i disagree. as the leader and visionary of msft, the company did exactly what he wanted. bill could've changed the direction of the company any time he wanted.
but he didn't want to.
And how do you know what he 'wanted' to do?
Good people are often screwed over or taken down a bad path by people they trust, that doesn't mean they set out to go down that path. Unless you are Gate's shrink, then we both can only assume.
And based on his involvement in specific areas of MS, there is a direct correlation to bad business taking hold when he would reliquish control of that area.
Ultimately, ya, he is responsible, but that doesn't mean he intended it that way. 50 billion does put you in a bubble whether you would like to believe it or not.
Also if you look at his non-MS life, he puts more money and energy into work that is for the betterment of mankind. He could just sit on his wealth and not make more work for himself.
From Wiki: The first version of MacWrite was actually rather limited, and could handle only a few pages of text before running into performance problems. Nevertheless, it increased user expectations from a word processing program. Similar word processors followed, including WriteNow, which fixed the limitations while adhering to much the same user interface, and the first GUI version of Microsoft Word.
I think you forget what features were in the first versions, I remember having to block text and using formatting tags in my version. It wasn't until Word popped on the scene did the new paradigm of select and modify leech back into other GUI applications.
However I used this a very 'mild' example that MS could really try to be dicks about. Also take drag and drop text in a document (MS Again), squiggle underlines for errors, etc.
Look at some of the 'crap' patent claims and lawsuits in the past couple of years. Many of them have held up. What odds do you place on a company as old as MS not having at least 5% of the patents hold up? And all it would take is a couple of significant patents to stand to mess up the whole non-MS industry.
Basically the bear gets poked a lot by money hungry little companies on patents, why poke it even harder just to see if it can bite? Really stupid.
am not 100% certain, but I think the problem is directly related to the DRM subsystem that is installed with Windows Media player 11.
Rather than spout attitude, you might actually have read what the GP posted.
Ok, explain to me what I missed...
WMP11 has NOTHING to do with Media Center DRM, and also has NO DRM in WMP11 that deals with Broadcast flags.
So if you believe WPM11 or the WMP11 DRM could be causing the problem, then the next time you get a flat tire, check your radiator for water, cause that MUST be the problem.
I don't know about Ken, as I haven't heard the claim before.
I do however know the gp poster is correct, Gates never said the 640KB quote. So this does make the author seem like a OS religion nut or stupid.
If people want to find the evil at MS, they need to look beyond Gates and the years when he turned over business control to Ballmer and others along the way. The moral decline at MS can be directly linked to the efforts of the 'business' mindset of these individuals and not the ideals Gates himself originally pushed.
Do I think what MS is doing with patents and claims is wrong?
It is wrong to use this as a false business model. However, the more they are pushed and sued and shoved into a corner the more likely they will slap back, and it will NOT be pretty, as there are odds enough in their favor that even a few 'important' patents will be upheld and destroy the non-MS computing market.
People forget that MS has been around a long time, and they not only have patents but also prior art. Take something as simple as 'select and modify' where you highlight a word and change the font, size, etc. And even though today this seems intuitive for a WYSIWYG GUI, the concept orginated from the MS Word team and MS could rip this concept out of every GUI based OS and application out there if it was upheld.
Also when you have been slapped around by patents as much as MS has, there will come a time they will slap back. This uprising in MS started when they moved to put patents on everything they do in the late 90s after being hit with a ton of 'crap' lawsuits. And even though they have tons of patents, to date, MS has not slapped back with them. (And please no one quote the 1999 WMA lawsuit that was about reverse engineering code and not a patent claim as evidence.)
MS has enough patents to keep every major computer software busy, and even though it is not common to hear on Slashdot, sadly MS does innovate 'enough' that many of their patents are very valid.
am not 100% certain, but I think the problem is directly related to the DRM subsystem that is installed with Windows Media player 11.
Well, you might be 100% certain, but you happen to be wrong. WMP11 has nothing to do with this issue.
The Content blockage is NOT specifically by design and happens more often than not because of bad signals from some cable companies marking content as locked, especially via composite output via their digital cable boxes (strangely, especially companies like Charter that use a BSD based OS on their boxes).
If you have an internal or external USB tuner or CableCard and don't have an external cable box, you shouldn't see this issue.
I love how one user has a problem, does a few searches and then writes an article about it without any real knowledge of the problem.
To my understanding the content block flag is only supposed to be used on VOD or special events to prevent recording of the event, not to prevent watching it.
If people look back, there were similar issues with Windows Media Center 2005 that MS finally had to address to fix the bad signaling from Cable companies. Once again it appears Cable companies are still messing up the signal and everyone is out to torch MS. Which is very ironic as Vista is the only OS with native CableCard support, but then again, these issues don't affect CableCard.
However there is a growing following that believes a few Cable providers are doing this on purpose to get extra $$ from users and force them to rent a DVR from the company.
My theater has two tuners, runs Vista Media Center and AMC and HBO are neither restricted for viewing or recording, however the protection bit is set on a few of the HBO shows that prevents me from dropping the recording into Movie Maker. (And there is a hack to bypass that even.) Also prior to Vista, you couldn't edit any recorded MS-PVR content with Movie Maker, and now you can easily.
Bottom line is these people are having signalling issues, generating the blockage. And NO this has nothing to do with WMP11 DRM or Vista DRM as the myth would like to believe. Do yourself a favor go look up the problem and you will see that Windows Media Center 2005 had similar issues, and it did not have WMP11, nor the isolated process protection like Vista does.
but they're being stupid because Vista's NOT doing well for them and costing them dearly.
I agree with the rest of the post that it is stupid for MS to push this issue; however, Vista is actually doing well for MS, it is not the failed OS many wanted it to be. (And yes I know people that see and are happy with the numbers both inside and out.)
Also don't forget that Vista in the 'mind' of MS hasn't even 'turned on' yet, as they have everything from hardware Vista power announcements like multi-core GPU projects that only run on Vista due to the scaling subsystem and GPU scheduler, all the way XBox Live service for Vista and a ton of 'native' WPF Vista projects. (Remember the WPF in Vista isn't technically used yet by any MS applications, and it is far beyond Win32/GDI+ programming.)
And just wait for any real wars to strike at Vista like 10.5 OSX, Vista has the capabilities to shove back hard if MS needs to. (Just like the XBox 360, MS developed in anticipation feature matches for the PS3 in terms of HD, 1080p, etc.)
2) The single player mode has several 'potential' stories, with the stories even being co-developed at different locations so no storyline can leak, as no one knows which one ships.
3) They are 'specifically' not using 360 level texturing, this means the texture quality is little if any better than Halo2. Why? To keep the quality and final art secret until the release. To keep bandwidth sizes low. Etc...
There are even people at Bungie that don't know the final texture art going to be used, nor the storyline, so I am astonished that you could find a review of something that doesn't exist.
Next week, let me guess, you will post a 1 year review of OS X 10.5?
Yet you haven't actually proven that WPF/E is any less capable in a replacement role for ActiveX web controls
Sorry, I assumed people were smart enough to discern a 'display plugin' from an unconstrained plugin technology running native code on the OS. Next time I will assume this is the 'slow class'...
You do know that Silverlight is just a fancy name for WPF/E, right? Therefore Silverlight is the replacement for ActiveX. Congratulations, you've just proven someone else's point.
No I wouldn't know that, having been in the WPF/E beta since last summer. (Seriously, the quality of responses on SlashDot are to the point of needing an IQ check.)
WPF and WPF/E They are NOT THE FREAKING SAME THING, hence the/E...
WPF Web apps are FULL WPF applications that ONLY run on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and they support the FULL WPF API, but have a distiction of being boxed inside the full.Net and also boxed inside IE protected mode on Vista...
Silverlight is a cross browser subset running on a stripped down.net framework that is compact, only does 2D, has little control support, and is designed for display and animating graphics and playing HD video more than full application development.
Maybe you can guess why the WPF/.NET 3.0 framework is 30-90MBs in size and the WPF/E(Silverlight) framework is under 2MB? Maybe because they only share the same programming concepts, but just maybe are not the same? They don't even run on the same framework code, even if you have Vista, you still have to install WPF/E to run Silverlight apps. Get it yet?
Congratulations, you've just proven you are the most clueless people to post in this thread...
(Is there anyone else out there that doesn't get the difference between WPF and WPF/E? If so, go to www.microsoft.com or Wikipedia before posting.)
Microsoft kinda-sorta shuffled it off into other areas after that. Now they're back with a vengence. Silverlight will be everything that ActiveX was going to be, but BETTER! Can you feel the excitement?
A) Silverlight is nothing like ActiveX. In function, security, etc. The main thing of silverlight is a more feature rich version of vector animation technologies with the ability to push higher quality video in a very easy to program manner that also directly works with current server and browser side scripting standards. It is what SVG should have been, but SVG couldn't see past basic image rendering. Flash is overkill, locked to its programming model, and in the end has far less features than SilverLight.
From what I personally know of Silverlight, MS waited for other technologies to fill this gap, and 5 years later it never happened, so they decided to use what they learned from developing WPF,.NET and security surrounding both to bring this type of technology to the Web.
B) Yes ActiveX sucks, and should have been limited to a Intranet or corporate technology only. MS was stupid not to have seen the security risks of distributing code in this manner.
C) MS has killed ActiveX in case others haven't noticed. It is hell to even get a control to run anymore because of the restrictions MS has added themselves.
D) If you want to talk about MS's ActiveX replacement, then you would be talking about.NET 3.0 and WPF Web applications. Unlike ActiveX they run in two sandboxes of security, and don't have access or security to do anything more than an HTML page can.
Go look up the British Library for an example of a WPF Web application, it is NOT SilverLight.
I suppose I must just throw up my hands and admit that you are just too dense to understand how delivering geometry via DMA negates any perceived performance benefit of putting a 3D driver in the kernel, leaving only the drawbacks.
No, I should just announce you are right, and call a meeting with my development team to explain how stupid they are because 'you said so'...
Go away before you drown, you are in over your head.
Nonsense. Modern video hardware is predominantly driven by DMA, which requires an insignifcant number of kernel calls after initial setup. The rest of your points are just as empty and/or misinformed as your first, not worth a response.
Which would be true if the games were using direct access with no driver interaction and not going through APIs like OpenGL and DirectX. However, since GAMES do, you are either trolling or still in 1990.
Technically, the subsystems in NT are user-mode processes, though they are (to my knowledge) the only user-mode processes that cause blue screens when they crash. To my knowledge, the only layers in the NT Kernel are between the executor and the drivers
Key words "(to my knowledge)"...
This is easy information to find, people please at least go look this crap so you don't sound freaking crazy.
From your post, you read one wikipedia page on NT, and even from that page you didn't even understand half of what you were reading.
MS has published tons of papers on this, in addition to books like Inside NT to OS theory books and papers that specifically talk about the concepts in use in NT and with reference to NT in works published after NT's creation in 1991.
Think of subsystems as being like shells with system-specific behavior.
Or they are complete OS environments that on top of the NT core. Even Win32/Win64 is a subsystem, and why you will find a Win32 kernel for that OS environment, which has nothing to do with and is not the NT OS's kernel.
The OS subsystem technology in NT is one of the few concepts NT pulled out of OS theory and implemented that is not found in other kernel designs. This is why Vista ships with a full BSD subsystem, in addition to the normal MS OS subsystems.
Windows doesn't need this functionality, but they really need nice VFS and inode layers in their filesystem.
And if the above wasn't proof enough, this sentence demonstrates all too well your lack of understanding of anything you are talking about. Ya, NT needs a nice VFS, wow, I bet MS never has ever thought of this... Geesh.
Finally, the grandparent's post about NT4 being a credible gaming platform is just laughable.
And I said NT4 was credible when? It had limited DirectX support compared to the DOS/Win9x platforms. NT4 was the first step in giving NT performance on par with user expectations from running assembly optimized games on Win9x OSes.
Win2k was the result of the changes started in NT4, and YES it is a very credible gaming platform. For reference go look up a few 1000 games people are still running. Heck even go wild and look up something called XBox, a little product that outperformed even Sony's dedicated console OS on specific console designed hardware; which is quite impressive for a general use OS to pull off.
Why even jump into a conversation when you are pulling info from wikipedia and don't even understand what you are reading?
But by all means, please tell us all about the "OS subsystems" that Linux cannot run. If you are referring to a microkernel vs a monolithic kernel, then you may want to use the actual terminology rather than what sounds like dumbed down idiocy.
I mention subsystems and you act like I made up a new word.
I would assume even a kiddie like yourself could find wikipedia before posting on something they know nothing about, next time try that.
So for the love of God, go look up NT subsystems and why most OS engineers like myself often refer to NT as a client/server kernel architecture...
Once you get done, be sure to come back here and explain how YOU think Linux could run multiple OS subsystems on an semi-agnostic core kernel.
Linux and Vista have the SAME problem. Drivers for both are in limited supply.
Not when you consider 99.9% of all Win2k & WinXP drivers work just fine in Vista.
Even all the users complaining about the Video drivers not being up to snuff yet, they can just install the XP drivers, as Vista still supports the legacy XP Video subsystem and driver model.
This is why people stating they won't move to Vista from XP because of video is a stupid argument, as they can run their XP drivers on Vista now and wait until the Vista drivers get ironed out by ATI/NVidia.
The problem with linux gaming is not performance or even technical. The problems with gaming on linux are:
Actually, just in terms of video based on where the video drivers run, performance will always be a contention when compared to OSes that structured so that the main video drivers are kernel or user/kernel mode hybrids as in Vista.
There are other debatable concepts, but this is the most glaring, as getting a game to perform the same inside Linux on the same hardware as it does in an OS like Windows is currently not possible.
So yes, market does drive a majority of the lack of gaming, but if Linux could actually keep up or even exceed gaming speeds in Windows, gaming developers would take it more serious and would be a 'reason' for people to finally pull away from Windows forever.
However I don't see these architectual changes ever happening, and MS keeps getting more clever with their Video concepts in Windows having learned from their console development efforts, then they will be hard to catch for a while.
If you're going to make a mess of things, at least with layers you have an organized mess. There's a reason that Linux is more secure than Windows.
You have no idea what you are talking about, past repeating the normal SlashDot spin...
Go look at the Layers of NT model, the NT4 changes and the Vista changes. Not only is NT far more structured, isolated, but even has concepts than Linux can't do like run OS subsystems because of its rich structured layers even at the kernel API interface level.
The Video driver ring drop in NT4 did add instability, but considering the performance they acheived with it, this was probably the right choice for the timeframe, as it made the NT code base a credible gaming platform. (99.9% of games are Windows based for performance, even OpenGL games run faster under Windows - and there is also the XBox and XBox 360 bascially Win2k and a fork from the Win2003/XP tree.)
However you can't seriously argue that the Video ring drop was a massive introduction of insecurity.
PS as you will note the Video model in Vista gets the benefits of both, near low ring level performance with user mode drivers. Again, something you don't find in Linux or OSX or any other current market OS.
I would expect this shoddy driver support out of ATI, since they have always been pretty disappointing. But nVidia is a true disappointment, since their driver support had always been top-notch until now.
As a PS...
For Vista - NVidia and ATI had to write the entire driver from scratch. From GPU Scheduling, RAM Virtualization to tons of other Vista features of the WDDM, make the leap quite significant.
However the thing people don't see to understand, even if you have Video card that has a crap driver available for it, just install the XP driver. You lose the WDDM and Aero concepts, but Vista works just like XP and will give you back the same quality and experience for Video.
So all the people whining about not moving to Vista because of the video driver problems are really not too bright. They can be running the same XP driver on Vista that they are using now, but have the other features of Vista. Then when NVidia and ATI get all the bugs out of the Vista driver version, move up to the cooler new driver features Vista offers in the WDDM Video subsystem.
If you centralize the install then you can bypass a chunk of licensing fees, as only a % of users will be using the applications from the server install at a certain time.
Also if you turn them in, MS will probably not do much other than make them legalize their licensing needs. MS tends to only go after large corporate 1000+ installs or reseller pirates, most companies just get asked for licensing fees.
This is exactly what a graphical file manager should abstract away through concepts such as time machine [apple.com].
I know this is SlashDot, but why reference a non-shipping product as the GUI standard example for this feature when it has been being used in Windows 2003 and WindowsXP for over 4 years?
Vista even goes a few steps beyond previous Windows versions and Time Machine.
PS from the last Beta I played with, Time Machine's UI has a ways to go to catch up to the simplicity of right click -> previous versions in Windows.
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i disagree. as the leader and visionary of msft, the company did exactly what he wanted. bill could've changed the direction of the company any time he wanted.
but he didn't want to.
And how do you know what he 'wanted' to do?
Good people are often screwed over or taken down a bad path by people they trust, that doesn't mean they set out to go down that path. Unless you are Gate's shrink, then we both can only assume.
And based on his involvement in specific areas of MS, there is a direct correlation to bad business taking hold when he would reliquish control of that area.
Ultimately, ya, he is responsible, but that doesn't mean he intended it that way. 50 billion does put you in a bubble whether you would like to believe it or not.
Also if you look at his non-MS life, he puts more money and energy into work that is for the betterment of mankind. He could just sit on his wealth and not make more work for himself.
From Wiki:
The first version of MacWrite was actually rather limited, and could handle only a few pages of text before running into performance problems. Nevertheless, it increased user expectations from a word processing program. Similar word processors followed, including WriteNow, which fixed the limitations while adhering to much the same user interface, and the first GUI version of Microsoft Word.
I think you forget what features were in the first versions, I remember having to block text and using formatting tags in my version. It wasn't until Word popped on the scene did the new paradigm of select and modify leech back into other GUI applications.
However I used this a very 'mild' example that MS could really try to be dicks about. Also take drag and drop text in a document (MS Again), squiggle underlines for errors, etc.
Look at some of the 'crap' patent claims and lawsuits in the past couple of years. Many of them have held up. What odds do you place on a company as old as MS not having at least 5% of the patents hold up? And all it would take is a couple of significant patents to stand to mess up the whole non-MS industry.
Basically the bear gets poked a lot by money hungry little companies on patents, why poke it even harder just to see if it can bite? Really stupid.
am not 100% certain, but I think the problem is directly related to the DRM subsystem that is installed with Windows Media player 11.
Rather than spout attitude, you might actually have read what the GP posted.
Ok, explain to me what I missed...
WMP11 has NOTHING to do with Media Center DRM, and also has NO DRM in WMP11 that deals with Broadcast flags.
So if you believe WPM11 or the WMP11 DRM could be causing the problem, then the next time you get a flat tire, check your radiator for water, cause that MUST be the problem.
I don't know about Ken, as I haven't heard the claim before.
I do however know the gp poster is correct, Gates never said the 640KB quote. So this does make the author seem like a OS religion nut or stupid.
If people want to find the evil at MS, they need to look beyond Gates and the years when he turned over business control to Ballmer and others along the way. The moral decline at MS can be directly linked to the efforts of the 'business' mindset of these individuals and not the ideals Gates himself originally pushed.
Do I think what MS is doing with patents and claims is wrong?
It is wrong to use this as a false business model. However, the more they are pushed and sued and shoved into a corner the more likely they will slap back, and it will NOT be pretty, as there are odds enough in their favor that even a few 'important' patents will be upheld and destroy the non-MS computing market.
People forget that MS has been around a long time, and they not only have patents but also prior art. Take something as simple as 'select and modify' where you highlight a word and change the font, size, etc. And even though today this seems intuitive for a WYSIWYG GUI, the concept orginated from the MS Word team and MS could rip this concept out of every GUI based OS and application out there if it was upheld.
Also when you have been slapped around by patents as much as MS has, there will come a time they will slap back. This uprising in MS started when they moved to put patents on everything they do in the late 90s after being hit with a ton of 'crap' lawsuits. And even though they have tons of patents, to date, MS has not slapped back with them. (And please no one quote the 1999 WMA lawsuit that was about reverse engineering code and not a patent claim as evidence.)
MS has enough patents to keep every major computer software busy, and even though it is not common to hear on Slashdot, sadly MS does innovate 'enough' that many of their patents are very valid.
am not 100% certain, but I think the problem is directly related to the DRM subsystem that is installed with Windows Media player 11.
Well, you might be 100% certain, but you happen to be wrong. WMP11 has nothing to do with this issue.
The Content blockage is NOT specifically by design and happens more often than not because of bad signals from some cable companies marking content as locked, especially via composite output via their digital cable boxes (strangely, especially companies like Charter that use a BSD based OS on their boxes).
If you have an internal or external USB tuner or CableCard and don't have an external cable box, you shouldn't see this issue.
I love how one user has a problem, does a few searches and then writes an article about it without any real knowledge of the problem.
To my understanding the content block flag is only supposed to be used on VOD or special events to prevent recording of the event, not to prevent watching it.
If people look back, there were similar issues with Windows Media Center 2005 that MS finally had to address to fix the bad signaling from Cable companies. Once again it appears Cable companies are still messing up the signal and everyone is out to torch MS. Which is very ironic as Vista is the only OS with native CableCard support, but then again, these issues don't affect CableCard.
However there is a growing following that believes a few Cable providers are doing this on purpose to get extra $$ from users and force them to rent a DVR from the company.
My theater has two tuners, runs Vista Media Center and AMC and HBO are neither restricted for viewing or recording, however the protection bit is set on a few of the HBO shows that prevents me from dropping the recording into Movie Maker. (And there is a hack to bypass that even.) Also prior to Vista, you couldn't edit any recorded MS-PVR content with Movie Maker, and now you can easily.
Bottom line is these people are having signalling issues, generating the blockage. And NO this has nothing to do with WMP11 DRM or Vista DRM as the myth would like to believe. Do yourself a favor go look up the problem and you will see that Windows Media Center 2005 had similar issues, and it did not have WMP11, nor the isolated process protection like Vista does.
I'm criticizing Microsoft management for thinking they can pull this off. They're off to a great start, with 9 managers and 6 developers.
Strange concept here...
Managers on my teams are also developers. So if people have a managing title, they are no longer able to create, think, develop, or code?
I think your definition of Manager is based on someone working at McDonalds a bit too long.
but they're being stupid because Vista's NOT doing well for them and costing them dearly.
I agree with the rest of the post that it is stupid for MS to push this issue; however, Vista is actually doing well for MS, it is not the failed OS many wanted it to be. (And yes I know people that see and are happy with the numbers both inside and out.)
Also don't forget that Vista in the 'mind' of MS hasn't even 'turned on' yet, as they have everything from hardware Vista power announcements like multi-core GPU projects that only run on Vista due to the scaling subsystem and GPU scheduler, all the way XBox Live service for Vista and a ton of 'native' WPF Vista projects. (Remember the WPF in Vista isn't technically used yet by any MS applications, and it is far beyond Win32/GDI+ programming.)
And just wait for any real wars to strike at Vista like 10.5 OSX, Vista has the capabilities to shove back hard if MS needs to.
(Just like the XBox 360, MS developed in anticipation feature matches for the PS3 in terms of HD, 1080p, etc.)
High, funny, or mentally impaired?
1) Multi- mean MULTI-player beta.
2) The single player mode has several 'potential' stories, with the stories even being co-developed at different locations so no storyline can leak, as no one knows which one ships.
3) They are 'specifically' not using 360 level texturing, this means the texture quality is little if any better than Halo2. Why? To keep the quality and final art secret until the release. To keep bandwidth sizes low. Etc...
There are even people at Bungie that don't know the final texture art going to be used, nor the storyline, so I am astonished that you could find a review of something that doesn't exist.
Next week, let me guess, you will post a 1 year review of OS X 10.5?
Yet you haven't actually proven that WPF/E is any less capable in a replacement role for ActiveX web controls
Sorry, I assumed people were smart enough to discern a 'display plugin' from an unconstrained plugin technology running native code on the OS. Next time I will assume this is the 'slow class'...
You do know that Silverlight is just a fancy name for WPF/E, right? Therefore Silverlight is the replacement for ActiveX. Congratulations, you've just proven someone else's point.
/E...
.Net and also boxed inside IE protected mode on Vista...
.net framework that is compact, only does 2D, has little control support, and is designed for display and animating graphics and playing HD video more than full application development.
No I wouldn't know that, having been in the WPF/E beta since last summer. (Seriously, the quality of responses on SlashDot are to the point of needing an IQ check.)
WPF and WPF/E
They are NOT THE FREAKING SAME THING, hence the
WPF Web apps are FULL WPF applications that ONLY run on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and they support the FULL WPF API, but have a distiction of being boxed inside the full
Silverlight is a cross browser subset running on a stripped down
Maybe you can guess why the WPF/.NET 3.0 framework is 30-90MBs in size and the WPF/E(Silverlight) framework is under 2MB? Maybe because they only share the same programming concepts, but just maybe are not the same? They don't even run on the same framework code, even if you have Vista, you still have to install WPF/E to run Silverlight apps. Get it yet?
Congratulations, you've just proven you are the most clueless people to post in this thread...
(Is there anyone else out there that doesn't get the difference between WPF and WPF/E? If so, go to www.microsoft.com or Wikipedia before posting.)
Microsoft kinda-sorta shuffled it off into other areas after that. Now they're back with a vengence. Silverlight will be everything that ActiveX was going to be, but BETTER! Can you feel the excitement?
.NET and security surrounding both to bring this type of technology to the Web.
.NET 3.0 and WPF Web applications. Unlike ActiveX they run in two sandboxes of security, and don't have access or security to do anything more than an HTML page can.
A) Silverlight is nothing like ActiveX. In function, security, etc. The main thing of silverlight is a more feature rich version of vector animation technologies with the ability to push higher quality video in a very easy to program manner that also directly works with current server and browser side scripting standards. It is what SVG should have been, but SVG couldn't see past basic image rendering. Flash is overkill, locked to its programming model, and in the end has far less features than SilverLight.
From what I personally know of Silverlight, MS waited for other technologies to fill this gap, and 5 years later it never happened, so they decided to use what they learned from developing WPF,
B) Yes ActiveX sucks, and should have been limited to a Intranet or corporate technology only. MS was stupid not to have seen the security risks of distributing code in this manner.
C) MS has killed ActiveX in case others haven't noticed. It is hell to even get a control to run anymore because of the restrictions MS has added themselves.
D) If you want to talk about MS's ActiveX replacement, then you would be talking about
Go look up the British Library for an example of a WPF Web application, it is NOT SilverLight.
I suppose I must just throw up my hands and admit that you are just too dense to understand how delivering geometry via DMA negates any perceived performance benefit of putting a 3D driver in the kernel, leaving only the drawbacks.
No, I should just announce you are right, and call a meeting with my development team to explain how stupid they are because 'you said so'...
Go away before you drown, you are in over your head.
funnel all 3D operations through a low level driver
Which is the WHOLE FREAKING point, where that driver sits in the system for performance reasons.
You are mental...
Nonsense. Modern video hardware is predominantly driven by DMA, which requires an insignifcant number of kernel calls after initial setup. The rest of your points are just as empty and/or misinformed as your first, not worth a response.
Which would be true if the games were using direct access with no driver interaction and not going through APIs like OpenGL and DirectX. However, since GAMES do, you are either trolling or still in 1990.
Technically, the subsystems in NT are user-mode processes, though they are (to my knowledge) the only user-mode processes that cause blue screens when they crash. To my knowledge, the only layers in the NT Kernel are between the executor and the drivers
Key words "(to my knowledge)"...
This is easy information to find, people please at least go look this crap so you don't sound freaking crazy.
From your post, you read one wikipedia page on NT, and even from that page you didn't even understand half of what you were reading.
MS has published tons of papers on this, in addition to books like Inside NT to OS theory books and papers that specifically talk about the concepts in use in NT and with reference to NT in works published after NT's creation in 1991.
Think of subsystems as being like shells with system-specific behavior.
Or they are complete OS environments that on top of the NT core. Even Win32/Win64 is a subsystem, and why you will find a Win32 kernel for that OS environment, which has nothing to do with and is not the NT OS's kernel.
The OS subsystem technology in NT is one of the few concepts NT pulled out of OS theory and implemented that is not found in other kernel designs. This is why Vista ships with a full BSD subsystem, in addition to the normal MS OS subsystems.
Windows doesn't need this functionality, but they really need nice VFS and inode layers in their filesystem.
And if the above wasn't proof enough, this sentence demonstrates all too well your lack of understanding of anything you are talking about. Ya, NT needs a nice VFS, wow, I bet MS never has ever thought of this... Geesh.
Finally, the grandparent's post about NT4 being a credible gaming platform is just laughable.
And I said NT4 was credible when? It had limited DirectX support compared to the DOS/Win9x platforms. NT4 was the first step in giving NT performance on par with user expectations from running assembly optimized games on Win9x OSes.
Win2k was the result of the changes started in NT4, and YES it is a very credible gaming platform. For reference go look up a few 1000 games people are still running. Heck even go wild and look up something called XBox, a little product that outperformed even Sony's dedicated console OS on specific console designed hardware; which is quite impressive for a general use OS to pull off.
Why even jump into a conversation when you are pulling info from wikipedia and don't even understand what you are reading?
But by all means, please tell us all about the "OS subsystems" that Linux cannot run. If you are referring to a microkernel vs a monolithic kernel, then you may want to use the actual terminology rather than what sounds like dumbed down idiocy.
I mention subsystems and you act like I made up a new word.
I would assume even a kiddie like yourself could find wikipedia before posting on something they know nothing about, next time try that.
So for the love of God, go look up NT subsystems and why most OS engineers like myself often refer to NT as a client/server kernel architecture...
Once you get done, be sure to come back here and explain how YOU think Linux could run multiple OS subsystems on an semi-agnostic core kernel.
Linux and Vista have the SAME problem. Drivers for both are in limited supply.
Not when you consider 99.9% of all Win2k & WinXP drivers work just fine in Vista.
Even all the users complaining about the Video drivers not being up to snuff yet, they can just install the XP drivers, as Vista still supports the legacy XP Video subsystem and driver model.
This is why people stating they won't move to Vista from XP because of video is a stupid argument, as they can run their XP drivers on Vista now and wait until the Vista drivers get ironed out by ATI/NVidia.
The problem with linux gaming is not performance or even technical. The problems with gaming on linux are:
Actually, just in terms of video based on where the video drivers run, performance will always be a contention when compared to OSes that structured so that the main video drivers are kernel or user/kernel mode hybrids as in Vista.
There are other debatable concepts, but this is the most glaring, as getting a game to perform the same inside Linux on the same hardware as it does in an OS like Windows is currently not possible.
So yes, market does drive a majority of the lack of gaming, but if Linux could actually keep up or even exceed gaming speeds in Windows, gaming developers would take it more serious and would be a 'reason' for people to finally pull away from Windows forever.
However I don't see these architectual changes ever happening, and MS keeps getting more clever with their Video concepts in Windows having learned from their console development efforts, then they will be hard to catch for a while.
If you're going to make a mess of things, at least with layers you have an organized mess. There's a reason that Linux is more secure than Windows.
You have no idea what you are talking about, past repeating the normal SlashDot spin...
Go look at the Layers of NT model, the NT4 changes and the Vista changes. Not only is NT far more structured, isolated, but even has concepts than Linux can't do like run OS subsystems because of its rich structured layers even at the kernel API interface level.
The Video driver ring drop in NT4 did add instability, but considering the performance they acheived with it, this was probably the right choice for the timeframe, as it made the NT code base a credible gaming platform. (99.9% of games are Windows based for performance, even OpenGL games run faster under Windows - and there is also the XBox and XBox 360 bascially Win2k and a fork from the Win2003/XP tree.)
However you can't seriously argue that the Video ring drop was a massive introduction of insecurity.
PS as you will note the Video model in Vista gets the benefits of both, near low ring level performance with user mode drivers. Again, something you don't find in Linux or OSX or any other current market OS.
I would expect this shoddy driver support out of ATI, since they have always been pretty disappointing. But nVidia is a true disappointment, since their driver support had always been top-notch until now.
As a PS...
For Vista - NVidia and ATI had to write the entire driver from scratch. From GPU Scheduling, RAM Virtualization to tons of other Vista features of the WDDM, make the leap quite significant.
However the thing people don't see to understand, even if you have Video card that has a crap driver available for it, just install the XP driver. You lose the WDDM and Aero concepts, but Vista works just like XP and will give you back the same quality and experience for Video.
So all the people whining about not moving to Vista because of the video driver problems are really not too bright. They can be running the same XP driver on Vista that they are using now, but have the other features of Vista. Then when NVidia and ATI get all the bugs out of the Vista driver version, move up to the cooler new driver features Vista offers in the WDDM Video subsystem.
If you centralize the install then you can bypass a chunk of licensing fees, as only a % of users will be using the applications from the server install at a certain time.
Also if you turn them in, MS will probably not do much other than make them legalize their licensing needs. MS tends to only go after large corporate 1000+ installs or reseller pirates, most companies just get asked for licensing fees.
This is exactly what a graphical file manager should abstract away through concepts such as time machine [apple.com].
I know this is SlashDot, but why reference a non-shipping product as the GUI standard example for this feature when it has been being used in Windows 2003 and WindowsXP for over 4 years?
Vista even goes a few steps beyond previous Windows versions and Time Machine.
PS from the last Beta I played with, Time Machine's UI has a ways to go to catch up to the simplicity of right click -> previous versions in Windows.
and I've been waiting, waiting, hoping, wondering why we don't have it in modern operating systems. I *want* this
Look up Windows 2003 Server, WindowsXP, Vista...
they have some of the worst ratings in network news and have been falling for a long time.
Every since they divorced MS, their ratings have been climbing significantly. Several time slots beating the downward movement of Fox.
I do. I have music that is 30+ years old. I don't want to be paying 20 dollars a month to listen to a few songs.
Then you burn these to a CD and put them in a freaking drawer. Geesh.