Microsoft should really have a disclaimer in there so people can't be misled into thinking this is actually an official representitive of Microsoft.
It's pretty obvious this guy isn't a microsoft employee and that half of what he's saying is probably bs.
I think the real reason why Vista has taken so long is WinFx is not just a wrapper around old windows code, it's
a complete re-write a totally new windows api independent of the old win32....
That's pretty full on... it's basically a re-write on XP + extra features. Think about it XP was the culmination of 15 years of development.
And I think Joel is absolutely right bloatware rants being a symptom of a mental disorder... All these rants about bloatware are just that rants...
Half of these whiney bitches above use windows and they'll all end up on Vista because it has some functionality not available on XP... or someone will write a program that utilises new features in Vista and they will buy Vista to use the new program.....
No he's actually sitting at desk in front of a computer behind the wall. I think this robot is just as impressive.
Hmmm slashdot editors... hint.... if u did.... google-> quasi robot
You might have saved us all 10 minutes of time and not posted this crap
Lord.... they really should occasionally pull stories like this off the main page when it turns out they've made a horrendous error in the news worthiness of the story.
This is not news for nerds or stuff that matters.
What a waste of my time....
Rate parent up and save others from expending any time looking into this crap.
I think researchers need to stop this sort of research which is based on hollywood science craption and focus on creating things that are actually real...
The stuff being developed at PARC (the same guys who invented windows and the mouse) is far more exciting to me than this. With Modular robotics and digital clay, plus a software development platform, this sort of work promises to provide a revolution similiar to what they did with personal computing.
It just makes me sad every time i see something like this where people have spent years of their lives developing completely dead end technology, in order to produce something that is really nothing more than a stupid high tech gimmick. Mechanical objects that can do nothing other than sing, dance, or make meaningless smalltalk don't impress me.
This whole discussion on this article is absolutely appalling, I've not read one modded up comment in which the author seemed like he had a clue about the subject matter in the article.
It's always been the case on here that technical articles about Microsoft ccontain quite a bit of offtopic general slagging of Microsoft, however there's usually one or two comments modded up that genuinely shed some intelligent light on the topic, this is probably the worst discussion I've seen on here. Why are moderators modding up offtopic crap !?
I'm actually genuinely interested in this topic and came to read the comments hoping someone might have some further insight or information on the subject. This seems to be getting worse, it seems slashdot is just not the place to find such information.
Perhaps it would be better for slashdot to stop posting articles such as these relating to MS technology with no apparent Open Source or Linux spin. I mean this just makes Slashdot look bad.
True... and bloatware also often creates garbage, however bloatware gets the garbage to market a hell of a lot faster than what you can do in notepad. In this day and age thats a commercial advantage.
Oh and he was also co-founder of Sun Microsystems...
And a recent attendee of the Dropping Knowledge forum in Berlin, where he had this to say... when asked the question "Why don't we dump all patent laws all around the world and stop restraining creativity and innovation?"
Oh and I'm sure google's refusal to hand over search data is completely out of self interest. That data is worth money to them, market researchers would give a mint to get a hold of it. If it suddenly became public domain Google would be losing out big time.
Trust needs to be proven. I trust Microsoft, because I know their model cannot possibly violate my privacy. Google, I'll give them data till the cows come home, all of it will be garbage. I use a google mail address to sign up for every single site liable to send me spam. I have a hotmail address for all my real email. My personal goal is to see google and every other sphinxter sniffing marketeer so overwhelmed with bullshit data that they choke on it.
You just need to go through and read some of their license agreements, if you have a gmail account your emails are just as much google's as they are yours.
I guess its a personal choice. I like to own my data, on my own machine. I'd rather pay Microsoft $100-$200USD every couple of years than give my data away, be hassled by ads and have marketeers know what size underwear i wear.
Make no mistake Google does not give away stuff for free. You're paying with your privacy.
Lets try and make black look white to fit our pathetic gullible little universe.
The whole do no evil thing is a load of horse shit, google is a corporation run by directors who have been selling off their stock as fast as they can. This is never a good sign of about the intentions of the directors.
If Microsoft was doing everything Google has done and is currently doing everyone would be crying out for the US justice department to do something about them. They control the popularity of sites, they collect data on your searches, the emails you send, the desktop search facility sends back information to google on the contents of your hard disk.
Personally I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. Microsoft knows they can't get away with anything on the desktop, if they tried anything dishonest, tried to invade the privacy of their users they know they would be caught straight away by all and sundry. You simply can't hide packets across the internet. Google... they want everyone's data on their servers under their control, where they can pretty much do what ever they want to do with it.
It's quite remarkable just how gullible the slashdot crowd can be.
"While WPF/E itself is a powerful Flash analogue, it doesn't have its own application development model like Flex or OpenLaszlo..."
WTF !!!!
What planet is this guy on ?
Has he never heard of.NET.... and Visual Studio.NET ?
Just what the hell is an application development model if.NET and Visual Studio don't count as one ?
Is this guy completely clueless or what ?
The whole "do no evil thing" should really be "do no evil till the price is right". Google needs its clean image because people would desert its service overnight if it were deemed to be evil. It's all just marketing.
If you really believe what you're saying then you're extremely gullible. All coorporations are souless money making machines designed only to generate profit. The day a board of directors is seen to not be working in that endeavour is the day serious pressure from it's shareholders will be brought to bear on that company.
I think the day Google can get away with doing something evil that will make it a lot money, is the day Google will do something evil. Right now if they're going to do something evil you can bet it's going to be kept well and truely under wraps.
What everyone in this discussion has missed as did the author of this stupid article, the biggest problem with security on MS Mobile platform is that there's NO security protection on Activesync... ie you lose your pda or someone steals it, the person possessing the device gets a usb cable connects it to a computer with activesync installed, bam ! They have then have full access to all the data on the pda, by default there's no facility to password protect the device.
Anyhow, after saying all that I often think security is over-hyped, there's really no such thing as security, there's only obfuscation, you can make it harder to get at someone's data but at the end of the day they're going to get access to it if they want it. The time, money and effort that goes into security I think is often out of proportion with the requirements. I've seen security experts almost come to tears when they realise after all their time and effort the biggest security risk is always the user, not the applications.
What a lot of security zealots forget at the end of the day that we have a little thing called the law, which in most parts of the world prohibits things such as breaking security on applications to illegally obtain data. As long as there is some sort of security that must be circumnavigated that is all that is necessary to make obtaining unauthorised access to data an illegal act in a court of law.
So I don't think the sophistication of security is that much of an issue, what is an issue is the complete absence of it.
If it were any other web site than slashdot I would have said that to begin with. Here I'd rather not jump on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon until I have to. I actually believe that due to the nature of computing that a monopoly for the desktop platform was and still is inevitable. As far as companies go I don't think Microsoft is really all that bad, try Haliburton, McDonalds, or Rothmans. I think the whole fight to stop them bundling new features with the OS will be seen as idiotic in retrospect 50 years from now... something like "How could you thiink of shipping a computer without virus protection, media, browsing, mail, VOIP virtualisation software etc etc etc?"
I think you need to think about the likely algorithms they are using in WGA. It's probably very logical (being a computer program and all). Maybe it goes by date.... what if when your organisation got it's 73rd computer, someone had already illegally used your keys to license two systems not belonging to your "non-profit gig"... hence the 73rd and 74th system may have been flagged as illegitimate. Then maybe by your actions perhaps WGA managed to correctly identify illegal systems and the WGA problems shifted from your npg machines to the actual illegitimate machines.
There has been a case in Australia where a major retailer was involved with selling bogus Microsoft software. I wasn't implying that you had knowingly engaged in a disreputable business. My other hunch was someone at Microsoft may have fucked up, or someone at Microsoft was actually engaging in fraudulent behaviour and giving your keys away to other people.
Slashdot Mirror
MSDN blogs is a publicly accessible blogging system.
You can join here
Microsoft should really have a disclaimer in there so people can't be misled into thinking this is actually an official representitive of Microsoft.
It's pretty obvious this guy isn't a microsoft employee and that half of what he's saying is probably bs.
I think the real reason why Vista has taken so long is WinFx is not just a wrapper around old windows code, it's a complete re-write a totally new windows api independent of the old win32....
That's pretty full on... it's basically a re-write on XP + extra features. Think about it XP was the culmination of 15 years of development.
The best comment submitted !!!
MOD PARENT UP !
Hilarious....
And I think Joel is absolutely right bloatware rants being a symptom of a mental disorder... All these rants about bloatware are just that rants...
Half of these whiney bitches above use windows and they'll all end up on Vista because it has some functionality not available on XP... or someone will write a program that utilises new features in Vista and they will buy Vista to use the new program.....
Looks like Vista has tightened his bolts.
Or he just has a clue as opposed to you.
No he's actually sitting at desk in front of a computer behind the wall. I think this robot is just as impressive. Hmmm slashdot editors... hint.... if u did .... google-> quasi robot
You might have saved us all 10 minutes of time and not posted this crap
Eeek.... the link somehow got omitted on my post...
Modular Robotics
Since having posted i've learnt this thing isn't even a smart eliza program. It's just an actor on a microphone talking through speakers on a toy.
This isn't even really worth discussing
Lord.... they really should occasionally pull stories like this off the main page when it turns out they've made a horrendous error in the news worthiness of the story. This is not news for nerds or stuff that matters. What a waste of my time.... Rate parent up and save others from expending any time looking into this crap.
I think researchers need to stop this sort of research which is based on hollywood science craption and focus on creating things that are actually real...
The stuff being developed at PARC (the same guys who invented windows and the mouse) is far more exciting to me than this. With Modular robotics and digital clay, plus a software development platform, this sort of work promises to provide a revolution similiar to what they did with personal computing.
It just makes me sad every time i see something like this where people have spent years of their lives developing completely dead end technology, in order to produce something that is really nothing more than a stupid high tech gimmick. Mechanical objects that can do nothing other than sing, dance, or make meaningless smalltalk don't impress me.
Is that this will probably further endanger native wildlife such as polar bears which have been drowning due to lack of ice.
This whole discussion on this article is absolutely appalling, I've not read one modded up comment in which the author seemed like he had a clue about the subject matter in the article.
It's always been the case on here that technical articles about Microsoft ccontain quite a bit of offtopic general slagging of Microsoft, however there's usually one or two comments modded up that genuinely shed some intelligent light on the topic, this is probably the worst discussion I've seen on here. Why are moderators modding up offtopic crap !?
I'm actually genuinely interested in this topic and came to read the comments hoping someone might have some further insight or information on the subject. This seems to be getting worse, it seems slashdot is just not the place to find such information.
Perhaps it would be better for slashdot to stop posting articles such as these relating to MS technology with no apparent Open Source or Linux spin. I mean this just makes Slashdot look bad.
True... and bloatware also often creates garbage, however bloatware gets the garbage to market a hell of a lot faster than what you can do in notepad. In this day and age thats a commercial advantage.
Oh and he was also co-founder of Sun Microsystems...
And a recent attendee of the Dropping Knowledge forum in Berlin, where he had this to say... when asked the question "Why don't we dump all patent laws all around the world and stop restraining creativity and innovation?"
You might also have mentioned he's the same Bill Joy who was chief architect at Sun through it's hay days.
But I hear Vista has a new updated version of notepad..... woa... can't wait to get my hands on that baby !!
Windows Users DON'T get excited about text editors !
Oh and I'm sure google's refusal to hand over search data is completely out of self interest. That data is worth money to them, market researchers would give a mint to get a hold of it. If it suddenly became public domain Google would be losing out big time.
Trust needs to be proven. I trust Microsoft, because I know their model cannot possibly violate my privacy. Google, I'll give them data till the cows come home, all of it will be garbage. I use a google mail address to sign up for every single site liable to send me spam. I have a hotmail address for all my real email. My personal goal is to see google and every other sphinxter sniffing marketeer so overwhelmed with bullshit data that they choke on it.
You just need to go through and read some of their license agreements, if you have a gmail account your emails are just as much google's as they are yours.
I guess its a personal choice. I like to own my data, on my own machine. I'd rather pay Microsoft $100-$200USD every couple of years than give my data away, be hassled by ads and have marketeers know what size underwear i wear.
Make no mistake Google does not give away stuff for free. You're paying with your privacy.
What a crock....
Lets try and make black look white to fit our pathetic gullible little universe.
The whole do no evil thing is a load of horse shit, google is a corporation run by directors who have been selling off their stock as fast as they can. This is never a good sign of about the intentions of the directors.
If Microsoft was doing everything Google has done and is currently doing everyone would be crying out for the US justice department to do something about them. They control the popularity of sites, they collect data on your searches, the emails you send, the desktop search facility sends back information to google on the contents of your hard disk.
Personally I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. Microsoft knows they can't get away with anything on the desktop, if they tried anything dishonest, tried to invade the privacy of their users they know they would be caught straight away by all and sundry. You simply can't hide packets across the internet. Google... they want everyone's data on their servers under their control, where they can pretty much do what ever they want to do with it.
It's quite remarkable just how gullible the slashdot crowd can be.
"AJAX is free, easy to use, and people are using it now."
People ARE using it, but you aren't !
No one in their right mind who has ever delivered AJAX sites would describe AJAX as easy. For what it achieves it's ridicuoulously complicated.
"While WPF/E itself is a powerful Flash analogue, it doesn't have its own application development model like Flex or OpenLaszlo..." WTF !!!! What planet is this guy on ? Has he never heard of .NET.... and Visual Studio .NET ?
Just what the hell is an application development model if .NET and Visual Studio don't count as one ?
Is this guy completely clueless or what ?
The whole "do no evil thing" should really be "do no evil till the price is right". Google needs its clean image because people would desert its service overnight if it were deemed to be evil. It's all just marketing.
If you really believe what you're saying then you're extremely gullible. All coorporations are souless money making machines designed only to generate profit. The day a board of directors is seen to not be working in that endeavour is the day serious pressure from it's shareholders will be brought to bear on that company.
I think the day Google can get away with doing something evil that will make it a lot money, is the day Google will do something evil. Right now if they're going to do something evil you can bet it's going to be kept well and truely under wraps.
What everyone in this discussion has missed as did the author of this stupid article, the biggest problem with security on MS Mobile platform is that there's NO security protection on Activesync... ie you lose your pda or someone steals it, the person possessing the device gets a usb cable connects it to a computer with activesync installed, bam ! They have then have full access to all the data on the pda, by default there's no facility to password protect the device.
Anyhow, after saying all that I often think security is over-hyped, there's really no such thing as security, there's only obfuscation, you can make it harder to get at someone's data but at the end of the day they're going to get access to it if they want it. The time, money and effort that goes into security I think is often out of proportion with the requirements. I've seen security experts almost come to tears when they realise after all their time and effort the biggest security risk is always the user, not the applications.
What a lot of security zealots forget at the end of the day that we have a little thing called the law, which in most parts of the world prohibits things such as breaking security on applications to illegally obtain data. As long as there is some sort of security that must be circumnavigated that is all that is necessary to make obtaining unauthorised access to data an illegal act in a court of law.
So I don't think the sophistication of security is that much of an issue, what is an issue is the complete absence of it.
If it were any other web site than slashdot I would have said that to begin with. Here I'd rather not jump on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon until I have to. I actually believe that due to the nature of computing that a monopoly for the desktop platform was and still is inevitable. As far as companies go I don't think Microsoft is really all that bad, try Haliburton, McDonalds, or Rothmans. I think the whole fight to stop them bundling new features with the OS will be seen as idiotic in retrospect 50 years from now... something like "How could you thiink of shipping a computer without virus protection, media, browsing, mail, VOIP virtualisation software etc etc etc?"
I think you need to think about the likely algorithms they are using in WGA. It's probably very logical (being a computer program and all). Maybe it goes by date.... what if when your organisation got it's 73rd computer, someone had already illegally used your keys to license two systems not belonging to your "non-profit gig"... hence the 73rd and 74th system may have been flagged as illegitimate. Then maybe by your actions perhaps WGA managed to correctly identify illegal systems and the WGA problems shifted from your npg machines to the actual illegitimate machines.
There has been a case in Australia where a major retailer was involved with selling bogus Microsoft software. I wasn't implying that you had knowingly engaged in a disreputable business. My other hunch was someone at Microsoft may have fucked up, or someone at Microsoft was actually engaging in fraudulent behaviour and giving your keys away to other people.