties' networks.
Finally, universities have copyrighted works themselves that they want protected. Allowing their networks to be freely used for pirating the copyrighted works of others is the last thing on their minds.
According to your link, unauthorized reproduction or distribution of $1000 worth of works in a 180-day period crosses the line from civil infraction to criminal activity. That's not an "extreme case". Many pirates cross that line all the time. Hell, many people simply leave their music collection (which they mostly received thru piracy) open to P2P uploading 24/7. Even if your collection is only worth one dollar, 1000 people obtaining it over P2P during a 180-day period becomes criminal on your part (not theirs), since you've distributed $1000 worth of works.
Google makes barely good enough products, not great ones. The product in question in this particular case, Google Desktop Search, is horrible as desktop search (not remotely in the same league as Vista's desktop search), is spyware, and is installed thru malware means (piggybacking on the install programs of unrelated software).
I just clicked your link, and while MapQuest appears higher than Google Maps in the actual search results, above ALL search results is the "sponsored link", which happes to be Find Maps on Google. So, you only proved the GP's point. No matter how many people link to an alternative map service (which would affect its search result ranking), Google Maps always appears first via the "sponsored link".
And maps isn't the only area where Google does this.
OMG.
lololololololololololol
As the old saying goes, "There's one born every minute."
How old are you anyway, twelve? No grown-up can be as stupid as naive as you appear to be.
"I just didn't realize they had been planning on achieving that goal by getting a bunch of OSS coders to do all their work for them for free."
That's the standard software development model now, and into the foreseeable future. That's the value of OSS. Get OSS devs to to your work for free. It's the reason IBM can layoff large portions of its AIX team, and tout Linux, since they don't have to pay development costs for the latter.
"Gives an insight into what Open Source is capable of."
We already knew that Open Source devs are capable of cloning the work of others.
"I don't think there has ever been a new MS OS release that has run faster on the same hardware than its predecessor."
.0 Mac OS releases (not counting 9.0, which was a .0 release in name-only). The all-time record for biggest performance drop off for a .0 release as compared to its predecessor is held by OSX 10.0. And although OSX's speed improved over time (it didn't get decent speed until 10.2), 9.0 would blow away even OSX 10.4 on the same hardware wrt speed.
Same can be said for
But of course, Win3.x and Mac OS 7 would blow away today's Windows and Mac on today's hardware (once those old OSes went through any necessary recompilation), and DOS would, in turn, blow away Win 3.x and Mac OS 7, so who cares?
I find it fascinating that Engadget's headline on this very same story is:
Report: Vista more secure than OS X and Linux
Way to spin, slashdot!!
What you're saying isn't exactly new info. Microsoft already publicly claims that what you describe is the reason for WGA. Whether people believe that or not is another question, but your claim is already widely known because Microsoft themselves make the claim.
Well, there are quite a few Capt Ahabs running around here.
The article says that numerous security flaws have already been found in Safari 3. I have to wonder if this is the result of Apple's developers being accustomed to the "safe" Mac environment, where it makes little difference if there are any flaws in software, as the flaws won't be exploited anyway. The Windows environment is an entirely different situation, and Apple devs aren't used to it. (I know Apple makes QuickTime player and iTunes for Windows, but those are relatively closed systems compared to a general purpose web browser (although even QuickTime player has had security updates.) We know from the huge amount of security flaws Apple has had to address this year, that they've been used to releasing vulnerable software, and getting away with it. That doesn't play in the Windows world.
This is like alien of a germ-free planet, and therefore having no immune system, deciding to visit earth and getting infected with viruses, bacteria, germs, and whatnot, within minutes of his arrival.
US antitrust law is civil law, not criminal law, thus it wouldn't be accurate to tag such stories as "crime".
"Google is also angry that there is not an easy way for them to hijack all the search boxes around the O/S. Is there an easy way for them to do that on OSX? Ubuntu?"
There's no easy way to hijack OSX's search boxes, but that's ok because Google and Apple colluded to lock Safari into allowing only Google in its search box, to hell with competing search engines. That's what Google considers to be "fair" competition.
"It makes me wonder if this is yet another example of them giving lower-quality products to the masses while keeping better tools for those who buy their products."
There's nothing preventing other developers from rolling their own UI widgets just like Microsoft's VS and Office teams did. Good grief, why does Microsoft have to hold developers hands for those devs to get anything done? Microsoft's VS and Office teams felt that the OS standard widgets didn't meet their needs, so they rolled their own just like any other competent developer could do. Incidentally, the VS team makes its widgets available to developers, so you don't know what you're talking about anyway.
Um, you do realize that Microsoft's push for WPE/XAML (aka Silverlight) already targets Windows IE, Windows Firefox, Mac Firefox, and Mac Safari, don't you? Adding support for Windows Safari will be trivial. Your post makes no sense at all.