Look, if you don't like Vista or don't want to like it or whatever, then fine. But there are people of a different opinion than slashdot conventional wisdom. That's all the people in this sub-thread are saying.
In Fall of 2004, Microsoft issued a 20 billion dollar dividend payment to its shareholders, which accounts for the first (and largest) drop in cash that the article lists. (I forget the exact amount, it was twenty-something billion dollars.) Since then, they've bought companies and made investments, which they felt would be better than sitting on cash, and they may be correct, since they've had record earnings every quarter, and the last two quarters were blow-out quarters (the most recent just reported yesterday).
Two points here: 1. Slashdotters have maintained for years that userbase size has(almost) no relation to the number of exploits an OS gets. MS fanboys would claim that OSX and Linux had fewer exploits because they had a much smaller userbase, and they'd be ripped to shreds by slashdotters that would accuse them of engaging in logical fallacy. Your statement that Vista has fewer flaws because it has fewer users goes directly against long held slashdot doctrine. And yet other slashdotters appear to be agreeing with you, which raises the question of just how closely slashdotters held that doctrine. Seems it was only a closely held belief when needed to defend OSX and Linux from MS fanboys.
2. Your premise is wrong anyway. The report says that Vista has fewer flaws in its first year than did XP, some version of Red Hat, and OSX 10.4 did in their first years (and it's not even close). But Vista actually has MORE users in its first year than all of those OSes did in their first years (and has more users than OSX and Red Hat, period). XP had a greater userbase percentage in its first year, but fewer actual users because the number of computers was 5 times smaller back when XP was released.
Just because lots of slashdotters code software and give it a way for nothing, doesn't mean that the rest of society's producers feel the same.
Speaking of "sense of entitlement", how about guys like yourself that feel entitled to any and every piece of digital content they can get their paws on without payment? Yours is the most selfish generation in history, and you have the gall to call out producers on their "sense of entitlement"? Good God.
"For those who don't believe this [maintain backwards compatibility is critical], how many of you made fun of MS for breaking backwards compatibility with "all apps need admin privledges" and created a "Cancel or Allow" dialog?"
The typical slashdotter (which I ain't) would say in both cases: "To hell with backwards compatibility. Microsoft should just follow the standards by default, and for any current website that gets broken, it's up to the web dev to fix it, and if he doesn't, too damn bad - the site will lose visitors which will force the web dev to either update it or watch as the site goes out of business. Similarly for apps needing admin privileges, Microsoft should've just made Vista so that such apps wouldn't run at all rather than throw up a "Cancel or Allow" dialog, and thereby force the app dev to update his app or go out of business."
So one *can* take a "backwards compatibility is NOT critical" stance and be consistent in both cases.
Reflector is nice (even more so for analyzing how other.NET languages actually work (e.g. one can user Reflector on an F# module to translate that code into C#).
But the actual source code is way better because it provides comments, which is many times the most important part of the code. Who knows, maybe some of the "misdesigns" of which you speak are perfectly reasonable when seeing the comments.
Also, this allows stepping through the code in a debugger, which Reflector doesn't allow (to my knowledge).
"MSOOXML is an order of magnitude harder to write a parser for than ODF."
The Gnumeric devs disagree with your assessment, as they've said it was easier to implement OOXML into Gnumeric than ODF. (Maybe you're making the point that ODF is "easier" because it's so incomplete. After all, ODF doesn't even support spreadsheet formulas, so that's one thing you don't need to implement in an ODF parser, but that's hardly a *good* thing.)
Oh, please STFU. If an open source suite had come up with the Office 2k7 UI, you'd be hailing it as a triumph of OSS, and you know it. God, you guys are so pathetic in your MS hatred.
The rights of the minority are infringed at the whim of the majority? You actually advocate such? God help you if you ever find yourself in the minority.
Um, no. Property taxes refer only to real estate property, not all property, and that's because real estate is a limited resource, whose ownership is granted by the government itself.
People aren't taxed for the number of washing machines they own or the number of blue jeans they own, or any other kind of physical property like that, only real estate, which is taxed for the reason I state above.
The notion that I should pay a tax for every short story I write is beyond absurd. Now, if a make money on the sales of such stories, then I do pay a tax, which is income tax.
How about just using the normal Microsoft logo as is done for all other company topics on this site?
And while slashdot is at it, how about replacing the broken-pane icon used for Windows topics with the normal Windows logo, as is done for all other topics?
Then, slashdot would at least have a *pretense* of objectivity.
Cutting back the length of copyright makes sense to me, in general (though I don't know what the actual length should be; 5 years seems too short). But there are certain cases where songs are used for commercial purposes (such as advertising jingles) where I think the creator of the original tune should get paid (not for 120 years, but at least 30 years (it seems like the sweet spot for advertising jingles is to use hit songs from 8 to 25 years old).
Regarding PDF, Microsoft had support for PDF in Office 2k7, but Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft in the EC (fearing that it would threaten Adobe's own monopoly in Office to PDF conversion tools), which forced Microsoft to remove PDF support. How's that for irony? An "open" format (PDF) that Microsoft is forbidden to support in its products.
As for ODF, Microsoft is sponsoring an open source ODF plugin for Office, so they already do that.
Oh, and OOXML is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard (see Brian Jones' latest blog entry on the progress ECMA is making to address the objections raised to the OOXML submission). When that happens, I fully expect you to make a post saying that all parties should be forced to support OOXML, since it'll be an open ISO standard.
Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.
First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007. Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.
LINQ *does* rock. Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the.NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in.NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).
VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.
XNA *is* an innovative product. See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.
Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed). Industry Standardization for HD Photo
TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.
It goes on and on.
Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.
Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.
Maybe the bigger issue is that slashdotters, and more importantly, Red Hat should think twice about dismissing Microsoft's patent claims wrt Linux distros as lies.
On OSX Panther, when saving a picture using Firefox, the Download mgr is invoked, and the spinning beachball comes up for up to 10 seconds for some reason. It sucks bad.
One of the claims of Opera's lawsuit is that Microsoft makes no attempt to comply with standards. Now that lawsuit looks utterly foolish. Opera is to blame. Normally when party A has a beef with party B, party A contacts party B so they can try to resolve the issue before running to the courts/commissions/government. If Opera had done that, they would've learned that IE8 would follow the CSS standards. But Opera didn't do that (or didn't care?) so filed a bogus suit out of willful ignorance. Opera is a laughing stock right now, and getting next to zero support for their suit, as shown by this mozilla blog entry: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/12/opera_calls_for.html
One of my pet peeves of FireFox is that if you save a picture to your harddrive, Firefox goes through the download manager, which is irritating. And slow. Does Firefox 3 fix this?
Considering that neither Linux nor OSX allow playing protected HD content from their computers AT ALL, let alone over HDMI, bashing Vista because it HAS that ability seems ass backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, if you don't like Vista or don't want to like it or whatever, then fine.
But there are people of a different opinion than slashdot conventional wisdom. That's all the people in this sub-thread are saying.
In Fall of 2004, Microsoft issued a 20 billion dollar dividend payment to its shareholders, which accounts for the first (and largest) drop in cash that the article lists. (I forget the exact amount, it was twenty-something billion dollars.) Since then, they've bought companies and made investments, which they felt would be better than sitting on cash, and they may be correct, since they've had record earnings every quarter, and the last two quarters were blow-out quarters (the most recent just reported yesterday).
;)
Sorry if this does nothing for your cold.
Two points here:
1. Slashdotters have maintained for years that userbase size has(almost) no relation to the number of exploits an OS gets. MS fanboys would claim that OSX and Linux had fewer exploits because they had a much smaller userbase, and they'd be ripped to shreds by slashdotters that would accuse them of engaging in logical fallacy. Your statement that Vista has fewer flaws because it has fewer users goes directly against long held slashdot doctrine. And yet other slashdotters appear to be agreeing with you, which raises the question of just how closely slashdotters held that doctrine. Seems it was only a closely held belief when needed to defend OSX and Linux from MS fanboys.
2. Your premise is wrong anyway. The report says that Vista has fewer flaws in its first year than did XP, some version of Red Hat, and OSX 10.4 did in their first years (and it's not even close). But Vista actually has MORE users in its first year than all of those OSes did in their first years (and has more users than OSX and Red Hat, period). XP had a greater userbase percentage in its first year, but fewer actual users because the number of computers was 5 times smaller back when XP was released.
Incidentally, Here are some Dec 2007 OS userbase share stats according to web hits:
XP: 76.9%
Vista: 10.5%
OSX: 7.3%
Linux: 0.6%
Just because lots of slashdotters code software and give it a way for nothing, doesn't mean that the rest of society's producers feel the same.
Speaking of "sense of entitlement", how about guys like yourself that feel entitled to any and every piece of digital content they can get their paws on without payment? Yours is the most selfish generation in history, and you have the gall to call out producers on their "sense of entitlement"? Good God.
"For those who don't believe this [maintain backwards compatibility is critical], how many of you made fun of MS for breaking backwards compatibility with "all apps need admin privledges" and created a "Cancel or Allow" dialog?"
The typical slashdotter (which I ain't) would say in both cases:
"To hell with backwards compatibility. Microsoft should just follow the standards by default, and for any current website that gets broken, it's up to the web dev to fix it, and if he doesn't, too damn bad - the site will lose visitors which will force the web dev to either update it or watch as the site goes out of business. Similarly for apps needing admin privileges, Microsoft should've just made Vista so that such apps wouldn't run at all rather than throw up a "Cancel or Allow" dialog, and thereby force the app dev to update his app or go out of business."
So one *can* take a "backwards compatibility is NOT critical" stance and be consistent in both cases.
Thank you.
Yours is the best post on this topic.
Reflector is nice (even more so for analyzing how other .NET languages actually work (e.g. one can user Reflector on an F# module to translate that code into C#).
But the actual source code is way better because it provides comments, which is many times the most important part of the code. Who knows, maybe some of the "misdesigns" of which you speak are perfectly reasonable when seeing the comments.
Also, this allows stepping through the code in a debugger, which Reflector doesn't allow (to my knowledge).
"MSOOXML is an order of magnitude harder to write a parser for than ODF."
The Gnumeric devs disagree with your assessment, as they've said it was easier to implement OOXML into Gnumeric than ODF. (Maybe you're making the point that ODF is "easier" because it's so incomplete. After all, ODF doesn't even support spreadsheet formulas, so that's one thing you don't need to implement in an ODF parser, but that's hardly a *good* thing.)
The collector of the Czech Reupblic's OOXML comments would disagree with you:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=418352&cid=22049468
Oh, please STFU.
If an open source suite had come up with the Office 2k7 UI, you'd be hailing it as a triumph of OSS, and you know it.
God, you guys are so pathetic in your MS hatred.
Tyranny by the majority?
The rights of the minority are infringed at the whim of the majority? You actually advocate such? God help you if you ever find yourself in the minority.
Um, no.
Property taxes refer only to real estate property, not all property, and that's because real estate is a limited resource, whose ownership is granted by the government itself.
People aren't taxed for the number of washing machines they own or the number of blue jeans they own, or any other kind of physical property like that, only real estate, which is taxed for the reason I state above.
The notion that I should pay a tax for every short story I write is beyond absurd. Now, if a make money on the sales of such stories, then I do pay a tax, which is income tax.
How about just using the normal Microsoft logo as is done for all other company topics on this site?
And while slashdot is at it, how about replacing the broken-pane icon used for Windows topics with the normal Windows logo, as is done for all other topics?
Then, slashdot would at least have a *pretense* of objectivity.
Cutting back the length of copyright makes sense to me, in general (though I don't know what the actual length should be; 5 years seems too short). But there are certain cases where songs are used for commercial purposes (such as advertising jingles) where I think the creator of the original tune should get paid (not for 120 years, but at least 30 years (it seems like the sweet spot for advertising jingles is to use hit songs from 8 to 25 years old).
Yep, and as usual, the kettle is *right*.
Regarding PDF, Microsoft had support for PDF in Office 2k7, but Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft in the EC (fearing that it would threaten Adobe's own monopoly in Office to PDF conversion tools), which forced Microsoft to remove PDF support. How's that for irony? An "open" format (PDF) that Microsoft is forbidden to support in its products.
As for ODF, Microsoft is sponsoring an open source ODF plugin for Office, so they already do that.
Oh, and OOXML is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard (see Brian Jones' latest blog entry on the progress ECMA is making to address the objections raised to the OOXML submission). When that happens, I fully expect you to make a post saying that all parties should be forced to support OOXML, since it'll be an open ISO standard.
Did you even bother to read TFA? IBM won on quantity (MS coming in 2nd), but Microsoft won on quality (and that wasn't even close).
Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.
.NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).
First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.
LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the
VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.
XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.
Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo
Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?
F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.
Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples
TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.
It goes on and on.
Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.
Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.
Maybe the bigger issue is that slashdotters, and more importantly, Red Hat should think twice about dismissing Microsoft's patent claims wrt Linux distros as lies.
The GP's post was funny. But your pile-on was lame.
On OSX Panther, when saving a picture using Firefox, the Download mgr is invoked, and the spinning beachball comes up for up to 10 seconds for some reason. It sucks bad.
One of the claims of Opera's lawsuit is that Microsoft makes no attempt to comply with standards. Now that lawsuit looks utterly foolish. Opera is to blame. Normally when party A has a beef with party B, party A contacts party B so they can try to resolve the issue before running to the courts/commissions/government. If Opera had done that, they would've learned that IE8 would follow the CSS standards. But Opera didn't do that (or didn't care?) so filed a bogus suit out of willful ignorance. Opera is a laughing stock right now, and getting next to zero support for their suit, as shown by this mozilla blog entry:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/12/opera_calls_for.html
One of my pet peeves of FireFox is that if you save a picture to your harddrive, Firefox goes through the download manager, which is irritating. And slow. Does Firefox 3 fix this?
The full list is here:
:p).
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html
And both iPhone and Leopard are on the list (just for Apple fanboys that came here to gloat on Vista's #1 ranking
The list is pretty weak, really. And strange too. Putting Office 2k7 on the list because it has a new interface? WTF?
Considering that neither Linux nor OSX allow playing protected HD content from their computers AT ALL, let alone over HDMI, bashing Vista because it HAS that ability seems ass backwards.