No, it's idiots from Hollywood stealing our word and our name for nothing but an attempt to squash yet another penny from Joe Sixpack and soccer moms.
It's not "idiots from Hollywood" taking "our" name. It's the majority of the population using the word in a certain way. You can keep painting some hijacking situation, but it's never going to stop the fact people use hacker a certain way. Hollywood didn't have much to do with it.
Just because a majority of the mindless part of the society fails to understand a word, the word doesn't change its meaning.
In short, yes, it does. It doesn't make people "mindless" just because they don't snap to attention and fit their language around your rigid little definition just to make you feel better. You come off as one of those angry, anti-social UNIX types who gets upset over completely trivial things like the usage of the word "hacker."
None of my arguments were strawmen; you were just unable to respond to any of them. In an attempt to save face, you're now unable to stop respond with inane accusations. Seriously, comparing Quartz 2D Extreme--which was just a drawing method and actually shipped--with WinFS, a fundamental feature which will never ship? Get real.
The OP was complaining about "hackers" in the ZOMG HOLLYWOOD!! sense of the word
No, it's "hackers" in the sense of the world that the vast majority of the world's population refers to it. Just because a tiny niche of geeks has decided that there's a difference between hacker and cracker and that hacker is the good one doesn't mean society is suddenly going to change its language just to make them feel good about calling themselves hackers.
This generation(s) refuses to give in and the previous gen is pissed.
Every generation thinks that exact same thing. Each generation thinks they're special, they're the rebels, and they're the important ones. They're not. Just another link in the chain.
Clearly, I won this debate. Again, I acknowledge your compete lack of any counterargument whatsoever. Comparing Quartz 2D Extreme to the WinFS debacle was the sorriest bit of Microsoft defensiveness I've yet witnessed on Slashdot. Next time, learn the difference between one of Longhorn's advertised fundamental technologies and a simple Quartz drawing method.
He was claiming that Apple shipping then turning off Quartz 2D Extreme, a drawing method disabled due to its high requirements, is somehow the same as Microsoft dropping what was one of the fundamental selling points of Longhorn for the last three years--WinFS, a revolutionary relational database filesystem. It's obvious how illogical the comparison is.
This is a good litmus test. If someone is bragging about something that's turned off, reportedly broken, and practically useless to the ordinary user, it's a pretty good sign that they are a very simple brand-loyalist uninterested in having an honest discussion. You win at that!
Here's an even better litmus test:
Quartz 2D Extreme = actually shipped WinFS = never shipped
Not only that, WinFS was advertised as one of the major fundamental new features in Longhorn, unlike Quartz 2D Extreme, which just moves drawing instructions to the GPU. Furthermore, you now ADMIT it's "practically useless to the end-user," so your attempt to compare it to a major new technology like WinFS and claim it's the same thing again fails.
I don't have any personal worth invested in it (unlike you and announced OSX features apparently)
I didn't bring up Quartz 2D Extreme and obsess over it to defend Microsoft's latest flop, you did. I acknowledge your total lack of a counterargument.
And. for the casual readers -- WinHEC and TechEd, where WinFS was demonstrated, are developer conferences -- but of course you know that OCG.
I love how you deliberately ignored the other venues I mentioned, like the interviews with Ballmer, Gates, and Microsoft project managers, as well as Channel9, which NON-developers watch.
Enough arguing with FUD-Spewing Zealots. You want to pretend that Apple didn't hype a technology that never amounted to anything [because it perhaps might avert one sale from MS to Apple], go right ahead and enjoy your delusions. I'm planning on running both 10.5 and Vista and don't give a fuck about the rhetoric of single-OS loyalists.
Clearly, I won this debate.
Quartz 2D Extreme = actually shipped in the OS. WinFS = hyped for five years then dropped.
Uh, none of it was MSDN. PC World articles describing Longhorn aren't MSDN. All the Channel 9 videos aren't MSDN. All the other articles and interviews given since 2003 talking about WinFS aren't MSDN.
WinFS was promised as a major end-user feature for Windows Vista. It was advertised as one of the three "Longhorn Fundamentals"--Avalon, WinFS, and Indigo.
For some reason you and your buddy have a completely double-standard about this
You're really clutching at straws here to draw a parallel to Microsoft's latest feature-drop, especially given that Quartz 2D Extreme actually did ship (unlike WinFS) and can be enabled for application testing to be ready when OS X Leopard is released. It was disabled because few graphics cards at the time fully supported the high shader requirements, among other reasons. Quartz 2D Extreme isn't a major, fundamental feature like WinFS was. It was simply method to move the Quartz drawing operations to the GPU.
WinFS was one of the major appeals of Longhorn and was promised to revolutionize the way users interacted with their files. Paul Thurrott raved about it for years. IEXBeta and Activewin were always posting articles about it. Microsoft employees responded to interview questions about it. It wasn't a developer-only thing.
perhaps caused by irrational sexual lust for Apple products.
Lacking a valid counterargument, you resort to irrelevant attacks to try to invalidate my point. A typical defensive response.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
That's the maddening part of the Vista story. You're absolutely correct that Vista should have been a new NT-based operating system starting from a clean codebase designed to carry Microsoft another 20 years, and pre-Vista/Win32 apps should have run in a sandbox environment. After all, Microsoft owns Virtual PC, and they're shipping an Express version for free! They've already got the perfect sandbox to aid them in supporting legacy applications. It's a real slap on the forehead that they didn't go the obvious route.
In retrospect, it's remarkable how smart Apple was to go the route they did with OS X, leveraging open source technology so that they didn't have to develop the whole operating system themselves and could concentrate on constructing a user experience on top of what was already well-tested code. It's a clean, elegant solution that's allowed them to outpace Microsoft at an incredible rate.
Right, because the Slashdot comments section is an excellent place to go to form an opinion on developer technical competence in the OSS community. Lame post.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
That's not what I'm talking about. A user can't add their own custom metadata to a document. I can't do a Get Info on a file, then add a "Client" field, then put a client's name, then search in Spotlight for all files with that name in their "Client" field.
At most, you can add text to the "Spotlight Notes" field.
When your developer conference comes with slogans such as "Redmond, start your copiers", don't even pretend it's not part of a consumer marketing program. The point was to hype 10.4 Tiger.
Nice dodge. Apple still never marketed Quartz 2D Extreme as an end-user feature. Your statements are desperately irrelevant.
And when was WinFS discussed in a non-developer setting by Microsoft?
In every single article on Longhorn from 2003 onward, starting with Bill Gates' Longhorn demo, every Microsoft employee blog, every Channel 9 video on the subject, etc. Longhorn was marketed as having three "Longhorn fundamentals":
1.) New XML-based interface codenamed Avalon 2.) New relational database filesystem called WinFS 3.) New communications system codenamed Indigo
You may not like Vista's Explorer, then, since it's being made to look like OS X Tiger's Finder, complete with shortcuts like "Documents" and "Music" running down the left.
Also, Spotlight does allow for complex queries, and there are plenty of resources online that give you the syntax to use. Smart Folders don't just function similarly to Vista's virtual folders, they're the exact same thing (but available since mid-2005, *cough*).
It was pushed for later release and was to be made available as a free, separate download after Vista shipped. Today's (er, Friday's) news is that WinFS won't be available as a separate download and will instead be rolled into other products like the next version of SQL Server, so Vista won't ever be getting a database-based filesystem after all, contrary to what was promised.
I never get it - people bitch that consumer pcs are way too overpowered for the average joe. So Microsoft uses all that extra power to better the user experience and people switch to bitching about that! Vista certainly uses more resources, but it puts them to good use.
The problem is that nobody can really see what Microsoft is doing to "better the user experience." It's the same old Windows with plastic highlights. OS X does everything Vista will claim to do but on much less powerful hardware. Add to the fact Microsoft's own employees think the Windows codebase is bloated and broken, and you begin to realize Windows is a slow, complicated hodge-podge of new and old code going back decades.
Besides, I don't see who's complaining about PCs being overpowered. And if I have all that power, I don't want Microsoft hogging it to display their transparent windows.
How about Media Center, DVD Maker? You know, all the iTools from the Apple world and then some.
Where's the "and then some" part? All the new bundled apps in Vista are direct clones of OS X apps, even down to the exact same interface in iCal. Even Vista's filesystem layout is a clone of OS X's, down to the same folder names in the same locations!
Make no mistake, this is a huge change, at least as big as the change from Windows 3.1 to 95.
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures. The transition to Vista is more like going from 95 to 98. Vista is the same old Windows code with an updated shell and some new APIs and minor features. It's not some huge, revolutionary change. You've been listening to hype for six years and have built Longhorn up in your mind.
It's more than 6 years in the making.
No, Microsoft had to start over in 2004 with the "Longhorn reset." Even if they hadn't, where are you getting 6 years? 6 years ago, they were just getting Windows 2000 out the door.
Are you really that blinded by hatred of Microsoft that you think 6 years and thousands of programmers have accomplished nothing?
It's not being "blinded by hatred." Even Microsoft's own employees refer to Vista as "broken." It's a massively huge codebase with tons of dependencies and crufty code dating back decades. The new features aren't that new. Vista is a minor accomplishment that will barely get Windows to the point where OS X was in April of 2005, and in many cases, where OS X was in 2001. Watching thumbnail full-motion-video in the taskbar? Please! I was doing that in the 2000 OS X Public Beta.
But hey, if you think translucent windows are some revolutionary OS change, have at it. I, however, predict a flop nearing the level of Windows ME.
Let's get this straight. Microsoft has been promising this as a major feature for Vista for the last four years, and you're surprised when people bitch that it's unceremoniously dropped? And this is part of a series of behaviors that involved dropping Vista features and delaying the product's release! Is your flippant remark about Slashdot somehow supposed to remove Microsoft's technical incompetence in completing its own projects?
Seems to me like MS just couldn't make WinFS as efficient and nice as they had promised so they just scratched it. Nothing wrong with that in my book.
Then they should have designed it better, managed the project better, etc. Again, they were just demoing WinFS two weeks ago! What you're saying is that there's nothing wrong in your book with promising a major feature for almost half a decade and then going back on the promise.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Oh, Spotlight is hardly done. For instance, there's a big desire to be able to add custom metadata attributes to files. Wikipedia's entry on WinFS describes some of what WinFS hoped to accomplish which Apple could implement on top of their existing system.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 2, Informative
WinFS = Windows Future Storage. It was always an SQL service layer on top of regular NTFS.
It's easier to bitch about a movie then it is to make one, but Battlefield Earth is still a shitty movie. What the hell does the Open Source community have to do with Microsoft hyping a feature for the last four years, promising its delivery, then LYING and not shipping it? Honestly, if that's your only defense, it may be time for you to re-evaluate your devotion to this company.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
WinFS isn't a filesystem, it's an SQL service for indexing files.
I'm really curious now if OS X Leopard will utilize CoreData/SQLite to create their own relational database filesystem in "Spotlight 2.0." The rumors all year have been that Steve Jobs wants to leapfrog Vista. Jesus, they've been handed a prime opportunity.
Hell, it makes you wonder if they had an idea they weren't going to ship even as they demoed WinFS at TechEd just two weeks ago.
And just think, enterprises rely on this company's OS, which is so internally complicated that its own developers call it "broken." It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "idiots from Hollywood" taking "our" name. It's the majority of the population using the word in a certain way. You can keep painting some hijacking situation, but it's never going to stop the fact people use hacker a certain way. Hollywood didn't have much to do with it.
In short, yes, it does. It doesn't make people "mindless" just because they don't snap to attention and fit their language around your rigid little definition just to make you feel better. You come off as one of those angry, anti-social UNIX types who gets upset over completely trivial things like the usage of the word "hacker."
None of my arguments were strawmen; you were just unable to respond to any of them. In an attempt to save face, you're now unable to stop respond with inane accusations. Seriously, comparing Quartz 2D Extreme--which was just a drawing method and actually shipped--with WinFS, a fundamental feature which will never ship? Get real.
Next.
No, it's "hackers" in the sense of the world that the vast majority of the world's population refers to it. Just because a tiny niche of geeks has decided that there's a difference between hacker and cracker and that hacker is the good one doesn't mean society is suddenly going to change its language just to make them feel good about calling themselves hackers.
Every generation thinks that exact same thing. Each generation thinks they're special, they're the rebels, and they're the important ones. They're not. Just another link in the chain.
Clearly, I won this debate. Again, I acknowledge your compete lack of any counterargument whatsoever. Comparing Quartz 2D Extreme to the WinFS debacle was the sorriest bit of Microsoft defensiveness I've yet witnessed on Slashdot. Next time, learn the difference between one of Longhorn's advertised fundamental technologies and a simple Quartz drawing method.
Next.
He was claiming that Apple shipping then turning off Quartz 2D Extreme, a drawing method disabled due to its high requirements, is somehow the same as Microsoft dropping what was one of the fundamental selling points of Longhorn for the last three years--WinFS, a revolutionary relational database filesystem. It's obvious how illogical the comparison is.
Here's an even better litmus test:
Quartz 2D Extreme = actually shipped
WinFS = never shipped
Not only that, WinFS was advertised as one of the major fundamental new features in Longhorn, unlike Quartz 2D Extreme, which just moves drawing instructions to the GPU. Furthermore, you now ADMIT it's "practically useless to the end-user," so your attempt to compare it to a major new technology like WinFS and claim it's the same thing again fails.
I didn't bring up Quartz 2D Extreme and obsess over it to defend Microsoft's latest flop, you did. I acknowledge your total lack of a counterargument.
Next.
I love how you deliberately ignored the other venues I mentioned, like the interviews with Ballmer, Gates, and Microsoft project managers, as well as Channel9, which NON-developers watch.
Clearly, I won this debate.
Quartz 2D Extreme = actually shipped in the OS.
WinFS = hyped for five years then dropped.
Next.
Uh, none of it was MSDN. PC World articles describing Longhorn aren't MSDN. All the Channel 9 videos aren't MSDN. All the other articles and interviews given since 2003 talking about WinFS aren't MSDN.
WinFS was promised as a major end-user feature for Windows Vista. It was advertised as one of the three "Longhorn Fundamentals"--Avalon, WinFS, and Indigo.
You're really clutching at straws here to draw a parallel to Microsoft's latest feature-drop, especially given that Quartz 2D Extreme actually did ship (unlike WinFS) and can be enabled for application testing to be ready when OS X Leopard is released. It was disabled because few graphics cards at the time fully supported the high shader requirements, among other reasons. Quartz 2D Extreme isn't a major, fundamental feature like WinFS was. It was simply method to move the Quartz drawing operations to the GPU.
WinFS was one of the major appeals of Longhorn and was promised to revolutionize the way users interacted with their files. Paul Thurrott raved about it for years. IEXBeta and Activewin were always posting articles about it. Microsoft employees responded to interview questions about it. It wasn't a developer-only thing.
Lacking a valid counterargument, you resort to irrelevant attacks to try to invalidate my point. A typical defensive response.
That's the maddening part of the Vista story. You're absolutely correct that Vista should have been a new NT-based operating system starting from a clean codebase designed to carry Microsoft another 20 years, and pre-Vista/Win32 apps should have run in a sandbox environment. After all, Microsoft owns Virtual PC, and they're shipping an Express version for free! They've already got the perfect sandbox to aid them in supporting legacy applications. It's a real slap on the forehead that they didn't go the obvious route.
In retrospect, it's remarkable how smart Apple was to go the route they did with OS X, leveraging open source technology so that they didn't have to develop the whole operating system themselves and could concentrate on constructing a user experience on top of what was already well-tested code. It's a clean, elegant solution that's allowed them to outpace Microsoft at an incredible rate.
Right, because the Slashdot comments section is an excellent place to go to form an opinion on developer technical competence in the OSS community. Lame post.
That's not what I'm talking about. A user can't add their own custom metadata to a document. I can't do a Get Info on a file, then add a "Client" field, then put a client's name, then search in Spotlight for all files with that name in their "Client" field.
At most, you can add text to the "Spotlight Notes" field.
Nice dodge. Apple still never marketed Quartz 2D Extreme as an end-user feature. Your statements are desperately irrelevant.
In every single article on Longhorn from 2003 onward, starting with Bill Gates' Longhorn demo, every Microsoft employee blog, every Channel 9 video on the subject, etc. Longhorn was marketed as having three "Longhorn fundamentals":
1.) New XML-based interface codenamed Avalon
2.) New relational database filesystem called WinFS
3.) New communications system codenamed Indigo
There you go.
Um, no they didn't. Quartz 2D Extreme was not marketed as a feature of OS X Tiger for end users.
You may not like Vista's Explorer, then, since it's being made to look like OS X Tiger's Finder, complete with shortcuts like "Documents" and "Music" running down the left.
Also, Spotlight does allow for complex queries, and there are plenty of resources online that give you the syntax to use. Smart Folders don't just function similarly to Vista's virtual folders, they're the exact same thing (but available since mid-2005, *cough*).
It was pushed for later release and was to be made available as a free, separate download after Vista shipped. Today's (er, Friday's) news is that WinFS won't be available as a separate download and will instead be rolled into other products like the next version of SQL Server, so Vista won't ever be getting a database-based filesystem after all, contrary to what was promised.
The problem is that nobody can really see what Microsoft is doing to "better the user experience." It's the same old Windows with plastic highlights. OS X does everything Vista will claim to do but on much less powerful hardware. Add to the fact Microsoft's own employees think the Windows codebase is bloated and broken, and you begin to realize Windows is a slow, complicated hodge-podge of new and old code going back decades.
Besides, I don't see who's complaining about PCs being overpowered. And if I have all that power, I don't want Microsoft hogging it to display their transparent windows.
Where's the "and then some" part? All the new bundled apps in Vista are direct clones of OS X apps, even down to the exact same interface in iCal. Even Vista's filesystem layout is a clone of OS X's, down to the same folder names in the same locations!
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures. The transition to Vista is more like going from 95 to 98. Vista is the same old Windows code with an updated shell and some new APIs and minor features. It's not some huge, revolutionary change. You've been listening to hype for six years and have built Longhorn up in your mind.
No, Microsoft had to start over in 2004 with the "Longhorn reset." Even if they hadn't, where are you getting 6 years? 6 years ago, they were just getting Windows 2000 out the door.
It's not being "blinded by hatred." Even Microsoft's own employees refer to Vista as "broken." It's a massively huge codebase with tons of dependencies and crufty code dating back decades. The new features aren't that new. Vista is a minor accomplishment that will barely get Windows to the point where OS X was in April of 2005, and in many cases, where OS X was in 2001. Watching thumbnail full-motion-video in the taskbar? Please! I was doing that in the 2000 OS X Public Beta.
But hey, if you think translucent windows are some revolutionary OS change, have at it. I, however, predict a flop nearing the level of Windows ME.
Then they should have designed it better, managed the project better, etc. Again, they were just demoing WinFS two weeks ago! What you're saying is that there's nothing wrong in your book with promising a major feature for almost half a decade and then going back on the promise.
Oh, Spotlight is hardly done. For instance, there's a big desire to be able to add custom metadata attributes to files. Wikipedia's entry on WinFS describes some of what WinFS hoped to accomplish which Apple could implement on top of their existing system.
WinFS = Windows Future Storage. It was always an SQL service layer on top of regular NTFS.
Of what, the technology or the broken promise of the technology?
It's easier to bitch about a movie then it is to make one, but Battlefield Earth is still a shitty movie. What the hell does the Open Source community have to do with Microsoft hyping a feature for the last four years, promising its delivery, then LYING and not shipping it? Honestly, if that's your only defense, it may be time for you to re-evaluate your devotion to this company.
WinFS isn't a filesystem, it's an SQL service for indexing files.
I'm really curious now if OS X Leopard will utilize CoreData/SQLite to create their own relational database filesystem in "Spotlight 2.0." The rumors all year have been that Steve Jobs wants to leapfrog Vista. Jesus, they've been handed a prime opportunity.
Hell, it makes you wonder if they had an idea they weren't going to ship even as they demoed WinFS at TechEd just two weeks ago.
And just think, enterprises rely on this company's OS, which is so internally complicated that its own developers call it "broken." It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.