Gee, a guy that foolishly claims global climate change is "comparatively tiny" and makes a joke out of a genuinely very serious problem is perfectly OK, but try to call climate change serious and you get -1 flamebait. I think that about reveals the level of intelligence on/., that and the article on a random number generator predicting the future.
I want some real scientific proof, not just theories and extremism.
Do you really want real scientific proof? I mean, really? Because if you do, why are you only asking on slashdot? Why don't you go and read some peer-reviewed science journals that publish studies about climate change and other climate studies? There is now an overwhelming body of real science on this issue to be read if you just go out and look for it. If you can't find it, the only reason for that would be if you aren't really looking, and are more interested in hearing things that reinforce your existing worldview. Slashdot is not a peer-reviewed science journal, and is not the place to ask for answers on such important matters. The answer to all your questions above are researched and published.
Keep your pants on there fella, these 'scientists' can't even agree amongst themselves how the dinosaurs died out.
They can't agree on the cause of the climate change, but they do agree that whatever caused it, the climate change was comparatively slow; this is known from the fossil records. The dinosaurs took over a million years to die out.
Yeah, funny.. but actually it's interesting to compare our behaviour to that of a deadly virus: the latter will also consume all available resources multiplying as quickly as possible until its host is completely destroyed, and unless it can find a new host, it will die along with the host.
Personally I'd like to believe that we're more intelligent than a virus cell, but all evidence seems against it.
You're thinking of the Christian right behind Bush
Really? One only needs to read most of the comments on slashdot to realise that thousands of people here think it isn't happening or isn't a problem. Are the majority of/. readers part of the "Christian right"?
There's no denying that global warming is happening (at least in the short term). It's the cause that that's uncertain. The dinosaurs had much higher global warming but we have yet to find a single dinosaur factory or dinosaur SUV. Unless the dinosaurs ate a huge number of baked beans, I don't know how they could be responsible for generating a significant amount of greenhouse gases..
Are you stupid? There is no longer any doubt that mankind is at least largely responsible for climate change. Let me give you some more perspective on some of your other idiotic comments:
Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 200 million years. We've only been here a few million. Speak to me again about "own demise" when we've managed to survive as long as the dinosaurs did.
The climate change that killed off the dinosaurs was much much slower than the one we're facing: the climate changed slowly over a period of about one million years. The climate change we're experiencing is taking place over a few hundred years. Only a retard cannot see that this is a fucking serious problem.
"Comparitively tiny"? Are you stupid or ignorant? Global climate change is going to be more disruptive to mankind than anything we've ever faced before in our history. This is serious shit, and trivialising it by trying to reduce it to a joke and a supposedly ironic soundbite is just stupid.
My own opinion is that most functionality in Word that isn't obvious is again because of bad design, and that a well-designed word processor again wouldn't require nearly as much investment in support/training because people would just naturally find it easier to use. A lot of features in MS Office are in really stupid un-obvious places or work in really stupid un-obvious ways. The problem is not that manuals are required, the problem is bad design. I think we've all just gotten used to thinking this is "how things are" though, that features are inherently in stupid un-obvious places in a word processor, that Word is somehow the "optimal layout" and "can't get better" and that it is us that just need to learn how to use it, and so we spend tonnes on training people to learn these "dumb" interface layouts and systems. There is so much room for improvement in Word in terms of making things more obvious it's just not funny. But because we're all so used to Word, we regard this as "normal", yet it only takes a little imagination to start thinking how much better things could be when using Word.
OpenOffice is no better. It makes me angry that they've seemingly tried to copy every bad idea that Microsoft had. "Feature X in Excel is retarded? Oh sure we'll copy it exactly, so it's just as retarded in OO". I suppose they do it though so that peoples existing investments in training (themselves, their employees, etc.) on how to do things in Office is transferrable to OO. In other words, everyone on the planet has now learned a particular dumb way of accessing feature X, so it's now a case of any new software having to adapt to where people have learned in their Office courses feature X will be.
Very few people question why things are they way they are... they just want to learn how to do it, and whatever you tell them is the way to do it, they accept that as normal, and memorize it or write it down. If someone asks you e.g. "how do I send a Word document to someone via e-mail, and you tell them that you first do three handstands and then click there and there and there, they'll just blindly write it down and assume this is perfectly normal computer design, that sending documents must just inherently require handstands, and they'll do the handstands every time. OK, that's an exaggerated example, replace handstands with "long unnecessary overly-complex method on the computer", and the point is true in general.
OK, 5.2 mil is definitely too low, that was rather naive, but the OP still has a point that you cannot deny: collectively, governments and corporations are paying so many tens of billions of $$ in Microsoft Office licensing fees that it would be possible, if only a fraction of those fees were diverted to a centralised managed fund instead, to develop an entirely new, better Office Suite in just a few years. The savings would be in the billions.
I've seen Word crash often. In particular Word (2000, I'm not sure about newer versions) used to have hundreds of problems when working with master documents. In fact, it just didn't work, it was so horribly broken, they'd obviously pushed it out the door incomplete.
The main reason Word needs support is because it's bad, not because word processors inherently need a lot of support.
People are easily tricked into thinking they're getting a "whole new OS" just by changing superficial things like the look and feel. Consider how many people thought that Windows XP was a "whole new operating system", many even thinking it was re-designed "from the ground up", just because it had a notably different look from Win2K, even though Windows XP was little more than Win2K with a new look and one or two new or improved features. The new look was key to making people think it was a major new thing. Human beings are not capable of evaluating software, they really can't tell the difference between a "new look" and a new OS. What they make doesn't have to be perfect, just somewhat better and it has to look like it's 'brand new'.
So I predict Longhorn will be the same. It's not going to be radically different at all: Technologically, it will just be Windows XP, but with:
A new look and feel
A different shell than explorer.exe (i.e. something more dock-like than the current taskbar)...
... with a built-in search box for quick access to functionality to search the Internet (using MSN) and your own computer
Some DRM, with increased 'hiding' of system and application files
A bit better security - not perfect, but better
The.NET API and managed code execution layer in addition to the Win32 API
Oh, and it'll probably require 1GB of RAM and a 5GHz CPU to get equivalent performance to machines of the early '90s.
Microsoft always take ages to make a new OS, this is nothing new, and it's not because they're doing anything major. They're not. They never have, there is only one major "new" thing that Windows XP added over what OSs like NextSTEP could do in 1992 already, and that's Unicode support. People will flock to Longhorn, and will love it, because if it looks new, it is new to them. The masses will genuinely believe the Microsoft hype that they've created a whole new secure operating system, just like they believed it with XP, and by the time people start to realise it was hype, most people have upgraded already, and they're back in the cycle of saying "oh well let's just wait a few years, maybe the next version will be better" while they wait for the running-two-years-late "Windows 2010". I've been watching this go on since Windows 3.1.
You're dead on, but the problem is people don't know or care when they buy crap, they just assume it's normal and continue. Bottom line is humans are mostly not capable of determining whether software is good or bad. People bought 95, 98, even Me, then XP, patiently waiting for it to finally become as good as e.g. systems like NextSTEP were in 1992. Why? Because they're clueless about systems like NextSTEP, and thought it was normal.
I disagree - MS need backward compatibility. The number one reason people buy Windows is all the existing apps that run on it. The number one complaint of competitors like Mac and Linux is that a lot of the apps people use don't run on those platforms. In other words the main reason people still buy Windows is to run the apps they need. If MS ever ditched backward-compatibility, they'd be "starting over" on an even keel with their competition, obliviating their main market advantage and allowing competitors to come in and compete on the same level. It could kill Microsoft. Bill Gates understands this - he's always emphasised backward compatibility, while Apple made a big mistake like this during the 80's.
Their stuff may be bloated crap, but with increasingly fast hardware, nobody seems to care much that the stuff is bloated crap, as long it runs the apps they want.
One of Microsoft's main goals is thus to try prevent people from using cross-platform APIs to develop their software, and to develop only for Windows. Hence.NET, C# and so on.
IOW MS uses its obscene Win/Office profits to fund it's other business ventures, but those other divisions have competition and thus act more like "normal businesses" than the 'monopoly division'. The question is how long they can keep doing that. Personally I think they will keep going for a long time still because all over the world companies have their documents in MS formats and exchange in these formats, thus are "locked in", and will inevitably rush to buy Longhorn and the new Office when they come out, even if they have no need for it, because most people can't get enough of Microsoft's junk. Also as competitors continue to reverse engineer these formats, Longhorn will use things like DRM instead of obfuscation to further secure this lock-in.
Of course, we've also all developed an odd but incorrect expectation that all of Microsoft's business divisions should be as obscenely profitable as Windows/Office, but this can never be as the other divisions have competition. Even if something miraculously breaks the Windows/Office stranglehold, all that Microsoft needs to do is keep the other divisions operating on lower margins - in other words like all other "normal" companies have to settle for doing - and use normal means like loans and investment capital to smooth over rough patches. In other words they would still survive, but only as a "normal" non-monopoly in those other markets. A monopoly's strategies are different to other companies, and Microsoft have been playing monopoly so long they may not be able to adapt, but I think they will --- firstly because the transition would be slow, giving them time to adapt, and secondly because Bill Gates is a very smart and cunning businessman. In fact the transition is already happening as MS figures out ways to make their other divisions profitable. Eventually what would come out of this, hypothetically, is a "gentler" Microsoft that is put in its place, but still a well-run powerful business.
Their Windows/Office high-margin profits though will continue to be a "pillar" for their other divisions for a long time, and I can't see anything upsetting that, simply because the "lock-in" is not due to Microsoft's products being better, but because people are locked in due to the file formats.. no matter how good a competitor's product might be it still wouldn't change that.
Maybe Darwin will help sort those companies out, which might actually be better in the end. Who is going to make more money - a company that turns away every tenth potential customer that tries to walk through the door, or the competitor who lets in ten out of ten potential customers?
Until the gods tire of idiocy and invent a race with greater souls than our own, it seems for the time being we will simply have to thicken our skins and put up with these unpleasant reminders dark side of humanity
So in other words you are proposing MORE political correctness by saying we should be accepting of this foolish and harmful behaviour? I don't think society should put up with anything that is harmful to it. That is why societies organize and create formal justice systems. Now, you could argue the existence of hate groups is harmless in itself, but when they wield enough power, or when they invariably simply get drunk one night and go murder some gay or black people, then it is harmful.
What would you say if a group of wanna-be rapists got together on the Net and had discussions about how they believe women should be raped, and how much they want to go out and rape women..... and then every now and then they actually go out and do it? (It's the same thing... a race-based hate group simply says "we think black/gay people should be killed" and every now and then they actually go out and do it.) Do you think society should "just develop a thicker skin" and "for the time being" leave the rapists be? That would be idiotic. These people don't belong in our civilized society.
What the hell, I edited the mistakes in that post on a preview, resubmitted, and it posted the OLD VERSION with the mistakes in it?!? Dammit. Here we go again:
People will find some characteristic other than race to single out and harass people. E.g. they'll single out fat people, or skinny people, or smart people, or whatever. They already do, just look at any classroom in which everyone is white.
Have you ever noticed though that the people who do this, i.e. harass other people based on some arbitrary characteristic, are invariably useless people.. i.e. they are usually people who have nothing special about them, no special skills, and are not able to contribute anything useful to the world. These "nazi types" are usually from the low classes in society. I think the reason these people tend to cluster in groups around a hate-based ideology is because it gives them some kind of magic "free ticket" to feeling "special", without having to do anything other than be a certain race or look a certain way. It's like the ideology calls to them by saying something like this: "Hey, nothing special about you, never achieved anything? Well we say that just being (race XYZ) makes you special by default, because (race XYZ) is superior, and (race XYZ) achieved all sorts of things." So someone with nothing special about them now feels they have something to be proud of, something that makes them special/superior to others, and they feel that they "belong" to something.
Look at class bullies, most of them are losers who are going nowhere in life. By picking out and alienating someone else who is smart or whatever, they get to feel better about themselves. Going further, a more subtle example is television: Most sitcoms have an extremely dumb or nerdy character... the idea is to make a character that is so dumb or nerdy, that even your dumbest/nerdiest viewer gets to feel better about themselves by being able to say to themselves "ha, look at that guy, he's so stuuupid, ha ha". Because nobody wants to be the stupidest or nerdiest person in a group. So the sitcom creators lower the bar so much that all viewers are raised above it. The idea is to make a show so stupid that the viewers feel better about themselves, it's a cheap feel-good manipulation trick that usually works. It's the same thing with racist groups - when you belong to such a group, you feel better about yourself because you define/depict another group as being inferior, even if you've never accomplished anything in your life. Don't know how a TV works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs". Don't know how a car works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented cars". As if saying "we" somehow makes you part of some "group" that supposedly invented TVs/cars, which is obviously not quite correct.
People will find some characteristic other than race to single out and harass people. E.g. they'll single out fat people, or skinny people, or smart people, or whatever. They already do, just look at a classroom, even if everyone in the class is all white.
Have you ever noticed though that the people who do this, i.e. harass other people based on some arbitrary characteristic, are invariably useless people.. i.e. they are usually people who have nothing special about them, no special skills, and are not able to contribute anything useful to the world. These nazi type groups are always the low classes in society. I think the reason these people tend to cluster in groups around a hate-based ideology is because it gives them a "magic" "free ticket" to feeling "special", without having to do anything other than be a certain colour or look a certain way. It's like the ideology calls to them by saying something like this: "Hey, nothing special about you? Well we say that just being (race XYZ) makes you special by default, because (race XYZ) is superior." So someone with nothing special about them now feels they have something to be proud of, something that makes them special/superior to others, and they feel that they "belong" to something.
Look at the class bully. Most of them are losers who are going nowhere in life. By picking out and alienating someone else who is smart or whatever, they get to feel better about themselves. Going further, look at television, almost every sitcom has an extremely dumb or nerdy character... the idea is to make a character that is so dumb or nerdy, that even your dumbest/nerdiest viewer gets to feel better about themselves by being able to say to themselves "ha look at that guy, he's so stupid, ha ha". Because nobody wants to be the stupidest or nerdiest person in a group. The idea is to make a show so stupid that the viewers feel better about themselves, it's a cheap feel-good manipulation trick that never fails to work. It's the same thing with racist groups - when you belong to such a group, you feel better about yourself because you define/depict another group as being inferior, even if you've never accomplished anything in your life. Don't know how a TV works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs". Don't know how a car works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs", as if by saying "we" you become part of a "group" that invented TVs, which is obviously false.
Sorry, just to clarify that further - it wasn't so much to make IE look faster than other browsers, but rather to make IIS look faster than other servers. I just thought it was what the original poster might be referring to though.
In comparative benchmarks you'll typically have something like a "static html" test where the idea is just to hammer the server as hard as possible with tens of thousands of requests for small static html pages. Since opening a connection is pretty heavy (a 3-way exchange), plus then say a few more MTU frag'd packets of the html content, then the final 2-way disconnect exchange, that last exchange easily accounts for 25% of the packets transmitted. In this sort of test, you're really measuring how fast the apps and OS can get those packets out onto the wire, i.e. you're measuring the overhead, so it can make a difference. Of course no user will feel it on a normal web page, but a lot of people read reviews of how web servers stack up against one another in benchmarks.
These days you have http 1.1 pipelining and you have re-use of connections, so the idea of opening and tearing down connections for every page is perhaps starting to seem a little archaic now, but this was a few years ago.
Are you nuts? FrontPage doesn't produce anything that conforms to any standards. Sheesh. "Talking with the Internet"? Are you trolling, or do you really think Microsoft invented the Internet? You ain't "talking with the Internet" when you view a FrontPage page, you're talking, essentially, with some undocumented format specific to one particular corporation.
IE... wtf is taking it so long if it's "integrated" as they say? It not only takes so much friggin time to load, but chews up the hard drive like they're going out of style!
It's not necessarily absolute that one will be faster than another, so each person's MMV. This is because sometimes differences elsewhere on the system can cause IE to be slower to start up. One of my systems at my old company, a fast computer, used to take over 30 seconds to open IE. Eventually I discovered why: That system had a few hundred fonts installed on it, and Internet Explorer is retarded enough to enumerate ALL THE FONTS on the system every time you open it. Deleting a lot of fonts fixed the problem. So IE was so slow to load because it sat thinking about all my fonts each time it started, even the ones it wasn't going to use. Firefox AFAIK isn't handicapped in this way. (IE wasn't the only piece of Microsoft software affected negatively by 'lots of fonts'. It's retarded, I'm not surprised graphics people tend to prefer Macs.)
Anyway, on my current Windows system (even with very few fonts) Firefox still takes quicker to open than IE, and "feels" quicker for just about everything I do, although granted that's subjective, "if it feels quicker it's still better".
Are you thinking of Microsoft breaking TCP/IP to 'fake' faster speeds of IIS and IE? It works like this: Normally when an HTTP session ends, the TCP/IP connection is torn down by the server, which according to TCP/IP standards, involves two packets: a "disconnect request" (sent by IIS or Apache to the browser) and then a "disconnect acknowledge" (sent by the browser back to the server to acknowledge that the disconnect was received. When the client receives the "disconnect" it sends the ACK and closes up the socket on its side; when the server receives the "disconnect ACK", the connection is fully closed and the resources it uses are freed up on the server side. Under normal conditions, if the occasional ACK happens to get lost, then all that happens is that the TCP/IP socket remains open for usually about another two minutes until it times out from inactivity and gets cleaned up by the OS anyway (if you "netstat -a" you should see these hanging around for a little while).
Now, Microsoft did two things: they modified TCP/IP when in conjunction with Internet Explorer to not send the disconnect ACK, and they modified IIS to not wait until it received the ACK to close and free up the socket, but rather to close it and free up the associated resources immediately. This perversion of the very open standard on which the Internet was founded has the following effects:
An IIS/IE exchange has fewer packets to send and less overhead when disconnecting, so artificially appears faster on stress-test benchmarks (normally a user would not feel the difference, but it makes a difference in stress-test benchmarks)
Here's the real clincher, and this is where Microsoft's slimy brilliance shines: When an Apache server is subjected to the same stress-test of dozens or hundreds of connections per second from IE clients, because the ACK is not received, the Apache server soon ends up with hundreds of open TCP/IP sockets waiting to time out. This slows down the OS's TCP/IP handling, artificially slowing down Apache in a way that would not happen if Microsoft had used TCP/IP and not MSTCP/IP. And of course the poor Apache system is just behaving correctly according to TCP/IP.
This whole rather unethical bit of sliminess was primarily concocted to not only make IIS artificially appear faster during benchmarks, but to artificially slow Apache down (because Microsoft was getting frustrated that IIS was unable to kick the Linux/Apache servers' asses).
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, a guy that foolishly claims global climate change is "comparatively tiny" and makes a joke out of a genuinely very serious problem is perfectly OK, but try to call climate change serious and you get -1 flamebait. I think that about reveals the level of intelligence on /., that and the article on a random number generator predicting the future.
I want some real scientific proof, not just theories and extremism.
Do you really want real scientific proof? I mean, really? Because if you do, why are you only asking on slashdot? Why don't you go and read some peer-reviewed science journals that publish studies about climate change and other climate studies? There is now an overwhelming body of real science on this issue to be read if you just go out and look for it. If you can't find it, the only reason for that would be if you aren't really looking, and are more interested in hearing things that reinforce your existing worldview. Slashdot is not a peer-reviewed science journal, and is not the place to ask for answers on such important matters. The answer to all your questions above are researched and published.
Keep your pants on there fella, these 'scientists' can't even agree amongst themselves how the dinosaurs died out.
They can't agree on the cause of the climate change, but they do agree that whatever caused it, the climate change was comparatively slow; this is known from the fossil records. The dinosaurs took over a million years to die out.
Yeah, funny .. but actually it's interesting to compare our behaviour to that of a deadly virus: the latter will also consume all available resources multiplying as quickly as possible until its host is completely destroyed, and unless it can find a new host, it will die along with the host.
Personally I'd like to believe that we're more intelligent than a virus cell, but all evidence seems against it.
You're thinking of the Christian right behind Bush
Really? One only needs to read most of the comments on slashdot to realise that thousands of people here think it isn't happening or isn't a problem. Are the majority of /. readers part of the "Christian right"?
There's no denying that global warming is happening (at least in the short term). It's the cause that that's uncertain. The dinosaurs had much higher global warming but we have yet to find a single dinosaur factory or dinosaur SUV. Unless the dinosaurs ate a huge number of baked beans, I don't know how they could be responsible for generating a significant amount of greenhouse gases..
Are you stupid? There is no longer any doubt that mankind is at least largely responsible for climate change. Let me give you some more perspective on some of your other idiotic comments:
"Comparitively tiny"? Are you stupid or ignorant? Global climate change is going to be more disruptive to mankind than anything we've ever faced before in our history. This is serious shit, and trivialising it by trying to reduce it to a joke and a supposedly ironic soundbite is just stupid.
You heard wrong .. Randi has a lot of money .. friend of mine is a good friend of his.
Windows NT, Windows 9x and Windows ME
Windows NT, sure, but Windows9x and Me have no security anyway.
My own opinion is that most functionality in Word that isn't obvious is again because of bad design, and that a well-designed word processor again wouldn't require nearly as much investment in support/training because people would just naturally find it easier to use. A lot of features in MS Office are in really stupid un-obvious places or work in really stupid un-obvious ways. The problem is not that manuals are required, the problem is bad design. I think we've all just gotten used to thinking this is "how things are" though, that features are inherently in stupid un-obvious places in a word processor, that Word is somehow the "optimal layout" and "can't get better" and that it is us that just need to learn how to use it, and so we spend tonnes on training people to learn these "dumb" interface layouts and systems. There is so much room for improvement in Word in terms of making things more obvious it's just not funny. But because we're all so used to Word, we regard this as "normal", yet it only takes a little imagination to start thinking how much better things could be when using Word.
OpenOffice is no better. It makes me angry that they've seemingly tried to copy every bad idea that Microsoft had. "Feature X in Excel is retarded? Oh sure we'll copy it exactly, so it's just as retarded in OO". I suppose they do it though so that peoples existing investments in training (themselves, their employees, etc.) on how to do things in Office is transferrable to OO. In other words, everyone on the planet has now learned a particular dumb way of accessing feature X, so it's now a case of any new software having to adapt to where people have learned in their Office courses feature X will be.
Very few people question why things are they way they are ... they just want to learn how to do it, and whatever you tell them is the way to do it, they accept that as normal, and memorize it or write it down. If someone asks you e.g. "how do I send a Word document to someone via e-mail, and you tell them that you first do three handstands and then click there and there and there, they'll just blindly write it down and assume this is perfectly normal computer design, that sending documents must just inherently require handstands, and they'll do the handstands every time. OK, that's an exaggerated example, replace handstands with "long unnecessary overly-complex method on the computer", and the point is true in general.
OK, 5.2 mil is definitely too low, that was rather naive, but the OP still has a point that you cannot deny: collectively, governments and corporations are paying so many tens of billions of $$ in Microsoft Office licensing fees that it would be possible, if only a fraction of those fees were diverted to a centralised managed fund instead, to develop an entirely new, better Office Suite in just a few years. The savings would be in the billions.
I've seen Word crash often. In particular Word (2000, I'm not sure about newer versions) used to have hundreds of problems when working with master documents. In fact, it just didn't work, it was so horribly broken, they'd obviously pushed it out the door incomplete.
The main reason Word needs support is because it's bad, not because word processors inherently need a lot of support.
People are easily tricked into thinking they're getting a "whole new OS" just by changing superficial things like the look and feel. Consider how many people thought that Windows XP was a "whole new operating system", many even thinking it was re-designed "from the ground up", just because it had a notably different look from Win2K, even though Windows XP was little more than Win2K with a new look and one or two new or improved features. The new look was key to making people think it was a major new thing. Human beings are not capable of evaluating software, they really can't tell the difference between a "new look" and a new OS. What they make doesn't have to be perfect, just somewhat better and it has to look like it's 'brand new'.
So I predict Longhorn will be the same. It's not going to be radically different at all: Technologically, it will just be Windows XP, but with:
Oh, and it'll probably require 1GB of RAM and a 5GHz CPU to get equivalent performance to machines of the early '90s.
Microsoft always take ages to make a new OS, this is nothing new, and it's not because they're doing anything major. They're not. They never have, there is only one major "new" thing that Windows XP added over what OSs like NextSTEP could do in 1992 already, and that's Unicode support. People will flock to Longhorn, and will love it, because if it looks new, it is new to them. The masses will genuinely believe the Microsoft hype that they've created a whole new secure operating system, just like they believed it with XP, and by the time people start to realise it was hype, most people have upgraded already, and they're back in the cycle of saying "oh well let's just wait a few years, maybe the next version will be better" while they wait for the running-two-years-late "Windows 2010". I've been watching this go on since Windows 3.1.
You're dead on, but the problem is people don't know or care when they buy crap, they just assume it's normal and continue. Bottom line is humans are mostly not capable of determining whether software is good or bad. People bought 95, 98, even Me, then XP, patiently waiting for it to finally become as good as e.g. systems like NextSTEP were in 1992. Why? Because they're clueless about systems like NextSTEP, and thought it was normal.
I disagree - MS need backward compatibility. The number one reason people buy Windows is all the existing apps that run on it. The number one complaint of competitors like Mac and Linux is that a lot of the apps people use don't run on those platforms. In other words the main reason people still buy Windows is to run the apps they need. If MS ever ditched backward-compatibility, they'd be "starting over" on an even keel with their competition, obliviating their main market advantage and allowing competitors to come in and compete on the same level. It could kill Microsoft. Bill Gates understands this - he's always emphasised backward compatibility, while Apple made a big mistake like this during the 80's.
Their stuff may be bloated crap, but with increasingly fast hardware, nobody seems to care much that the stuff is bloated crap, as long it runs the apps they want.
One of Microsoft's main goals is thus to try prevent people from using cross-platform APIs to develop their software, and to develop only for Windows. Hence .NET, C# and so on.
IOW MS uses its obscene Win/Office profits to fund it's other business ventures, but those other divisions have competition and thus act more like "normal businesses" than the 'monopoly division'. The question is how long they can keep doing that. Personally I think they will keep going for a long time still because all over the world companies have their documents in MS formats and exchange in these formats, thus are "locked in", and will inevitably rush to buy Longhorn and the new Office when they come out, even if they have no need for it, because most people can't get enough of Microsoft's junk. Also as competitors continue to reverse engineer these formats, Longhorn will use things like DRM instead of obfuscation to further secure this lock-in.
Of course, we've also all developed an odd but incorrect expectation that all of Microsoft's business divisions should be as obscenely profitable as Windows/Office, but this can never be as the other divisions have competition. Even if something miraculously breaks the Windows/Office stranglehold, all that Microsoft needs to do is keep the other divisions operating on lower margins - in other words like all other "normal" companies have to settle for doing - and use normal means like loans and investment capital to smooth over rough patches. In other words they would still survive, but only as a "normal" non-monopoly in those other markets. A monopoly's strategies are different to other companies, and Microsoft have been playing monopoly so long they may not be able to adapt, but I think they will --- firstly because the transition would be slow, giving them time to adapt, and secondly because Bill Gates is a very smart and cunning businessman. In fact the transition is already happening as MS figures out ways to make their other divisions profitable. Eventually what would come out of this, hypothetically, is a "gentler" Microsoft that is put in its place, but still a well-run powerful business.
Their Windows/Office high-margin profits though will continue to be a "pillar" for their other divisions for a long time, and I can't see anything upsetting that, simply because the "lock-in" is not due to Microsoft's products being better, but because people are locked in due to the file formats .. no matter how good a competitor's product might be it still wouldn't change that.
Maybe Darwin will help sort those companies out, which might actually be better in the end. Who is going to make more money - a company that turns away every tenth potential customer that tries to walk through the door, or the competitor who lets in ten out of ten potential customers?
Until the gods tire of idiocy and invent a race with greater souls than our own, it seems for the time being we will simply have to thicken our skins and put up with these unpleasant reminders dark side of humanity
So in other words you are proposing MORE political correctness by saying we should be accepting of this foolish and harmful behaviour? I don't think society should put up with anything that is harmful to it. That is why societies organize and create formal justice systems. Now, you could argue the existence of hate groups is harmless in itself, but when they wield enough power, or when they invariably simply get drunk one night and go murder some gay or black people, then it is harmful.
What would you say if a group of wanna-be rapists got together on the Net and had discussions about how they believe women should be raped, and how much they want to go out and rape women ..... and then every now and then they actually go out and do it? (It's the same thing ... a race-based hate group simply says "we think black/gay people should be killed" and every now and then they actually go out and do it.) Do you think society should "just develop a thicker skin" and "for the time being" leave the rapists be? That would be idiotic. These people don't belong in our civilized society.
What the hell, I edited the mistakes in that post on a preview, resubmitted, and it posted the OLD VERSION with the mistakes in it?!? Dammit. Here we go again:
People will find some characteristic other than race to single out and harass people. E.g. they'll single out fat people, or skinny people, or smart people, or whatever. They already do, just look at any classroom in which everyone is white.
Have you ever noticed though that the people who do this, i.e. harass other people based on some arbitrary characteristic, are invariably useless people .. i.e. they are usually people who have nothing special about them, no special skills, and are not able to contribute anything useful to the world. These "nazi types" are usually from the low classes in society. I think the reason these people tend to cluster in groups around a hate-based ideology is because it gives them some kind of magic "free ticket" to feeling "special", without having to do anything other than be a certain race or look a certain way. It's like the ideology calls to them by saying something like this: "Hey, nothing special about you, never achieved anything? Well we say that just being (race XYZ) makes you special by default, because (race XYZ) is superior, and (race XYZ) achieved all sorts of things." So someone with nothing special about them now feels they have something to be proud of, something that makes them special/superior to others, and they feel that they "belong" to something.
Look at class bullies, most of them are losers who are going nowhere in life. By picking out and alienating someone else who is smart or whatever, they get to feel better about themselves. Going further, a more subtle example is television: Most sitcoms have an extremely dumb or nerdy character ... the idea is to make a character that is so dumb or nerdy, that even your dumbest/nerdiest viewer gets to feel better about themselves by being able to say to themselves "ha, look at that guy, he's so stuuupid, ha ha". Because nobody wants to be the stupidest or nerdiest person in a group. So the sitcom creators lower the bar so much that all viewers are raised above it. The idea is to make a show so stupid that the viewers feel better about themselves, it's a cheap feel-good manipulation trick that usually works. It's the same thing with racist groups - when you belong to such a group, you feel better about yourself because you define/depict another group as being inferior, even if you've never accomplished anything in your life. Don't know how a TV works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs". Don't know how a car works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented cars". As if saying "we" somehow makes you part of some "group" that supposedly invented TVs/cars, which is obviously not quite correct.
People will find some characteristic other than race to single out and harass people. E.g. they'll single out fat people, or skinny people, or smart people, or whatever. They already do, just look at a classroom, even if everyone in the class is all white.
Have you ever noticed though that the people who do this, i.e. harass other people based on some arbitrary characteristic, are invariably useless people .. i.e. they are usually people who have nothing special about them, no special skills, and are not able to contribute anything useful to the world. These nazi type groups are always the low classes in society. I think the reason these people tend to cluster in groups around a hate-based ideology is because it gives them a "magic" "free ticket" to feeling "special", without having to do anything other than be a certain colour or look a certain way. It's like the ideology calls to them by saying something like this: "Hey, nothing special about you? Well we say that just being (race XYZ) makes you special by default, because (race XYZ) is superior." So someone with nothing special about them now feels they have something to be proud of, something that makes them special/superior to others, and they feel that they "belong" to something.
Look at the class bully. Most of them are losers who are going nowhere in life. By picking out and alienating someone else who is smart or whatever, they get to feel better about themselves. Going further, look at television, almost every sitcom has an extremely dumb or nerdy character ... the idea is to make a character that is so dumb or nerdy, that even your dumbest/nerdiest viewer gets to feel better about themselves by being able to say to themselves "ha look at that guy, he's so stupid, ha ha". Because nobody wants to be the stupidest or nerdiest person in a group. The idea is to make a show so stupid that the viewers feel better about themselves, it's a cheap feel-good manipulation trick that never fails to work. It's the same thing with racist groups - when you belong to such a group, you feel better about yourself because you define/depict another group as being inferior, even if you've never accomplished anything in your life. Don't know how a TV works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs". Don't know how a car works? Who cares, you can say stuff like "we invented TVs", as if by saying "we" you become part of a "group" that invented TVs, which is obviously false.
Sorry, just to clarify that further - it wasn't so much to make IE look faster than other browsers, but rather to make IIS look faster than other servers. I just thought it was what the original poster might be referring to though.
In comparative benchmarks you'll typically have something like a "static html" test where the idea is just to hammer the server as hard as possible with tens of thousands of requests for small static html pages. Since opening a connection is pretty heavy (a 3-way exchange), plus then say a few more MTU frag'd packets of the html content, then the final 2-way disconnect exchange, that last exchange easily accounts for 25% of the packets transmitted. In this sort of test, you're really measuring how fast the apps and OS can get those packets out onto the wire, i.e. you're measuring the overhead, so it can make a difference. Of course no user will feel it on a normal web page, but a lot of people read reviews of how web servers stack up against one another in benchmarks.
These days you have http 1.1 pipelining and you have re-use of connections, so the idea of opening and tearing down connections for every page is perhaps starting to seem a little archaic now, but this was a few years ago.
designed with FrontPage to the latest standard
Are you nuts? FrontPage doesn't produce anything that conforms to any standards. Sheesh. "Talking with the Internet"? Are you trolling, or do you really think Microsoft invented the Internet? You ain't "talking with the Internet" when you view a FrontPage page, you're talking, essentially, with some undocumented format specific to one particular corporation.
IE... wtf is taking it so long if it's "integrated" as they say? It not only takes so much friggin time to load, but chews up the hard drive like they're going out of style!
It's not necessarily absolute that one will be faster than another, so each person's MMV. This is because sometimes differences elsewhere on the system can cause IE to be slower to start up. One of my systems at my old company, a fast computer, used to take over 30 seconds to open IE. Eventually I discovered why: That system had a few hundred fonts installed on it, and Internet Explorer is retarded enough to enumerate ALL THE FONTS on the system every time you open it. Deleting a lot of fonts fixed the problem. So IE was so slow to load because it sat thinking about all my fonts each time it started, even the ones it wasn't going to use. Firefox AFAIK isn't handicapped in this way. (IE wasn't the only piece of Microsoft software affected negatively by 'lots of fonts'. It's retarded, I'm not surprised graphics people tend to prefer Macs.)
Anyway, on my current Windows system (even with very few fonts) Firefox still takes quicker to open than IE, and "feels" quicker for just about everything I do, although granted that's subjective, "if it feels quicker it's still better".
Are you thinking of Microsoft breaking TCP/IP to 'fake' faster speeds of IIS and IE? It works like this: Normally when an HTTP session ends, the TCP/IP connection is torn down by the server, which according to TCP/IP standards, involves two packets: a "disconnect request" (sent by IIS or Apache to the browser) and then a "disconnect acknowledge" (sent by the browser back to the server to acknowledge that the disconnect was received. When the client receives the "disconnect" it sends the ACK and closes up the socket on its side; when the server receives the "disconnect ACK", the connection is fully closed and the resources it uses are freed up on the server side. Under normal conditions, if the occasional ACK happens to get lost, then all that happens is that the TCP/IP socket remains open for usually about another two minutes until it times out from inactivity and gets cleaned up by the OS anyway (if you "netstat -a" you should see these hanging around for a little while).
Now, Microsoft did two things: they modified TCP/IP when in conjunction with Internet Explorer to not send the disconnect ACK, and they modified IIS to not wait until it received the ACK to close and free up the socket, but rather to close it and free up the associated resources immediately. This perversion of the very open standard on which the Internet was founded has the following effects:
This whole rather unethical bit of sliminess was primarily concocted to not only make IIS artificially appear faster during benchmarks, but to artificially slow Apache down (because Microsoft was getting frustrated that IIS was unable to kick the Linux/Apache servers' asses).