Maybe you should go work for Microsoft, seeing as creating an XML schema for a document that can describe the layout, formatting and content of 4 different versions of Office for 35 different languages seems like such a trivial task for you... either that or make break throughs in quantum mechanics or string theory... seems like a waste of your talents to be putting energy into discussions with moronic slashdot users.
What relevance does a document standard have to an organisation that cannot convert all it's documents to it?
I think the difference you speak of is really one between academic and real business needs. Microsoft is not going to support a standard that leaves some of their customers no migration path and they're definitely not going to be interested in achieving academic ideals at the expense of business objectives.
As for differences between Microsoft and everyone else, what the differences about everyone else and everyone else? There are always differences, just look at every flavour of linux and the variations between console commands/scripting.
I think this is more about picking on Microsoft than any real valid technical argument.
I think saying OpenXML is "defined vaguely at best" is pretty extreme and unfair (even for slashdot).
The criticism you're talking about is NOT as you allude to in your comment being levelled at the entire specification. The criticism is levelled at a few points within the spec which are in fact OPTIONAL for software implementors of OpenXML readers and writers. Whats more these constructs are actually specifically PROHIBITED from being used in new documents. The only reason why they are included at all is to enable specific types of legacy MS Office (e.g Japanese word 98 docs) documents to be expressed in the OpenXML format.
I think the real issue is not that Microsoft employees are all satanic, it is that when you work at Microsoft you must deal with legacy issues. They can't create a new file spec for office in which it is impossible to express documents created with legacy versions of office. OpenXML has been defined to allow legacy documents (dating back to the 90's) to be converted to the new format. Dealing with backwards compatibility with software created in the 90's is simply not possible to trivialise.
True proponents of open standards should actually be rejoicing OpenXML as it is actually very easy to implement the compulsory (non-legacy) components of the standard. Should MS have success with OpenXML the majority of the corporate world documents will eventually be transformed to OpenXML, which means these documents will be in a highly accessible easy to interpret format. Do you think anyone could possibly use simple tools (like a text editor and zip archiver) to create office documents by hand that can be opened by Office before OpenXML? Or be able to open a word document using a zip archiver, extract and edit parts of the document using a text editor? Surely this has to be a giant step forward?
ODF defines a standard which makes no allowances for backwards compatibility with past file formats as opposed to MS's OpenXML format which does.
All of the criticism levelled at OpenXML is about the difficulty to implement the backwards compatibility constructs of the format. There's nothing MS can do about this complexity, as the complexity is already out there in form of the MS Office documents sitting round in corporate filing systems dating back to the 90's.
In reality its actually very easy to implement the constructs required to create new OpenXML format documents, and just as easy to implement a reader for such documents. So this criticism is coming from interests such as those in IBM that would like to everyone to give up on all the content they have created using MS formats.
In reality, this is not an option, should OpenXML just become another ODF then the corporate world would probably just choose none of the above and wait for another solution to come along that does satisfy their needs.
I believe Apple is actually evaluating it... So like a phoenix from the ashes the puck might actually be reborn.
This is a mouse he designed for his thesis in industrial design. It looks eerily like the old Apple puck, except it is wireless (that's right no cord to orientate it). The mouse remembers its orientation using an inbuilt compass, you can then rotate the mouse to use it as an extra axis of movement.
It's highly functional, elegant, and easy to use. If the original puck had been a cyclo it might have been hailed as design brilliance along side the ipod, iphone etc.
I think it is good he's made these statements, because now no one will take him seriously. He doesn't seem to understand that the internet is decentralised, and that should he actually be taken seriously it would simply make mean the US would be cut off from all the current and future innovations P2P technology has/is delivering. P2P isn't just about sharing Metallica MP3's, how about Skype, Wuala, or Seti@home for example.
When computer systems work and perform adequetly, there is obivously no adequet business reason for "upgrading".
The only thing that would make a large business think about upgrading machines that are performing adequetly is TCO. As machines break down, or as the company expands, a business has to purchase new machines, unless they reinstall the OS, the machine is going to come with Vista. At some point when a business is supporting 3 or 4 different distro's the TCO of these computers systems becomes high enough that they'll choose to retire one distro and replace all the machines running an older distro, I've seen this beginning to happen with Windows 2000, even before Vista was released.
I think the only companies I know who jumped to upgrade to Vista from XP were Microsoft development houses. They only moved to Vista to make sure they were still leading/bleeding edge.
I think what you're saying about Google is quite true, and it's not just Google to look out for, there are many players in the online collaboration market looking to gain penetration into corporate collaboration market, currently dominated by MS Sharepoint, Domino and SAP.
I think the real danger for MS is that businesses will finally get to a point where they realise the ultimate solution to their TCO problems is to go thin client and push everything server side. I think Microsoft needs to concentrate on making sure the TCO of owning multiple versions of Windows does not increase with each new release of Windows. That means these distros must play well together on a company domain. From what I've seen W2K, XP and Vista do seem to function quite happily within a single domain.
The key will come with Vista Server and whether it serves to reduce TCO of an enterprise running many flavours of Windows. If companies don't move to Vista Server then MS could be in big trouble, especially if this is because of a perception that upgrading to Vista Server would actually increase their TCO.
You are right, the wording of this article is extremely misleading.
There was a memory leak but it was due to their code, not with the Microsoft.NET Framework. Specifically their code was creating objects that were never being garbage collected as they were still being referenced in their code, i.e. they forgot to dispose and unsubscribe from events to objects that were still active. This is a really simple mistake you'd probably find in 40% of newbie programmers C# or Java code. Yes... this sort of problem can occur just as easily in Java (even more easily if you believe Microsoft).
Now on to flaming slashdot...
I really think Slashdot should pull articles like these either completely or at least from the front page when they realise they're misleading or factually incorrect.
This story simply isn't news worthy, it's not even interesting for anyone half competant in.NET development. It reflects really poorly on slashdot and reduces the sight to the quality of your average web blog. In summary it's a waste of everyone's time.
MR. MEPHESTO It's thanks to the wonder of genetic engineering that soon there will be an end to hunger, disease, pollution, even war. I've created things that will change the world for the better -- (pointing) -- For instance, here is a monkey with four asses. In a cage is a medium sized monkey with four asses that looks pissed off.
KYLE (To Stan) How does that make the world better? Stan shrugs. Mephesto shows them more pissed-off animals.
MR. MEPHESTO And here, of course, is my four-assed ostrich, and my four-assed mongoose.
The Boys look increasingly confused.
STAN Do you have anything besides just animals with four asses?
MR. MEPHESTO Oh, well, I suppose so... Ah yes, over here --
Mephesto points to some odd-looking animals.
MR. MEPHESTO Here I have rats spliced with ducks... And gorillas spliced with mosquitos. And here I have rabbits spliced with fish to make little bunny fish!!
In a tank, four fish with bunny ears swim around. Cartman looks at them closely and notices that the bunny ears have little strings attached to them.
CARTMAN Hey... These bunny ears are tied on with little strings!
MR. MEPHESTO And over here is swiss cheese spliced with chalk... And a beard.
The boys look at the bearded swiss cheese with chalk.
KYLE Well what about our pot-bellied elephant?
MR. MEPHESTO Oh... well I'm sorry children, but pig and elephant DNA just won't splice. Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy?
KYLE Which song is that?
MR. MEPHESTO "Da'n Do-A, Pig and Elephant D-N-A Just Won't Splice?".
The kids look at each other.
MR. MEPHESTO However maybe I could help you add a few asses to that swine of yours.
CARTMAN You can keep your hands off of Fluffy's ass!
Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak!
Hmmm.... no doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
There is a small slither of truth to what you're saying however Windows Mobile is not floundering for technical reasons.
The bigger factors involved are entirely political and all about corporate desires to control the platform. Every mobile company sees its device as one day being the ubiquitous computing deviced used for all electronic interactions, music, video, communication and last but not least BANKING. The mobile market is flooded with closed systems, and the makers of these systems spin the closed nature of their systems as being an advantage as they are "TRUSTED COMPUTING" environments... trusted because they don't trust anyone to have access to their systems.
I have evaluated both the IPhone and Windows Mobile. I see only three main things seperating them:-
1. Quality of hardware - The IPhone is a nice neat (but heavy) device and most importantly it's fast and far more responsive than most past Windows Mobile devices. However that may just be Apple's timing, because the devices coming out now for Windows Mobile appear to be just as responsive. Responsiveness of Windows Mobile devices in the past has been a big problem and this has nothing to do with the OS being built for the lowest common denominator... quite the opposite, it's because the OS has been too heavy for the devices.
2. Marketing. Apple's marketing is phenomenal, the timing, the messages they send out. People in marketing will be studying them for decades. Microsoft has done almost zero marketing for Windows Mobile, I've never seen anything in the media that looked like a concerted effort to market a Windows Mobile device. This is mainly because Microsoft doesn't make Windows Mobile devices, they sell the platform to smaller vendors with little or no budget for marketing, at least not on the scale Apple does.
3. Historically Apple is fully into closed systems and is probably far more willing to venture into that landscape than what Microsoft would be with the DOJ scrutinizing every move, this makes them a better candidate to work with existing Telcos than Microsoft.
So what does this mean for Google... Android?
Perhaps it's marketing genius, or maybe it's total stupidity but that name seems very odd to me. Google's OS will face the same issues as Windows Mobile going to small players with no marketing budgets. So on the marketing front they seem more than a bit dubious.
I think what's a lot more interesting is that Google is partnering up with HTC, a Windows Mobile vendor. This says to me that Google is actually competing head on with Windows Mobile which they know only holds about 10% of the market. So unless there is significant market expansion for open OS systems like Windows Mobile, Google is probably only going to cut into Microsoft's very small slice of pie, which spells doom for both Windows Mobile and the GPhone platform. But perhaps this is exactly what the Google/Apple team want to achieve. Further fragmentation of Microsoft's markets.
I think Android is a rouse. They don't really want to see Android succeed they just want to see it worsen Windows Mobile position in the market. I believe Google's ambitions in this area are still very much in it's partnership with Apple.
I've seen Mono being used by development companies to supply products that work on both Macs and Windows. With the predominant development and market actually being Mac OSX and not windows.
I really don't get it, why do you want to create your own proprietry standard for a specific platform based on an open multi-platform standard? Isn't that exactly what Microsoft gets accused of?
And one other point to the author of this article.... Its OpenXML not OOXML. Why is it that people don't want to use the correct name?
I find the refusal of sites like Slashdot to use the correct name, plus the reaction to Microsoft's attempts to open up their Office suite very strange. Isn't it a good thing that all the businesses out there currently using Microsoft Office might one day have converted all their documents to an XML format? It's got to be a step forward from the old closed binary formats.
The Gartner group is like any other company, they create material for the purpose of making profit. Their criteria for selecting topics are as follows:
1. The topic must be topical and something people are extremely interested in 2. It must be purely speculatory to make it impossible for anyone to dispute any information they manufacture. 3. It must be loaded and contraversial.
All the topics you've listed and this topic fall into those 3.
Gartner reports are nearly always ridiculous in hindsight, they're just taking shots in the dark like most other people. But that doesn't really matter as everyone who was going to purchase their paper has already done so well before it's ludicrousness ever fully makes itself apparent.
However in this case I think the veracity of this report is probably easier to determine than most, seeing as most software is semi-redundant after 3 years, you would simply need to conduct a slashdot pole and find out what the percentage of time developers are working on closed source as opposed to open source. If that pole showed 80% of development time was currently being used to write code that would be licensed as open source then Gartner would have it right.... 80% of the non-redundant source code out there 3 years from now would be open source.
His explanation is somewhat different to yours, in fact its completely the opposite.
The broadcast flag is a request for a response that uses Unicast.... which is not a legacy thing at all. Just the opposite legacy routers often do not support Unicast.
So maybe you have it back the front, perhaps Vista has been optimised such that it now works better with most of the routers out there today but does not work with old routers that do not support Unicast or handle the broadcast flag in the DHCP request.
I would think this is a non-issue I'm not a Linux expert but a quick search....
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2006-0318.html... seems to indicate at least red-hat and probably most Linux distro's come with DHCP server support for unicast responses and would not have this issue with Vista.
As I understand this issue Vista is fully compliant with the DHCP standard and it is the DHCP servers failure to fully implement the DHCP standard and support unicast responses which is the problem.
I think this issue is only going to occur with old legacy systems and routers.
In which case if you were Microsoft what would your care factor be? How long do you allow for support for old legacy systems which are not standards compliant?
The problem is Vista is setting the DHCP Unicast flag in it's requests, and the DHCP server in this story does not support unicast responses and is consequently giving no response at all.
Microsoft hasn't implemented anything outside the DHCP standard in Vista.
They have adhered to the DHCP standard and the guidelines you have specified above as they have allowed users of Vista to alter it's behaviour with a simple registry setting...
This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response.
In Lundis case I suspect their DHCP server doesn't support unicast responses, and their Anti-MS zealot admins don't feel like changing that.
You can just imagine how diffent this would be if it were a new version of Apple OSX and not Vista having issues with their outdated systems.
Yeeeeeeep that them Vista DHCP packets be real broked I reckon rightly. Nice thunkin.
Anyway, here's Jim's answer:
This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response. To do so, you must modify the registry on the DHCP server (assuming a Windows-based DHCP server).
1. On the server, open the Registry Editor and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\DHCPServer\Parameters.
2. If the IgnoreBroadcastFlag value does not exist in this key, create it as a DWORD value.
3. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to to 1 to cause the server to ignore the client broadcast flag and always respond with multicast. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to 0 to allow the clients to request unicast.
4. Close the Registry Editor and restart the DHCP server.
Vista's implementation is fine, it's the antiquated software Lundis admin are grimly determined to hang on to that's the problem.
So basically the problem is that Vista is utilising a part of the DHCP standard that is not implemented on Lundis DHCP server.
It's the Linux system here which is failing to comply with the DHCP standard not the other way around.
I think this would be an entirely different story and an entirely different response from Lundis admin if this issue was with say... a new version of Apple OSX.
They should just update their DHCP server to something a little more up to date and compliant, and stop playing stupid anti-MS political games.
I don't really blame Microsoft for refusing to help your Vista users. As with most companies Microsoft charges for support, they're not going to help your users for free.
What sort of IT Administrators do you have ? Most of the civilised IT world would have a single administrator or at least appoint a single person to consult Microsoft and determine an appropriate solution, in this case a simple reg file distributed on a USB key or a login script would do the trick.
So have you even read or heard a single word from the Dalai Lama?
If the tibetans were so impoverished and surpressed by the "upper class"... I think you're about the first person I've ever heard raise this theory, and I actually know people from mongolia.
Why didn't they just over throw them by force? Do you even know that the Dalai Lama more often than not is born into one of these impoverished families?...You know what I was going to spend a lot of effort writting a page or so to try and expose you to your own ignorance but it's really not worth the effort, just enjoy your +5 negativity/ignorance/interesting or whatever it is...
Finally, putting Microsoft in the "camp" of those that offers freedom is just a little rich. You make it sound like Microsoft is some big friendly bear that welcomes all comers. On the contrary, Microsoft is happy to give people freedom as long as they are locked into Windows. That company did not get where it is today by playing nice. Microsoft allows anyone to develop for it's mobile platform. All the other players including Apple do not. Seeing as I am not Google... I'm going to back MS, because at least I have a shot on their platform. Microsoft have always played hard with big corporate competitors, but they have always been very generous to smaller players developing on their platform.
Sorry I just dont get why any developer would get excited about the IPhone - a locked down device excluding all from client-side rich client development. The most ingenius thing about Apple today is their marketing, and the inventiveness of their patent lawyers, neither of which I have any passion for. The multi-touch interface whilst hardly ground breaking was about the only feature that I thought was cool about the IPhone.
As for the Google and Apple partnership. HTML application development is seeing its last years of development, HTML development over time seems to have only gotten uglier and uglier year by year, it's truely a hopelessly broken architecture for application development, it was never right to begin with, and it's never going to be right. I live and pray for the day to come when I never have to mess around with HTML, Javascript and CSS hacks, to do what should be trivial app dev tasks.
Microsoft have already released a truely next gen internet application development platform incorporating vector graphics xml based mark up language (XAML) accompanied by next communication framwork for next gen rich client peer to peer or client/server development. Google and many other competitors are working on their own competing platforms. Microsoft's cross platform implementation of XAML - Silverlight is currently being rolled out and will soon be available for the Windows Mobile platform as well as many others.
So do you understand why I could possibly be left unswayed by Apple's offerings (what little there is)?
Nothing lasts for forever, but it is clear that we are moving to an era in mobile devices where software is becoming king. Yes, you still need a good piece of equipment, but the biggest source of innovation will be on the software side. Apple is extremely well-position to succeed in this world.
It is clear we are moving into an era where the boundary between mobile devices and computers are blurred. The battle lines are clearly drawn, on one side the same old camps that are seeking to lock down dominate and control the platform to exclude all but themselves and selected submissive partners, and on the other those who would allow the freedom to do client side development on the device.
It is also clear that we are reaching a point where HTML application development is showing clear signs of growing pains and people are increasingly turning to rich client development. Flash, Microsoft, Google are all rich client technology designed to replace HTML. Apple supplying a browser with its IPhone is not an innovation nor is it a solution for next gen internet applications.
Nearly every phone for the last 6 or 7 years has supplied support for GPRS and web browsing. Contrary to popular belief HTML is not ideal for developing software applications. Basically HTML is a lowsy medium in which to express your creativity.
So what makes the IPhone so special? ITunes? Most phones on the market let you play MP3's.
Slashdot Mirror
Or IE8
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx
Not interested.
I'm waiting for exact information on when exactly time is meant to stop.
I then want to make sure at that exact moment, that I'm drunk, eating nachos, whilst having sex with a super model and playing xbox.
Maybe you should go work for Microsoft, seeing as creating an XML schema for a document that can describe the layout, formatting and content of 4 different versions of Office for 35 different languages seems like such a trivial task for you... either that or make break throughs in quantum mechanics or string theory... seems like a waste of your talents to be putting energy into discussions with moronic slashdot users.
What relevance does a document standard have to an organisation that cannot convert all it's documents to it?
I think the difference you speak of is really one between academic and real business needs. Microsoft is not going to support a standard that leaves some of their customers no migration path and they're definitely not going to be interested in achieving academic ideals at the expense of business objectives.
As for differences between Microsoft and everyone else, what the differences about everyone else and everyone else?
There are always differences, just look at every flavour of linux and the variations between console commands/scripting.
I think this is more about picking on Microsoft than any real valid technical argument.
I think saying OpenXML is "defined vaguely at best" is pretty extreme and unfair (even for slashdot).
The criticism you're talking about is NOT as you allude to in your comment being levelled at the entire specification. The criticism is levelled at a few points within the spec which are in fact OPTIONAL for software implementors of OpenXML readers and writers. Whats more these constructs are actually specifically PROHIBITED from being used in new documents. The only reason why they are included at all is to enable specific types of legacy MS Office (e.g Japanese word 98 docs) documents to be expressed in the OpenXML format.
I think the real issue is not that Microsoft employees are all satanic, it is that when you work at Microsoft you must deal with legacy issues. They can't create a new file spec for office in which it is impossible to express documents created with legacy versions of office. OpenXML has been defined to allow legacy documents (dating back to the 90's) to be converted to the new format. Dealing with backwards compatibility with software created in the 90's is simply not possible to trivialise.
True proponents of open standards should actually be rejoicing OpenXML as it is actually very easy to implement the compulsory (non-legacy) components of the standard. Should MS have success with OpenXML the majority of the corporate world documents will eventually be transformed to OpenXML, which means these documents will be in a highly accessible easy to interpret format. Do you think anyone could possibly use simple tools (like a text editor and zip archiver) to create office documents by hand that can be opened by Office before OpenXML? Or be able to open a word document using a zip archiver, extract and edit parts of the document using a text editor? Surely this has to be a giant step forward?
ODF defines a standard which makes no allowances for backwards compatibility with past file formats as opposed to MS's OpenXML format which does.
All of the criticism levelled at OpenXML is about the difficulty to implement the backwards compatibility constructs of the format. There's nothing MS can do about this complexity, as the complexity is already out there in form of the MS Office documents sitting round in corporate filing systems dating back to the 90's.
In reality its actually very easy to implement the constructs required to create new OpenXML format documents, and just as easy to implement a reader for such documents. So this criticism is coming from interests such as those in IBM that would like to everyone to give up on all the content they have created using MS formats.
In reality, this is not an option, should OpenXML just become another ODF then the corporate world would probably just choose none of the above and wait for another solution to come along that does satisfy their needs.
A friend of mine has fixed the puck!!!
I believe Apple is actually evaluating it... So like a phoenix from the ashes the puck might actually be reborn.
This is a mouse he designed for his thesis in industrial design. It looks eerily like the old Apple puck, except it is wireless (that's right no cord to orientate it). The mouse remembers its orientation using an inbuilt compass, you can then rotate the mouse to use it as an extra axis of movement.
It's highly functional, elegant, and easy to use. If the original puck had been a cyclo it might have been hailed as design brilliance along side the ipod, iphone etc.
I think it is good he's made these statements, because now no one will take him seriously. He doesn't seem to understand that the internet is decentralised, and that should he actually be taken seriously it would simply make mean the US would be cut off from all the current and future innovations P2P technology has/is delivering. P2P isn't just about sharing Metallica MP3's, how about Skype, Wuala, or Seti@home for example.
I've seen a lot of companies with Win 2K also.
When computer systems work and perform adequetly, there is obivously no adequet business reason for "upgrading".
The only thing that would make a large business think about upgrading machines that are performing adequetly is TCO. As machines break down, or as the company expands, a business has to purchase new machines, unless they reinstall the OS, the machine is going to come with Vista. At some point when a business is supporting 3 or 4 different distro's the TCO of these computers systems becomes high enough that they'll choose to retire one distro and replace all the machines running an older distro, I've seen this beginning to happen with Windows 2000, even before Vista was released.
I think the only companies I know who jumped to upgrade to Vista from XP were Microsoft development houses. They only moved to Vista to make sure they were still leading/bleeding edge.
I think what you're saying about Google is quite true, and it's not just Google to look out for, there are many players in the online collaboration market looking to gain penetration into corporate collaboration market, currently dominated by MS Sharepoint, Domino and SAP.
I think the real danger for MS is that businesses will finally get to a point where they realise the ultimate solution to their TCO problems is to go thin client and push everything server side. I think Microsoft needs to concentrate on making sure the TCO of owning multiple versions of Windows does not increase with each new release of Windows. That means these distros must play well together on a company domain. From what I've seen W2K, XP and Vista do seem to function quite happily within a single domain.
The key will come with Vista Server and whether it serves to reduce TCO of an enterprise running many flavours of Windows. If companies don't move to Vista Server then MS could be in big trouble, especially if this is because of a perception that upgrading to Vista Server would actually increase their TCO.
You are right, the wording of this article is extremely misleading.
.NET Framework. Specifically their code was creating objects that were never being garbage collected as they were still being referenced in their code, i.e. they forgot to dispose and unsubscribe from events to objects that were still active. This is a really simple mistake you'd probably find in 40% of newbie programmers C# or Java code. Yes... this sort of problem can occur just as easily in Java (even more easily if you believe Microsoft).
.NET development. It reflects really poorly on slashdot and reduces the sight to the quality of your average web blog. In summary it's a waste of everyone's time.
There was a memory leak but it was due to their code, not with the Microsoft
Now on to flaming slashdot...
I really think Slashdot should pull articles like these either completely or at least from the front page when they realise they're misleading or factually incorrect.
This story simply isn't news worthy, it's not even interesting for anyone half competant in
MR. MEPHESTO
It's thanks to the wonder of genetic engineering that soon there will be an end to hunger, disease, pollution, even war. I've created things that will change the world for the better
-- (pointing) --
For instance, here is a monkey with four asses. In a cage is a medium sized monkey with four asses that looks pissed off.
KYLE
(To Stan)
How does that make the world better? Stan shrugs. Mephesto shows them more pissed-off animals.
MR. MEPHESTO
And here, of course, is my four-assed ostrich, and my four-assed mongoose.
The Boys look increasingly confused.
STAN
Do you have anything besides just animals with four asses?
MR. MEPHESTO
Oh, well, I suppose so... Ah yes, over here --
Mephesto points to some odd-looking animals.
MR. MEPHESTO
Here I have rats spliced with ducks... And gorillas spliced with mosquitos. And here I have rabbits spliced with fish to make little bunny fish!!
In a tank, four fish with bunny ears swim around. Cartman looks at them closely and notices that the bunny ears have
little strings attached to them.
CARTMAN
Hey... These bunny ears are tied on with little strings!
MR. MEPHESTO
And over here is swiss cheese spliced with chalk... And a beard.
The boys look at the bearded swiss cheese with chalk.
KYLE
Well what about our pot-bellied elephant?
MR. MEPHESTO
Oh... well I'm sorry children, but pig and elephant DNA just won't splice. Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy?
KYLE
Which song is that?
MR. MEPHESTO
"Da'n Do-A, Pig and Elephant D-N-A Just Won't Splice?".
The kids look at each other.
MR. MEPHESTO
However maybe I could help you add a few asses to that swine of yours.
CARTMAN
You can keep your hands off of Fluffy's ass!
Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Dvoraaak! Hmmm.... no doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
There is a small slither of truth to what you're saying however Windows Mobile is not floundering for technical reasons.
The bigger factors involved are entirely political and all about corporate desires to control the platform. Every mobile company sees its device as one day being the ubiquitous computing deviced used for all electronic interactions, music, video, communication and last but not least BANKING. The mobile market is flooded with closed systems, and the makers of these systems spin the closed nature of their systems as being an advantage as they are "TRUSTED COMPUTING" environments... trusted because they don't trust anyone to have access to their systems.
I have evaluated both the IPhone and Windows Mobile. I see only three main things seperating them:-
1. Quality of hardware - The IPhone is a nice neat (but heavy) device and most importantly it's fast and far more responsive than most past Windows Mobile devices. However that may just be Apple's timing, because the devices coming out now for Windows Mobile appear to be just as responsive. Responsiveness of Windows Mobile devices in the past has been a big problem and this has nothing to do with the OS being built for the lowest common denominator... quite the opposite, it's because the OS has been too heavy for the devices.
2. Marketing. Apple's marketing is phenomenal, the timing, the messages they send out. People in marketing will be studying them for decades. Microsoft has done almost zero marketing for Windows Mobile, I've never seen anything in the media that looked like a concerted effort to market a Windows Mobile device. This is mainly because Microsoft doesn't make Windows Mobile devices, they sell the platform to smaller vendors with little or no budget for marketing, at least not on the scale Apple does.
3. Historically Apple is fully into closed systems and is probably far more willing to venture into that landscape than what Microsoft would be with the DOJ scrutinizing every move, this makes them a better candidate to work with existing Telcos than Microsoft.
So what does this mean for Google... Android?
Perhaps it's marketing genius, or maybe it's total stupidity but that name seems very odd to me. Google's OS will face the same issues as Windows Mobile going to small players with no marketing budgets. So on the marketing front they seem more than a bit dubious.
I think what's a lot more interesting is that Google is partnering up with HTC, a Windows Mobile vendor. This says to me that Google is actually competing head on with Windows Mobile which they know only holds about 10% of the market. So unless there is significant market expansion for open OS systems like Windows Mobile, Google is probably only going to cut into Microsoft's very small slice of pie, which spells doom for both Windows Mobile and the GPhone platform. But perhaps this is exactly what the Google/Apple team want to achieve. Further fragmentation of Microsoft's markets.
I think Android is a rouse. They don't really want to see Android succeed they just want to see it worsen Windows Mobile position in the market. I believe Google's ambitions in this area are still very much in it's partnership with Apple.
Well that's one angle.
I've seen Mono being used by development companies to supply products that work on both Macs and Windows. With the predominant development and market actually being Mac OSX and not windows.
I really don't get it, why do you want to create your own proprietry standard for a specific platform based on an open multi-platform standard? Isn't that exactly what Microsoft gets accused of?
And one other point to the author of this article.... Its OpenXML not OOXML. Why is it that people don't want to use the correct name?
I find the refusal of sites like Slashdot to use the correct name, plus the reaction to Microsoft's attempts to open up their Office suite very strange. Isn't it a good thing that all the businesses out there currently using Microsoft Office might one day have converted all their documents to an XML format? It's got to be a step forward from the old closed binary formats.
The Gartner group is like any other company, they create material for the purpose of making profit. Their criteria for selecting topics are as follows:
1. The topic must be topical and something people are extremely interested in
2. It must be purely speculatory to make it impossible for anyone to dispute any information they manufacture.
3. It must be loaded and contraversial.
All the topics you've listed and this topic fall into those 3.
Gartner reports are nearly always ridiculous in hindsight, they're just taking shots in the dark like most other people. But that doesn't really matter as everyone who was going to purchase their paper has already done so well before it's ludicrousness ever fully makes itself apparent.
However in this case I think the veracity of this report is probably easier to determine than most, seeing as most software is semi-redundant after 3 years, you would simply need to conduct a slashdot pole and find out what the percentage of time developers are working on closed source as opposed to open source. If that pole showed 80% of development time was currently being used to write code that would be licensed as open source then Gartner would have it right.... 80% of the non-redundant source code out there 3 years from now would be open source.
I think you need to take your argument up with Jim...
s t_flag.html
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadca
His explanation is somewhat different to yours, in fact its completely the opposite.
The broadcast flag is a request for a response that uses Unicast.... which is not a legacy thing at all. Just the opposite legacy routers often do not support Unicast.
So maybe you have it back the front, perhaps Vista has been optimised such that it now works better with most of the routers out there today but does not work with old routers that do not support Unicast or handle the broadcast flag in the DHCP request.
I would think this is a non-issue I'm not a Linux expert but a quick search....
... seems to indicate at least red-hat and probably most Linux distro's come with DHCP server support for unicast responses and would not have this issue with Vista.
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2006-0318.html
As I understand this issue Vista is fully compliant with the DHCP standard and it is the DHCP servers failure to fully implement the DHCP standard and support unicast responses which is the problem.
I think this issue is only going to occur with old legacy systems and routers.
In which case if you were Microsoft what would your care factor be? How long do you allow for support for old legacy systems which are not standards compliant?
The problem is Vista is setting the DHCP Unicast flag in it's requests, and the DHCP server in this story does not support unicast responses and is consequently giving no response at all.
Microsoft hasn't implemented anything outside the DHCP standard in Vista.
They have adhered to the DHCP standard and the guidelines you have specified above as they have allowed users of Vista to alter it's behaviour with a simple registry setting...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233
But hey lets not let technical facts get in the way of a good ol fashioned anti-MS beat up.
Which is precisely the reason why Vista is not at fault here.
s t_flag.html
The Linux DHCP server is at fault, because it's not responding to Vista DHCP requests.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadca
To quote Jim...
This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response.
In Lundis case I suspect their DHCP server doesn't support unicast responses, and their Anti-MS zealot admins don't feel like changing that.
You can just imagine how diffent this would be if it were a new version of Apple OSX and not Vista having issues with their outdated systems.
Broken?
s t_flag.html
c es\DHCPServer\Parameters.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadca
It sets the DHCP Unicast Broadcast flag.
Yeeeeeeep that them Vista DHCP packets be real broked I reckon rightly. Nice thunkin.
Anyway, here's Jim's answer:
This isn't so much a client issue as it is a server issue. In order for your Windows clients to receive DHCP responses by unicast rather than broadcast, you need to configure the DHCP server accordingly to allow clients to request a unicast response. To do so, you must modify the registry on the DHCP server (assuming a Windows-based DHCP server).
1. On the server, open the Registry Editor and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servi
2. If the IgnoreBroadcastFlag value does not exist in this key, create it as a DWORD value.
3. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to to 1 to cause the server to ignore the client broadcast flag and always respond with multicast. Set the value of IgnoreBroadcastFlag to 0 to allow the clients to request unicast.
4. Close the Registry Editor and restart the DHCP server.
Vista's implementation is fine, it's the antiquated software Lundis admin are grimly determined to hang on to that's the problem.
Well the support KB from Microsoft paints a different picture
s t_flag.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dhcp_unicast_broadca
So basically the problem is that Vista is utilising a part of the DHCP standard that is not implemented on Lundis DHCP server.
It's the Linux system here which is failing to comply with the DHCP standard not the other way around.
I think this would be an entirely different story and an entirely different response from Lundis admin if this issue was with say... a new version of Apple OSX.
They should just update their DHCP server to something a little more up to date and compliant, and stop playing stupid anti-MS political games.
I don't really blame Microsoft for refusing to help your Vista users. As with most companies Microsoft charges for support, they're not going to help your users for free.
What sort of IT Administrators do you have ? Most of the civilised IT world would have a single administrator or at least appoint a single person to consult Microsoft and determine an appropriate solution, in this case a simple reg file distributed on a USB key or a login script would do the trick.
So have you even read or heard a single word from the Dalai Lama?
...You know what I was going to spend a lot of effort writting a page or so to try and expose you to your own ignorance but it's really not worth the effort, just enjoy your +5 negativity/ignorance/interesting or whatever it is...
If the tibetans were so impoverished and surpressed by the "upper class"... I think you're about the first person I've ever heard raise this theory, and I actually know people from mongolia.
Why didn't they just over throw them by force? Do you even know that the Dalai Lama more often than not is born into one of these impoverished families?
Sorry I just dont get why any developer would get excited about the IPhone - a locked down device excluding all from client-side rich client development. The most ingenius thing about Apple today is their marketing, and the inventiveness of their patent lawyers, neither of which I have any passion for. The multi-touch interface whilst hardly ground breaking was about the only feature that I thought was cool about the IPhone.
As for the Google and Apple partnership. HTML application development is seeing its last years of development, HTML development over time seems to have only gotten uglier and uglier year by year, it's truely a hopelessly broken architecture for application development, it was never right to begin with, and it's never going to be right. I live and pray for the day to come when I never have to mess around with HTML, Javascript and CSS hacks, to do what should be trivial app dev tasks.
Microsoft have already released a truely next gen internet application development platform incorporating vector graphics xml based mark up language (XAML) accompanied by next communication framwork for next gen rich client peer to peer or client/server development. Google and many other competitors are working on their own competing platforms. Microsoft's cross platform implementation of XAML - Silverlight is currently being rolled out and will soon be available for the Windows Mobile platform as well as many others.
So do you understand why I could possibly be left unswayed by Apple's offerings (what little there is)?
It is clear we are moving into an era where the boundary between mobile devices and computers are blurred. The battle lines are clearly drawn, on one side the same old camps that are seeking to lock down dominate and control the platform to exclude all but themselves and selected submissive partners, and on the other those who would allow the freedom to do client side development on the device.
It is also clear that we are reaching a point where HTML application development is showing clear signs of growing pains and people are increasingly turning to rich client development. Flash, Microsoft, Google are all rich client technology designed to replace HTML. Apple supplying a browser with its IPhone is not an innovation nor is it a solution for next gen internet applications.
Nearly every phone for the last 6 or 7 years has supplied support for GPRS and web browsing. Contrary to popular belief HTML is not ideal for developing software applications. Basically HTML is a lowsy medium in which to express your creativity. So what makes the IPhone so special? ITunes? Most phones on the market let you play MP3's.