This is my standard 'Vista Sucks' response (thought you touched on many of the points.
Bad: 3.0, 95, ME, Vista, OK: 3.1, 98, XP, Seven, Great 3.11, 98 OSR, XP SP2, Seven SP?
The reason is that a name change indicates a change in the API/Driver models, and it takes a while for the Hardware and Applications to catch up.
An OS is basically the layer between Hardware and Applications, everything else is just sugar. In the cases of wfw 3.11, 98, XP, and Seven PC and app makers managed to make mostly compliant products, and the OS itself has matured to fix errors and omissions in the specs.
I knew that Vista was gonna 'flop', and people would hate it, just like the previous versions that wern't yet supported by on-the-market PC's and software, but it's a chicken-and-egg situation, MS had to put it out there with full force and (apperant) confidance, otherwise (more) people would still be using XP, running as adminstrator, without good IPv6 support, without good power-save mode support, 64 bit support, etc. etc.
If whatever 8 is ends up with major API changes, it'll 'fail' as well, but maybe 8 will just be a refined Vista->Seven-> line... Odds are, if it's called 'Eight' it'll do well, but if they come up with a new major name scheme (#.# -> Year -> Double-Letter -> single word -> ????) it'll likely be a strategic failure... I don't see any major new hardware comeing down the pipes (16-32-64 bits, GPU dominance, the Internet...) except for mass cores, and 3D displays.
I saw people on Ars Technica in a massive discussion about 'IA128' referred to in some leaked MS slideshow, and everyone was off on 'lol 128 bit addressing, how dumb' but noone mentioned Intel's prototype 128 core CPU... old techs can get stuck in a mindset, the HZ race and the Bit-width race are nearing their end, (like the philosophers arrow, major 'breakthroughs' will likly produce single digit percentage gains)
The next major revision of Windows, based on my crystal ball will provide better support for massive numbers of cores, perhaps also giving up on the 'S' in SMP, not only treating GPU 'shaders' and CPU 'cores' as different breeds of the same beast, but allowing threads to be sheduled on pools of different core types, say a system 32 cores with floating point optimizations, 32 vector operation optimized cores, 64 general integer operation cores (perhaps with brach-prediction optimization, for 'control' threads), and GPU 'shader' cores on an add-in board, with fast streaming operation, but slow access to main memory... It'll also have native UI for 3D displays (requiring GPU's with a 64 bit memory model, LOL), and better integration with mobile data networks (3/4G whatever, I don't keep up with cellular stuff)
And it'll suck, the thread sheduling will be inefficent, and most PC's will still only have a handful of cores, 3D displays won't be standardized, and will give people headaches, and Mobile data will be too expensive, when downloading patches at a per-kilobyte rate...
But, the version after that, when everyone and their dog has a kilo-core machine, and app developers properly tag/seperate their threads for effective scheduling, 3D actually works well and dosn't make people barf, and people pony up for unlimited mobile data, and the OS (9?10?) is refined, it'll be great.
Wow, I went much futher than my usual, and I'm now late for work.
I hope they win... then I hope that Hormell foods sues them for damaging thier previously valuable IP reguarding processed pork products. If these guys invented Spam filtering, them they must have been a driving force behind calling it Spam, infringing Hormell's valuable Trademark.
jeesh, these guys sound like someone from a Monty Python sketch....
Nowdays, I understand how my dad (A Boeing inspector for many years) felt when watching movies with airplanes... pointing out that they took off in a 737, but the landing scene shows a 757!
But, I still recall how annoying it was to have such things pointed out all the time... So I try and keep my mouth shut during the show.
Imagine what it must be like for a real medical doctor to watch 'House', or a real serial killer to watch 'Dexter'.
In the US, afaik, no, they use QAM encoding, same as cable modems. However, many TV's can tune 'Clear' (unencrypted) QAM and ATSC, and all channels that are available over the air (OTA) should be unencrypted on Cable (I believe it's a legal requirement, but cable co's continueally 'accidently' encrypt channels
How much of this kind of problem is caused by the standard behavior of browsers to make a 'best guess' at interpreting 'bad' HTML, since the parsing rules are very lax compared to XML?
Should unmatched tags cause the browser to stop and say 'Parsing Error, Invalid HTML'? (or whatever user-friendly message the browser author writes)
'cause I could totally imagine someone, somewhere writing a browser that sees '<'s and auto-re-encodes them, then does it's tag parsing.
Back around 1998 I worked for a company that made e-commerce sites as their first tester for less than a month. The first bug I found was that a new user could insert script tags in their username (any field, really), my employers response was "Why would anyone want to hack a website?"... I wouldn't drop the issue, so they dropped me.
The last time I installed Windows 95 (the first release, which did not yet have IE) I then tried to get a browser onto it.
Since I was tech-savvy enough to know about FTP, I tried FTP'ing to various browser-software sites, including Microsoft and (iirc)Netscape. I was not successful, and could not get directions from any web sites, since there was no browser to get to the web sites with. I eventually was able to telnet to a *nix shell account, and use a text-based browser (lynx, iirc) to get a windows-compatible browser file.
As a car analogy, a web browser is like tires. If you managed to get an [car]/[OS] without [tires]/[browser], good luck getting to the [tire store]/[browser installer].
Well, I heard once that on the old road from the bulk of West Germany to Berlin, back when it was surrounded by East Germany, just getting out of your car could get you shot. If you had a breakdown/out of gas, or such you had to wait for the military guys to arrive.
But then, East Germanys border was designed to keep them IN, not just others to keep others out.
Well, very few ships are flagged from the US; the shipping companies don't like paying taxes, so they register in tax havens that don't provide any support.
When a US flagged ship is threatened however, you get snipers like for the 'Maersk Alabama'
"They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!"
Knowing about the legal fights over royalties from movies like 'Forrest Gump' and 'Lord of the Rings'... I would feel safer trusting my money to a pirate than a movie studio.
But then I lent $30,000 to an attorney recovering from crack addiction to restart his business. (he's been paying me on time for 2 years so far)
I like my idea for a file-copy-that-is-not-a-copy loophole.
1) read a byte. 2) generate a random byte. 3) is the random number amazingly identical to the number in the origional file? if so, jump to 5. 4) goto 2 5) write the new, randomly generated byte into a new file. 6) if not at end of input file, goto 1.
This process may (as there is a chance the program may never generate a particular byte, and loop to the end of the universe) create a file of completely new bits that just happen to match the input file. Such an astonishing co-incidence is truly amazing, and should be shared with the world.
I've seen a lot of projects like NES, Apple ][, Amiga... emulators so that old games can be played on modern machines...
Are there not such projects for old Mainframes? Might be an excellent way to replace such systems... unless the costs of the required stability testing, software licensing issues and such would be too much... also custom hardware I/O may be difficult to adapt... (Anyone know where to get a USB 8 inch floppy disc drive or 110 baud modem?)
Probably better to replace such incredibly old applications anyway.
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Incorrect, with current methods you can identify both.
Depending on the number, and distribution of intentional errors, you can tweak such a system to indentify any number of mixed sources. For example if you insert 30 errors into each copy at unique points, and 3 copies are blended randomly, if will contain an average of 10 errors from each source, possibly enough to identify all 3 sources. With overlaping points, even if a best 2 out of 3 method is used to generate the copy, you can still find out which sources. Consider each point at which an error is inserted or not as a bit, and think of RAID, ECC, Parity, etc.
I believe that a particular large software company already uses this type of method on their source code distributions, to indentify leaks. I recall a presentation from someone working at that company on the local university learning channel where they described fingerprinting source code in this manner.
I wouldn't mind seeing sponsorship on DLC addons...
If Coke Corporation wants to pay for, say, a Left4Dead mini-campaign and slap a few billboards in it, or McDonalds pays for an added zone in WoW and gets ads on the loading screens, cool.
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This is my standard 'Vista Sucks' response (thought you touched on many of the points.
Bad: 3.0, 95, ME, Vista,
OK: 3.1, 98, XP, Seven,
Great 3.11, 98 OSR, XP SP2, Seven SP?
The reason is that a name change indicates a change in the API/Driver models, and it takes a while for the Hardware and Applications to catch up.
An OS is basically the layer between Hardware and Applications, everything else is just sugar. In the cases of wfw 3.11, 98, XP, and Seven PC and app makers managed to make mostly compliant products, and the OS itself has matured to fix errors and omissions in the specs.
I knew that Vista was gonna 'flop', and people would hate it, just like the previous versions that wern't yet supported by on-the-market PC's and software, but it's a chicken-and-egg situation, MS had to put it out there with full force and (apperant) confidance, otherwise (more) people would still be using XP, running as adminstrator, without good IPv6 support, without good power-save mode support, 64 bit support, etc. etc.
If whatever 8 is ends up with major API changes, it'll 'fail' as well, but maybe 8 will just be a refined Vista->Seven-> line... Odds are, if it's called 'Eight' it'll do well, but if they come up with a new major name scheme (#.# -> Year -> Double-Letter -> single word -> ????) it'll likely be a strategic failure... I don't see any major new hardware comeing down the pipes (16-32-64 bits, GPU dominance, the Internet...) except for mass cores, and 3D displays.
I saw people on Ars Technica in a massive discussion about 'IA128' referred to in some leaked MS slideshow, and everyone was off on 'lol 128 bit addressing, how dumb' but noone mentioned Intel's prototype 128 core CPU... old techs can get stuck in a mindset, the HZ race and the Bit-width race are nearing their end, (like the philosophers arrow, major 'breakthroughs' will likly produce single digit percentage gains)
The next major revision of Windows, based on my crystal ball will provide better support for massive numbers of cores, perhaps also giving up on the 'S' in SMP, not only treating GPU 'shaders' and CPU 'cores' as different breeds of the same beast, but allowing threads to be sheduled on pools of different core types, say a system 32 cores with floating point optimizations, 32 vector operation optimized cores, 64 general integer operation cores (perhaps with brach-prediction optimization, for 'control' threads), and GPU 'shader' cores on an add-in board, with fast streaming operation, but slow access to main memory... It'll also have native UI for 3D displays (requiring GPU's with a 64 bit memory model, LOL), and better integration with mobile data networks (3/4G whatever, I don't keep up with cellular stuff)
And it'll suck, the thread sheduling will be inefficent, and most PC's will still only have a handful of cores, 3D displays won't be standardized, and will give people headaches, and Mobile data will be too expensive, when downloading patches at a per-kilobyte rate...
But, the version after that, when everyone and their dog has a kilo-core machine, and app developers properly tag/seperate their threads for effective scheduling, 3D actually works well and dosn't make people barf, and people pony up for unlimited mobile data, and the OS (9?10?) is refined, it'll be great.
Wow, I went much futher than my usual, and I'm now late for work.
I hope they win... then I hope that Hormell foods sues them for damaging thier previously valuable IP reguarding processed pork products.
If these guys invented Spam filtering, them they must have been a driving force behind calling it Spam, infringing Hormell's valuable Trademark.
jeesh, these guys sound like someone from a Monty Python sketch. ...
bloody vikings.
Nowdays, I understand how my dad (A Boeing inspector for many years) felt when watching movies with airplanes... pointing out that they took off in a 737, but the landing scene shows a 757!
But, I still recall how annoying it was to have such things pointed out all the time... So I try and keep my mouth shut during the show.
Imagine what it must be like for a real medical doctor to watch 'House', or a real serial killer to watch 'Dexter'.
In the US, afaik, no, they use QAM encoding, same as cable modems. However, many TV's can tune 'Clear' (unencrypted) QAM and ATSC, and all channels that are available over the air (OTA) should be unencrypted on Cable (I believe it's a legal requirement, but cable co's continueally 'accidently' encrypt channels
How much of this kind of problem is caused by the standard behavior of browsers to make a 'best guess' at interpreting 'bad' HTML, since the parsing rules are very lax compared to XML?
Should unmatched tags cause the browser to stop and say 'Parsing Error, Invalid HTML'? (or whatever user-friendly message the browser author writes)
'cause I could totally imagine someone, somewhere writing a browser that sees '<'s and auto-re-encodes them, then does it's tag parsing.
Back around 1998 I worked for a company that made e-commerce sites as their first tester for less than a month. The first bug I found was that a new user could insert script tags in their username (any field, really), my employers response was "Why would anyone want to hack a website?"... I wouldn't drop the issue, so they dropped me.
That redacting documents by simply putting a opaque block over them dosn't removing the unlaying data?
Our family cat was born on that day, at 6:36 (6 hours and 6*6 minutes).
She will yowl and hiss like crazy if anyone touches her, but never bites/scratches, Calico, but no particularly sinister pattern like Hitlercat, etc.
The last time I installed Windows 95 (the first release, which did not yet have IE) I then tried to get a browser onto it.
Since I was tech-savvy enough to know about FTP, I tried FTP'ing to various browser-software sites, including Microsoft and (iirc)Netscape. I was not successful, and could not get directions from any web sites, since there was no browser to get to the web sites with. I eventually was able to telnet to a *nix shell account, and use a text-based browser (lynx, iirc) to get a windows-compatible browser file.
As a car analogy, a web browser is like tires. If you managed to get an [car]/[OS] without [tires]/[browser], good luck getting to the [tire store]/[browser installer].
Actually, it was an April Fools story.
They just used the described means to submit it, and it just now finished.
Unfortunetly, nothing excludes the Bureaucrat from being a Sociopath as well.
Some might even claim it's a prerequisite.
Maybe there is a particular product that induces suicidal thoughts by exposure.
Anything from chemicals used in the industrial process that may have psychiatric effects.
One of the symptoms of chronic lead exposure is depression, and what are the odds of lead poisoning in a chinese factory?
(excluding the more sinister possibility of something like Stephen King's "Christine"... a cursed iPad anyone? )
Ahh, the classic IBM Model M, a keyboard tough enough to kill a man, and then type his obituary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard
Well, I heard once that on the old road from the bulk of West Germany to Berlin, back when it was surrounded by East Germany, just getting out of your car could get you shot. If you had a breakdown/out of gas, or such you had to wait for the military guys to arrive.
But then, East Germanys border was designed to keep them IN, not just others to keep others out.
Well, very few ships are flagged from the US; the shipping companies don't like paying taxes, so they register in tax havens that don't provide any support.
When a US flagged ship is threatened however, you get snipers like for the 'Maersk Alabama'
"They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!"
Knowing about the legal fights over royalties from movies like 'Forrest Gump' and 'Lord of the Rings'... I would feel safer trusting my money to a pirate than a movie studio.
But then I lent $30,000 to an attorney recovering from crack addiction to restart his business. (he's been paying me on time for 2 years so far)
Why don't the ships travel in convoys so that a few armed ships can escort a fleet of unarmed cargo ships.
Cheaper for multiple ships to split the cost.
Isn't that because of all the extra bounds checking and such to help prevent exploitable binaries, crashes, etc. that's on by default?
Joining a Union is like owning a gun, the right to do so is important to have; but I wouldn't want to myself.
a 'standing army' of a Union leads to it's own problems, with corruption and waste.
ADA requirements also add a lot to prison costs...
So, is Tamiflu going to be the new chemical in our groundwater that environmentalists will freak over?
I like my idea for a file-copy-that-is-not-a-copy loophole.
1) read a byte.
2) generate a random byte.
3) is the random number amazingly identical to the number in the origional file? if so, jump to 5.
4) goto 2
5) write the new, randomly generated byte into a new file.
6) if not at end of input file, goto 1.
This process may (as there is a chance the program may never generate a particular byte, and loop to the end of the universe) create a file of completely new bits that just happen to match the input file. Such an astonishing co-incidence is truly amazing, and should be shared with the world.
I've seen a lot of projects like NES, Apple ][, Amiga... emulators so that old games can be played on modern machines...
Are there not such projects for old Mainframes? Might be an excellent way to replace such systems... unless the costs of the required stability testing, software licensing issues and such would be too much... also custom hardware I/O may be difficult to adapt... (Anyone know where to get a USB 8 inch floppy disc drive or 110 baud modem?)
Probably better to replace such incredibly old applications anyway.
With specs its a bit more difficult, but with books its not really that hard to get 2 copies from 2 seperate sources. Diff the two and you can create a unique sig than matches neither.
Incorrect, with current methods you can identify both.
Depending on the number, and distribution of intentional errors, you can tweak such a system to indentify any number of mixed sources. For example if you insert 30 errors into each copy at unique points, and 3 copies are blended randomly, if will contain an average of 10 errors from each source, possibly enough to identify all 3 sources. With overlaping points, even if a best 2 out of 3 method is used to generate the copy, you can still find out which sources. Consider each point at which an error is inserted or not as a bit, and think of RAID, ECC, Parity, etc.
I believe that a particular large software company already uses this type of method on their source code distributions, to indentify leaks. I recall a presentation from someone working at that company on the local university learning channel where they described fingerprinting source code in this manner.
IAAL and it is legal malpractice to not double-check the prosecution's sentencing algorithm and recommendations to the judge ...
That's assuming the error is not in their clients favor...
I wouldn't mind seeing sponsorship on DLC addons...
If Coke Corporation wants to pay for, say, a Left4Dead mini-campaign and slap a few billboards in it, or McDonalds pays for an added zone in WoW and gets ads on the loading screens, cool.