I work at Microsoft on Vista, and I've been telling people this for months. If you'd rather listen to Steve Jobs, fine, but you can't pretend he's the only one saying this.
> Yes, facing the reality of corporate capitalism > does that to people, eh?
No, deciding that nobody deserves to lose does that to people. The reality is that most products are losers, and deservedly so. If you invent the scratch-and-sniff floppy disk, you're an idiot, and however many thousands of dollars you waste trying to sell this stupid idea are dollars you deserve to lose.
Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, you have to get someone to manufacture these things. If I run a manufacturing plant where they can be produced, and you come to me and say "how much will three thousand of these cost?", I know you're an idiot and your product is stupid and you're wasting your money. But I don't care. I am not in the business of telling you what to do with your invention. I'll just tell you what they cost, and take your money.
Now, I don't particularly deserve that money. I didn't invent anything. I was just sitting around and you came wandering up. But in the end, you lose your money, and I win it. This is what usually happens. It's how capitalism really works.
Now, Marx would say that I have exploited you to get this money, and that it was wrong. But Marx was an idiot. He based this conclusion on the fallacious idea that work in and of itself has value regardless of what is produced, and this same idea is at the heart of complaints that some competitor in the marketplace didn't deserve to fail.
> you know what's one of the most common error > messages I see? it's "INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR"
I always thought that meant "your code sucks". I've only seen it twice in fifteen years, and in both cases my code sucked. Is there any chance you're just a shitty programmer?
> Calling people who oppose you "socialists"
That's not what I said. I said the idea that nobody deserves to lose inevitably leads to Marxism. It's the same kind of stupidity that leads people to complain about "income inequality". The highest income is always going up, thanks to inflation and interest, but the lowest income has always been and will always be zero. This guarantees that income inequality always increases.
> The Windows kernel does more? As a desktop user, > or a company, will this more make a difference to me?
Does the less that the Linux kernel does make a difference? There's a certain mindset that believes having lots of CPU, memory, and disk available is a Good Thing. There's a certain other mindset that classified this available CPU, memory, and disk as "wasted" and therefore a Bad Thing. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
> There were such projects widely available > before OSX?
Widely available? No. But I worked for a browser company that used a virtual 3-D cube as a sort of primordial tabbed-browsing concept. You dragged the page left for "back", right for "forward", and up or down to navigate between individual web page "channels". This was around 1997 or so. Really stupid idea; usability sucked so bad it wasn't funny. The product never sold a single copy, eventually ended up in a little library that you could buy for way too much money and build your own shitty browser, and hardly anyone bought it then either.
But I'm not stupid enough to claim that any of your screenshots come from someone who "stole" that idea. It's not a new idea. It's the same damn idea people have been talking about for years. I understand there were at least three other companies working on the same concept while we were.
> Microsoft just copied it from them
Honestly, everybody's just working on the same damn ideas. There's no "copy from those guys" happening. We've been dreaming about the 3-D desktop since the days of VRML. Go watch "Johnny Mnemonic" - it's an incompetent vision, to be sure, but hardly stolen from Apple.
> By the time Linux started, 32-bit processors > where on the loose for 6 years.
But the Linux world is the UNIX world. Or is that only when it suits YOUR purposes? Twelve years old when you want to be fast, thirty when you want to be first?
That must be awfully convenient. Dishonest, sure, but convenient.
> But what's Vista then? Where's the innovation really?
Mostly under the hood, where you can't see it. You'll see the effect in applications, though - such as Office 2007, which is pretty damn innovative.
> those features actually reduce the value of the > operating system to Microsoft's customers
No DRM means no digital HD media. Can't do it. Not legally, anyway.
DRM means you can watch legitimate HD media at full HD, and some amount of questionable HD media at reduced clarity. If you prefer to watch no digital HD media, you can do that, too.
Looks like increased value to me. What about you? Sure, IP law is fucked and the media companies are corrupt thieving bastards who just want to extort more money form the consumer while paying less to the artist. But that's not our fault. If you want to complain about something, go complain about them.
> Why in the world should you even know about > the products that I received from another > entity?
We don't. You're missing the point. You're so bound up in the idea that we get paid for something we don't deserve, you're simply refusing to see that we're actually providing services and software for which we NEVER get paid.
We have a contract. When you sign that contract, we say "how many eligible computers do you have?" and you are required by the terms of the contract to tell us.
If you get more computers, you don't have to tell us anything. We DON'T know you have them. We simply extend your license to cover those computers. If you install Windows on some of those computers and activate it through Windows Genuine Advantage, THEN we know you have more computers, but you still don't pay anything for them.
At the end of your contract, when you renew it, we say "how many eligible computers do you have?" and you are required by the terms of the contract to tell us. If you don't like that, you don't have to do it! We also have a different contract. For that contract, we ask "how many computers do you want to license?" instead.
So if you don't want us to know you have Linux machines, you don't have to tell us. But if you go from "we have Windows on all 300 of our machines" to "we have Windows on 300 of our machines", we can sort of figure out that you have more machines. We just don't know how many or what they're running.
> it removes any benefit of implementing > alternative products once the agreement > has been entered
But in the timeline I provided, the school gets to use 100 Linux machines for 2 years if they want. Isn't that enough time for them to say "hey, this is great, let's switch!" and install it on the other 300? Then they can tell us to go to hell when the contract is up.
It's all about choice. The problem with choice is that when you suck, people don't choose you. And that's why you want to FORCE your school to use what YOU give them, instead of giving them the choice. We give them the choice.
I haven't made any technical review of the DRM in Vista, but if you could remove it easily, you could bypass it easily. For it to be effective, you'd need to tightly intertwine it with critical O/S components, such that if you take out the DRM nothing works anymore.
> A game that uses OpenGL in both platforms, > Windows and Linux, is faster on Linux
Since the Linux kernel does not do as much as the Windows kernel (not in any way a value judgement), this is to be expected. More CPU and memory bandwidth are available to the game under Linux. This type of benchmark is shortsighted.
> with the Aero GUI, I think Microsoft tries > to copy Mac OS X.
Translucent windows under X have been developed competently by at least four different teams before OSX. The feature is commonly requested and frequently attempted. Usually, people decide it's not worth the CPU hit. OSX and Vista are the first systems which have implemented this feature through hardware acceleration. Neither invented the idea. Neither is in any way visionary or brilliant for saying "hey, let's use this 3D hardware, then maybe performance won't be teh suck".
> The Linux world is the Unix world.
And it's not the Windows world. We did 16-bit platforms when you people were laughing at us and saying "get a real computer". You don't get to bitch about it now that we've pushed you off most of your own home field.
> Linux is still more difficult than Windows.
And if you start looking at where the Linux experience has traditionally surpassed Windows, you notice that its lead is disappearing a *lot* faster than it's catching up to Windows on usability.
> If the definition of "objectively shit" for > software is that one person has major issues > with it,
No, the definition of "objectively shit" for software is that it takes clearly inappropriate actions. If I execute a command in a piece of software, it should either do what I said, or do nothing. It should not do something else. It may optionally ASK me if I *intended* to do something else, but this should be an exceedingly rare occurrence.
This is why EMACS is shit. The command set has no enforced standard. Any given command may do anything on a given installation of EMACS.
> Text editors edit code, but they don't have all > the features of code editors.
Which is precisely why I don't compare EMACS to vi. They aren't the same thing. EMACS is a programmer's editor. It has been designed as a programmer's editor. Its purpose is to edit code. This is not what vi is designed to do; vi is designed to edit text. It is, however, what Visual Studio is designed to do. So while it is not appopriate to compare EMACS to vi, it is entirely appropriate to compare it to Visual Studio.
> I ASKED at the very beginning if this was > a vi vs emacs thing.
See above. You cannot productively compare EMACS to vi any more than you can productively compare a Ferrari to an Oldsmobile.
> I asked several times if you could name a > better console text editor than emacs, and > you never mentioned vi.
No, I mentioned Xedit, which you completely ignored. See above again; when asked to name a better car than a Ferrari, nobody in his right mind names Oldsmobile. The standards are different.
> You don't seem to know how to debate. If > program X is shit, then give specifics as to > why, and give examples of similar programs that > are not shit.
I've done this. Claiming I didn't is just bullshit. Bullshit is not valid debate. I therefore submit that I'm not the one who doesn't know how to debate.
> Vista helps the media companies take my rights away.
You don't have any right to watch Talladega Nights in HD.
That right is owned by a media company. That company licenses this right to you on a temporary and contingent basis when you pay a fee. One of the conditions of that license is a working DRM implementation. By law, if you do not have a working DRM implementation, your license is invalid and you still have no right to watch it.
By providing DRM, Microsoft *enables* your rights. Nothing is taken away, because you do not have anything in the first place. There is no legal alternative.
> My actions are completely, 100% consistent - and yet > it seems to upset you.
What upsets me is that we have a broken body of international law that prevents us from doing anything other than what we've done, and yet somehow you think boycotting our product is going to accomplish something.
> Games that run on both, Windows and Linux, run faster on Linux.
OpenGL runs faster than Direct3D. A lot faster. Some people say this is because OpenGL is more elegant and efficient; some say it's because Direct3D is doing a lot more. I think both of these statements are correct because it's a causal relation: OpenGL is more elegant and efficient because it doesn't do as much.
> So, by your saying, Microsoft is always ahead, right?
Yes, if you're just copying what we do. Since we do it before you copy it, and copying it takes nonzero time, we have a nonzero time to keep moving. Mathematically, you can never catch up, because you don't know what to copy until we release it.
As far as your list goes, why don't we copy the Linux world more? Because... well, we don't want to. We do things when they're a good idea, not when someone else does them.
> The bussiness using FOSS are copying another company > using FOSS?
No, no, NO.
When a company has proprietary software, and someone says "make it open source", that company frequently says "but our competition would steal it".
That argument is STUPID, and there are probably HUNDREDS of places online that will explain exactly why. You can even find an answer in the FAQ on the OSI web site. ESR's CATB covers it in more detail.
> This quote of yours reminds me of those > people thinking that Windows is their > computer. First of, there are Linux > distributions that you can get at no cost
I'm talking about 100% Windows-compatible software, just like 100% IBM-compatible hardware. Linux isn't 100% Windows-compatible. If you want to compete with Windows, you can't do "everything Windows does". You have to do something different and call it better. You can't JUST be a copy. You have to be more than that.
Linux isn't even remotely a copy of Windows. It's a copy of UNIX, which is a whole different thing. That *is* a good business strategy for competing with Windows.
Well, except for the part where it sucks, but you guys are working on that - right?;)
> I won't have an operating system tell me what > I am and am not allowed to do with my computer
We're not telling you that. The disc is telling you. We're just handing you the message. You're effectively saying "I'm not going to have some postman tell me what I do and don't get in the mail". The postman isn't in charge of that. It's simply not rational to pressure him about the matter, because he can't control what you get in the mail. No matter how large and strong and united your effort is, it can't accomplish anything this way.
> I'm not going to give up my rights just because > "I shouldn't make Microsoft suffer."
You're boycotting the wrong thing. I don't care if you boycott Vista; like you say, we won't suffer. But the statement you're trying to make isn't being made when you boycott Vista. If you want to make that statement, you have to boycott the HD disc formats and players.
I'm certainly mightily amused that this incorporates "don't buy a PS3", since it has a built-in Blu-Ray drive, but that's honestly not a motivator. It also incorporates "don't buy Microsoft's HD-DVD peripheral for the XBox 360", and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't, or even neglect to say that in the hope people won't notice it. If you have a problem with DRM - and I sure as hell do - make that statement to the people who are using it. DRM needs to die, and we need to kill it.
But boycotting Vista won't do that. If you want to boycott Vista, do it honestly, for a reason that actually has something to do with Vista. (Like, say, WGA. Not that I dislike WGA, but I know a lot of people here who do.) If DRM is the problem, go boycott something that *has* DRM. All we do is tell you about it.
> Your inability to figure out how to use it/uninstall it does > not make it objectively shit.
Actually, it does. I've been using software for over thirty years. If my experience isn't sufficient to use and uninstall your software, your software is objectively shit. If your software tells me it's uninstalled when it really isn't, your software is objectively shit. If I open a bug that I have personally observed and you close it as "bogus", your software is objectively shit.
> Yes, words mean things. By IN the console, I meant in the console.
You didn't say in the console. You said from the console. Check your post.
> Why are you bringing up code editors when I'm talking about text editors?
Because code is text, so every code editor is a variety of text editor. EMACS also contains a vast number of features designed explicitly for the editing of code, so if code editors aren't under consideration, then EMACS doesn't exist.
You're not very smart, are you?
> emacs and vi are the best, so I don't know how you say they're shit
I didn't say vi was shit. I said EMACS is shit. I like vi.
> Maybe you think working with a console is shit.
No, I think working with shit is shit. I've probably spent more time working with consoles than you've spent breathing.
> obviously Microsoft decided that for now, > it's better for them to go along
What do you think the valid alternative would be? An operating system that can't play HD content at all, or an operating system that plays HD content illegally? One of those sucks, and the other lands us in court.
Something I've been on about myself. Can't be helped, though. *sigh* Sometimes there's just no way to do things nicely; it doesn't matter how polite you are with your error dialogs, they still *look* like they say "You're Stupid" with an "I Know" button.
> I refuse to be told how I am allowed to use > the things I own
PLEASE put the blame in the right place on this.
The media conglomerates are trying to tell you what you can do with your HD-DVDs. When Vista sees a "bad" media path, it ASKS the DVD what it should do, and the DVD tells it. It's the DVD that says "don't play me!" or "make me look like crap!", and all Vista does is obey the command it's been given.
We *have* to do that. If we don't do what the DVD says to do, we're not allowed to play it; DMCA, and all that rot. The only thing we've done is set up a system that lets you play HD-DVDs legally on a suitably validated signal path.
If you want to make someone suffer over this, Microsoft aren't the right people. It's the media companies who are trying to shove this particular turd into the market and tell you it's chocolate. Boycotting Vista isn't going to send them a message; boycotting HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs sends that message.
I don't expect this to happen, because people care a lot more about watching "Jackass 2" at 1080p than they do about their rights. Ultimately, most of the people who care about the rights will try to get the best of both worlds by ripping and burning all their HD content... but since they can't really say this out loud, the rest of the world will think they bought it, and go out to Best Buy to pick up their own copy. Meanwhile, the people who suffer first are the ones who care about our rights AND the law, and in the end we all lose.
> Didn't you just say a couple of posts ago that > software developers don't copy because copying > is bad for business?
No, I said that copying your competitor's entire application was a bad business strategy. If you don't see the difference, you really ought to stop having this conversation.
> if a program's features are being copied that > the program isn't total shit
It doesn't matter how much treasure you bury in your shit, it's still shit. Recovering the treasure doesn't in any way express admiration of your shit.
> what is Firefox shit compared to?
It's *objectively* shit. I hate it. It keeps hijacking MIME types, refusing to let me change the default browser, running after I've uninstalled it, TRYING to run after I've manually deleted the executable... if I hadn't experienced it, I wouldn't believe it. You probably don't.
> I don't know of any text editors with macros
Amusingly, vim has them. However, for serious programmable macros, you might want to check out Visual SlickEdit, which - like EMACS - has its very own language. Unlike ELISP, SlickC is based on C syntax, which most programmers already know.
> name one text editor that has more features than > emacs that can be run from the console
The Visual Studio IDE. Unlike EMACS, which uses a toy language for its scripting and extensibility, VS allows you to write extensions in full-blown C++, VB, and C#.
It doesn't run IN the console, but you can run it FROM the console. Is that not what you meant? Details, details, details. Words mean things.
> Can you even name another console text editor?
XEdit. IBM 370 era editor on VM/CMS mainframes. Frequently used to write COBOL. Used REXX as the scripting language.
> at the time DOS was a toy, and Windows 3.x doubly so
Yes, which is why Windows 95 had no effective competition. And your point was...?
> Do you not think that having the application stack as > well as the API (Win16/32) is not a conflict of interest?
I don't think it's a conflict of interest when a company writes applications for its own operating system. In fact, I think it's NECESSARY, so the company can ensure its API is actually sensible.
> other than the natural network effects
I think the effects you notice with Microsoft are also natural network effects, but that the network is massively large and therefore the effect is massively magnified. The same effects occur with other products, but the network is so small many effects are lost in the noise.
> So you are admitting that Microsoft receives payment for > services or products rendered by another entity.
No we're not. Look at this timeline.
2005 - School buys 3-year Windows license for 300 PCs.
2006 - You give the school 100 Linux PCs. The school immediately receives 100 Windows licenses for them under the terms of the School Agreement, but PAYS NOTHING. This is Microsoft providing a service. The school does not have to use the licenses unless they want to. But they do. So they will.
2007 - The school gets Vista upgrade licenses for all *400* PCs and does not pay one red cent. This is Microsoft providing software. The school does not have to upgrade anything unless they want to. But they do. So they will.
2008 - Agreement expires. The school may now choose whether to license 300 or 400 PCs for Windows. If they decide to license 300, they switch to Academic Select and pay only for the 300 they want licensed. If they decide to license all 400, they can stay on the School Agreement and pay for all 400. And that's what they'll do.
Notice that the school always gets to choose what they want to do with all 400 computers, and is never forced to pay Microsoft anything for the new ones. In fact, if they like Linux enough, they can at any point decide to install Linux on all 400 machines and not renew the Microsoft license at all.
But they won't. They'll decide all on their own to turn your Linux contribution into another hundred Windows boxes. And when the renewal term comes up, they'll license all 400. We don't have to *make* them do it; they *want* to do it.
Your failure to understand why does not indicate any conspiracy or malfeasance.
Then no matter how long we give them, no alternative will arrive. That's pretty much what I said.
> Innovation is having a flash of insight and > creating something totally new.
How big does that something have to be before it counts? Look at Office 2007. On the one hand, we've just changed the way the toolbars and menus work. On the other, nothing else has ever worked that way, and it radically alters the way you interact with the applications. We even license this technology to our partners so they can use it in their products. Is that still just incremental?
> Then how to you explain Windows' continual copying > of IBM's CUA interface standards on the Windows > desktop?
I'm talking about copying someone else's product when you don't have one. It's a whole different thing when you copy a feature from one application into another application; sometimes that's the same kind of dead-end road, but more frequently it's just a recognition that someone else has already invented this particular wheel and there's no real way to dramatically improve on it. I don't think anyone NEEDS to write an AVL tree implementation from scratch anymore, and I don't think anyone who does is going to make any breakthroughs.
> Sweeping statements about licensing methodologies > are rarely accurate
The inaccuracy of the statement is sort of the point. When a company claims its competitors will copy its products if it goes open source, that company is using a wrongheaded argument, because copying another company's products is not a competitive advantage. Quite the contrary.
> All free OSes have to do
My original point still stands: if that's all you have to do, why haven't you done it?
> reproduce the API that applications use to get at > system services. The complete reproduction of the > Windows kernel, etc., is not a requirement.
It is if you're serious about compatibility. Your alternative operating system isn't really an alternative unless I can run my library of Windows software on it; I have thousands of dollars invested in that software. Reproducing the API requires that your underlying system internals meet certain requirements, and those requirements cascade. By the time your alternative kernel can accurately and reliably load arbitrary Windows device drivers with comparable performance to Windows, it can be productively argued that for all intents and purposes it IS the Windows kernel.
You just can't call it that, because of trademark and the army of lawyers in Redmond.;)
I'd like to talk to your brother-in-law. Without more understanding of his concerns, I can't really address them. If he's got that many problems with it, and I don't, one of us is very very wrong. It's best for everyone involved - him, me, Microsoft, and the end user - if we start looking at how to fix it.
I'm at the north end of building 26, lab 3117. If he's not on the Redmond campus, he can type "darklock" into the campus directory and get me on Communicator or email.
I suspect he just doesn't understand the business motivation for certain decisions. Testers tend to get very focused on the technical questions, and lose sight of the overall project objectives.
> IE 7 blatantly copied the best features of Firefox
Web browsing is a commodity activity. Eventually, all the browsers are going to be functionally identical. That's normal. It's why Firefox stole those features from Opera in the first place. Remember when frames were the killer feature of Netscape Navigator (not that anyone used them) and AJAX was the killer feature of IE (not that anyone used it) and stylesheets were the killer feature of Opera (not that anyone used them)? I do. Don't lecture me on browser history unless you know what you're talking about.
> It doesn't really have any competitors
There are a great many text editors for a great many platforms which have extensive scripting and macro capabilities.
> Are you trying to say that emacs sucks because > it doesn't do what Word does?
No, I'm trying to say that it sucks because it sucks.
And just to rub Tom Christiansen's nose in it, I note you make no assertion that Perl doesn't suck.
The difference between competitive and power-hungry is largely about whether you think the loser DESERVED to lose.
I think the loser always deserves to lose. I think that in the vast majority of cases, enough that you can effectively pretend it's ALL cases, the loser loses because of something the loser has done wrong or failed to do altogether.
It is very rarely - almost never - because of anything the winner has done particularly right. It is simply that the winner connected all of the dots without getting them out of order.
But for precisely this reason, it is entirely as valid to say that the winner DID NOT DESERVE TO WIN. In the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, these people would claim that the tortoise cheated. He won by default; the hare wasn't running. If the hare ran, the tortoise would have lost. The race was not fair.
And when you couple this with the idea that nobody deserves to lose, which isn't an uncommon viewpoint among hippies and liberals and the people who run the Special Olympics, you start thinking that the winner is always some kind of villain. After all, the loser didn't deserve to lose, and the winner didn't deserve to win. That's pretty much the definition of "cheating", isn't it? Unfortunately, it's true no matter who wins. Once you accept this idea, EVERYONE who wins by definition cheated to do so. The idea of competition becomes unacceptable. You effectively become a Marxist.
It's all in your perspective. Start looking at what Microsoft's competition did wrong or didn't do at all; the question isn't quite as cut and dried. Most of the time, they were sleeping under a tree and we just wandered past.
False analogy. I'm talking about something which is intended to be a cheaper but otherwise identical alternative. What you're discussing is cheaper and completely different.
Furthermore, Firefox, Perl, and EMACS *are* awful. They're like big pools of warm shit; once you're deep enough in them, you forget they're shit and just happily enjoy how warm they are.
If you use Vista for a couple weeks, long enough that:
1. All of your software is installed 2. All of your devices are configured 3. All of your personal preferences are set...the UAC dialogs go away almost entirely. I haven't seen one on my dev box in weeks.
That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. I'm also rather worried that so many people who are, apparently, considered qualified to review software in this industry - can't seem to figure out that the first week or two on a new system IS NOT NORMAL USAGE.
Disclosure: I'm a contractor working on Vista at Microsoft.
> What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
You know that doesn't work, right? The frog eventually does jump out of the water. If you extend the analogy to consumers, raising the heat too much does in fact make them leave.
> If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs > [...] people would gradually come up with > viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP.
Wasn't five years long enough? XP came out in 2001, DX9 in 2002, why couldn't the industry produce compatible alternatives over that five year period? Doesn't it seem reasonable to conclude that a market which couldn't produce alternatives in five years is not going to produce them at all?
Microsoft are constantly innovating. A day doesn't go by that we don't have thousands of people looking at our products and saying "how do we make this better?" - because that's our job. That's not going to stop. Even if we wait ten years to produce an upgrade, we're going to be innovating and improving for that entire ten years. So if the industry does happen to produce a clone of our current generation, we just have to look back and find the last RTM-quality build. Then we dump it on the market, and your alternative immediately becomes obsolete. You may as well have never had one at all.
Copying other people is a road to failure. It doesn't lead anywhere else. It's the major reason companies don't want to go open source, because their competition could copy them more easily, and the open source community has a huge body of very intelligent explanations as to why this reason is STUPID. Copying doesn't work. It's a bad business model. It doesn't serve consumers.
Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same.
> hardly anyone listens to me
I'm listening. I have roughly the influence of a hemorrhoid, but I'm still listening.;)
> WordPerfect wasn't tied to one OS, wasn't developed > by a platform developer to tie in to the OS
Word was available for the Mac before Windows was even released.
> why was Windows forever tied to the previous OSes?
Because Microsoft was tied to previous customers who were often tied to thousands of dollars in existing software written for a previous O/S.
> why couldn't the win32api libraries be developed over > top of a POSIX layer
What's wrong with "Services For Unix"? Granted, it's exactly the opposite - a POSIX layer over top of the Win32 API - but seriously, what's wrong with it?
> You may hate the idea of people not locking their > applications/data to a particular OS, but that's what > a lot of us users find handy.
That's inaccurate. I happen to NOT HATE the idea of people LOCKING applications/data to a particular O/S. I agree it's not the greatest thing they could do. I agree it would be better if the applications/data weren't locked. But I do not think failure to do the best possible thing is evil or hateful or even undesirable.
> you don't care what anyone says if it doesn't come in > a format that recognizes your ignorance?
This is how communication works. You have something to send, and you want me to receive it. So you choose a protocol that both sides understand.
When someone sends me a StarOffice document, he has chosen the wrong protocol. He has done this, not because he doesn't speak Microsoft Office, but because he wants me to speak StarOffice. StarOffice can, after all, produce documents in several formats that Microsoft Office can open - so his choice of a format it CANNOT open is deliberate. He wants me to install StarOffice.
So it is, in effect, a remote code execution exploit. And I refuse those on principle, just like unsigned ActiveX controls and invitations to punch the monkey.
> Well I'm writing this with Firefox, in Gentoo Linux.
And look, it opens great in IE7 on Vista. Isn't interoperability great?
But if it didn't, I wouldn't read it. You're some random guy on the internet. What you say may be very smart and insightful and interesting, but it's not important. I don't NEED to read it any more than you NEED me to read it.
Now, if my manager sends me an important document in StarOffice format, that's another matter. That isn't going to happen here at Microsoft. It never happened when I was working anywhere else, either - except when I was running my own company on "no Microsoft software EVER for ANYTHING", and I sent out important documents in StarOffice format, and then I would get them back with messages saying "WTF, use MS Office".
So I did. You can't run a company doing things your customers hate. It leads to bankruptcy. I flushed about $75,000 down the toilet fighting the good fight on the open source front lines, and then I figured out that you people honestly don't care about me. You don't care if my business succeeds. You don't care if my work gets done. You don't care if my rent gets paid. You only care that I don't use Microsoft products. And that's a pretty sick culture.
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I work at Microsoft on Vista, and I've been telling people this for months. If you'd rather listen to Steve Jobs, fine, but you can't pretend he's the only one saying this.
> Yes, facing the reality of corporate capitalism
> does that to people, eh?
No, deciding that nobody deserves to lose does that to people. The reality is that most products are losers, and deservedly so. If you invent the scratch-and-sniff floppy disk, you're an idiot, and however many thousands of dollars you waste trying to sell this stupid idea are dollars you deserve to lose.
Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, you have to get someone to manufacture these things. If I run a manufacturing plant where they can be produced, and you come to me and say "how much will three thousand of these cost?", I know you're an idiot and your product is stupid and you're wasting your money. But I don't care. I am not in the business of telling you what to do with your invention. I'll just tell you what they cost, and take your money.
Now, I don't particularly deserve that money. I didn't invent anything. I was just sitting around and you came wandering up. But in the end, you lose your money, and I win it. This is what usually happens. It's how capitalism really works.
Now, Marx would say that I have exploited you to get this money, and that it was wrong. But Marx was an idiot. He based this conclusion on the fallacious idea that work in and of itself has value regardless of what is produced, and this same idea is at the heart of complaints that some competitor in the marketplace didn't deserve to fail.
> you know what's one of the most common error
> messages I see? it's "INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR"
I always thought that meant "your code sucks". I've only seen it twice in fifteen years, and in both cases my code sucked. Is there any chance you're just a shitty programmer?
> Calling people who oppose you "socialists"
That's not what I said. I said the idea that nobody deserves to lose inevitably leads to Marxism. It's the same kind of stupidity that leads people to complain about "income inequality". The highest income is always going up, thanks to inflation and interest, but the lowest income has always been and will always be zero. This guarantees that income inequality always increases.
> The Windows kernel does more? As a desktop user,
> or a company, will this more make a difference to me?
Does the less that the Linux kernel does make a difference? There's a certain mindset that believes having lots of CPU, memory, and disk available is a Good Thing. There's a certain other mindset that classified this available CPU, memory, and disk as "wasted" and therefore a Bad Thing. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
> There were such projects widely available
> before OSX?
Widely available? No. But I worked for a browser company that used a virtual 3-D cube as a sort of primordial tabbed-browsing concept. You dragged the page left for "back", right for "forward", and up or down to navigate between individual web page "channels". This was around 1997 or so. Really stupid idea; usability sucked so bad it wasn't funny. The product never sold a single copy, eventually ended up in a little library that you could buy for way too much money and build your own shitty browser, and hardly anyone bought it then either.
But I'm not stupid enough to claim that any of your screenshots come from someone who "stole" that idea. It's not a new idea. It's the same damn idea people have been talking about for years. I understand there were at least three other companies working on the same concept while we were.
> Microsoft just copied it from them
Honestly, everybody's just working on the same damn ideas. There's no "copy from those guys" happening. We've been dreaming about the 3-D desktop since the days of VRML. Go watch "Johnny Mnemonic" - it's an incompetent vision, to be sure, but hardly stolen from Apple.
> By the time Linux started, 32-bit processors
> where on the loose for 6 years.
But the Linux world is the UNIX world. Or is that only when it suits YOUR purposes? Twelve years old when you want to be fast, thirty when you want to be first?
That must be awfully convenient. Dishonest, sure, but convenient.
> But what's Vista then? Where's the innovation really?
Mostly under the hood, where you can't see it. You'll see the effect in applications, though - such as Office 2007, which is pretty damn innovative.
> those features actually reduce the value of the
> operating system to Microsoft's customers
No DRM means no digital HD media. Can't do it. Not legally, anyway.
DRM means you can watch legitimate HD media at full HD, and some amount of questionable HD media at reduced clarity. If you prefer to watch no digital HD media, you can do that, too.
Looks like increased value to me. What about you? Sure, IP law is fucked and the media companies are corrupt thieving bastards who just want to extort more money form the consumer while paying less to the artist. But that's not our fault. If you want to complain about something, go complain about them.
> Why in the world should you even know about
> the products that I received from another
> entity?
We don't. You're missing the point. You're so bound up in the idea that we get paid for something we don't deserve, you're simply refusing to see that we're actually providing services and software for which we NEVER get paid.
We have a contract. When you sign that contract, we say "how many eligible computers do you have?" and you are required by the terms of the contract to tell us.
If you get more computers, you don't have to tell us anything. We DON'T know you have them. We simply extend your license to cover those computers. If you install Windows on some of those computers and activate it through Windows Genuine Advantage, THEN we know you have more computers, but you still don't pay anything for them.
At the end of your contract, when you renew it, we say "how many eligible computers do you have?" and you are required by the terms of the contract to tell us. If you don't like that, you don't have to do it! We also have a different contract. For that contract, we ask "how many computers do you want to license?" instead.
So if you don't want us to know you have Linux machines, you don't have to tell us. But if you go from "we have Windows on all 300 of our machines" to "we have Windows on 300 of our machines", we can sort of figure out that you have more machines. We just don't know how many or what they're running.
> it removes any benefit of implementing
> alternative products once the agreement
> has been entered
But in the timeline I provided, the school gets to use 100 Linux machines for 2 years if they want. Isn't that enough time for them to say "hey, this is great, let's switch!" and install it on the other 300? Then they can tell us to go to hell when the contract is up.
It's all about choice. The problem with choice is that when you suck, people don't choose you. And that's why you want to FORCE your school to use what YOU give them, instead of giving them the choice. We give them the choice.
I haven't made any technical review of the DRM in Vista, but if you could remove it easily, you could bypass it easily. For it to be effective, you'd need to tightly intertwine it with critical O/S components, such that if you take out the DRM nothing works anymore.
> A game that uses OpenGL in both platforms,
> Windows and Linux, is faster on Linux
Since the Linux kernel does not do as much as the Windows kernel (not in any way a value judgement), this is to be expected. More CPU and memory bandwidth are available to the game under Linux. This type of benchmark is shortsighted.
> with the Aero GUI, I think Microsoft tries
> to copy Mac OS X.
Translucent windows under X have been developed competently by at least four different teams before OSX. The feature is commonly requested and frequently attempted. Usually, people decide it's not worth the CPU hit. OSX and Vista are the first systems which have implemented this feature through hardware acceleration. Neither invented the idea. Neither is in any way visionary or brilliant for saying "hey, let's use this 3D hardware, then maybe performance won't be teh suck".
> The Linux world is the Unix world.
And it's not the Windows world. We did 16-bit platforms when you people were laughing at us and saying "get a real computer". You don't get to bitch about it now that we've pushed you off most of your own home field.
> Linux is still more difficult than Windows.
And if you start looking at where the Linux experience has traditionally surpassed Windows, you notice that its lead is disappearing a *lot* faster than it's catching up to Windows on usability.
> If the definition of "objectively shit" for
> software is that one person has major issues
> with it,
No, the definition of "objectively shit" for software is that it takes clearly inappropriate actions. If I execute a command in a piece of software, it should either do what I said, or do nothing. It should not do something else. It may optionally ASK me if I *intended* to do something else, but this should be an exceedingly rare occurrence.
This is why EMACS is shit. The command set has no enforced standard. Any given command may do anything on a given installation of EMACS.
> Text editors edit code, but they don't have all
> the features of code editors.
Which is precisely why I don't compare EMACS to vi. They aren't the same thing. EMACS is a programmer's editor. It has been designed as a programmer's editor. Its purpose is to edit code. This is not what vi is designed to do; vi is designed to edit text. It is, however, what Visual Studio is designed to do. So while it is not appopriate to compare EMACS to vi, it is entirely appropriate to compare it to Visual Studio.
> I ASKED at the very beginning if this was
> a vi vs emacs thing.
See above. You cannot productively compare EMACS to vi any more than you can productively compare a Ferrari to an Oldsmobile.
> I asked several times if you could name a
> better console text editor than emacs, and
> you never mentioned vi.
No, I mentioned Xedit, which you completely ignored. See above again; when asked to name a better car than a Ferrari, nobody in his right mind names Oldsmobile. The standards are different.
> You don't seem to know how to debate. If
> program X is shit, then give specifics as to
> why, and give examples of similar programs that
> are not shit.
I've done this. Claiming I didn't is just bullshit. Bullshit is not valid debate. I therefore submit that I'm not the one who doesn't know how to debate.
> Vista helps the media companies take my rights away.
You don't have any right to watch Talladega Nights in HD.
That right is owned by a media company. That company licenses this right to you on a temporary and contingent basis when you pay a fee. One of the conditions of that license is a working DRM implementation. By law, if you do not have a working DRM implementation, your license is invalid and you still have no right to watch it.
By providing DRM, Microsoft *enables* your rights. Nothing is taken away, because you do not have anything in the first place. There is no legal alternative.
> My actions are completely, 100% consistent - and yet
> it seems to upset you.
What upsets me is that we have a broken body of international law that prevents us from doing anything other than what we've done, and yet somehow you think boycotting our product is going to accomplish something.
> Games that run on both, Windows and Linux, run faster on Linux.
;)
OpenGL runs faster than Direct3D. A lot faster. Some people say this is because OpenGL is more elegant and efficient; some say it's because Direct3D is doing a lot more. I think both of these statements are correct because it's a causal relation: OpenGL is more elegant and efficient because it doesn't do as much.
> So, by your saying, Microsoft is always ahead, right?
Yes, if you're just copying what we do. Since we do it before you copy it, and copying it takes nonzero time, we have a nonzero time to keep moving. Mathematically, you can never catch up, because you don't know what to copy until we release it.
As far as your list goes, why don't we copy the Linux world more? Because... well, we don't want to. We do things when they're a good idea, not when someone else does them.
> The bussiness using FOSS are copying another company
> using FOSS?
No, no, NO.
When a company has proprietary software, and someone says "make it open source", that company frequently says "but our competition would steal it".
That argument is STUPID, and there are probably HUNDREDS of places online that will explain exactly why. You can even find an answer in the FAQ on the OSI web site. ESR's CATB covers it in more detail.
> This quote of yours reminds me of those
> people thinking that Windows is their
> computer. First of, there are Linux
> distributions that you can get at no cost
I'm talking about 100% Windows-compatible software, just like 100% IBM-compatible hardware. Linux isn't 100% Windows-compatible. If you want to compete with Windows, you can't do "everything Windows does". You have to do something different and call it better. You can't JUST be a copy. You have to be more than that.
Linux isn't even remotely a copy of Windows. It's a copy of UNIX, which is a whole different thing. That *is* a good business strategy for competing with Windows.
Well, except for the part where it sucks, but you guys are working on that - right?
> I won't have an operating system tell me what
> I am and am not allowed to do with my computer
We're not telling you that. The disc is telling you. We're just handing you the message. You're effectively saying "I'm not going to have some postman tell me what I do and don't get in the mail". The postman isn't in charge of that. It's simply not rational to pressure him about the matter, because he can't control what you get in the mail. No matter how large and strong and united your effort is, it can't accomplish anything this way.
> I'm not going to give up my rights just because
> "I shouldn't make Microsoft suffer."
You're boycotting the wrong thing. I don't care if you boycott Vista; like you say, we won't suffer. But the statement you're trying to make isn't being made when you boycott Vista. If you want to make that statement, you have to boycott the HD disc formats and players.
I'm certainly mightily amused that this incorporates "don't buy a PS3", since it has a built-in Blu-Ray drive, but that's honestly not a motivator. It also incorporates "don't buy Microsoft's HD-DVD peripheral for the XBox 360", and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't, or even neglect to say that in the hope people won't notice it. If you have a problem with DRM - and I sure as hell do - make that statement to the people who are using it. DRM needs to die, and we need to kill it.
But boycotting Vista won't do that. If you want to boycott Vista, do it honestly, for a reason that actually has something to do with Vista. (Like, say, WGA. Not that I dislike WGA, but I know a lot of people here who do.) If DRM is the problem, go boycott something that *has* DRM. All we do is tell you about it.
> As in Windows copying the Apple interface?
The interface is not the whole application. There's this stuff called "code" underneath it.
> YAMS (Yet Another Microsoft Shill)
I work here, dumbass. Read the whole thread next time.
> Your inability to figure out how to use it/uninstall it does
> not make it objectively shit.
Actually, it does. I've been using software for over thirty years. If my experience isn't sufficient to use and uninstall your software, your software is objectively shit. If your software tells me it's uninstalled when it really isn't, your software is objectively shit. If I open a bug that I have personally observed and you close it as "bogus", your software is objectively shit.
> Yes, words mean things. By IN the console, I meant in the console.
You didn't say in the console. You said from the console. Check your post.
> Why are you bringing up code editors when I'm talking about text editors?
Because code is text, so every code editor is a variety of text editor. EMACS also contains a vast number of features designed explicitly for the editing of code, so if code editors aren't under consideration, then EMACS doesn't exist.
You're not very smart, are you?
> emacs and vi are the best, so I don't know how you say they're shit
I didn't say vi was shit. I said EMACS is shit. I like vi.
> Maybe you think working with a console is shit.
No, I think working with shit is shit. I've probably spent more time working with consoles than you've spent breathing.
> obviously Microsoft decided that for now,
> it's better for them to go along
What do you think the valid alternative would be? An operating system that can't play HD content at all, or an operating system that plays HD content illegally? One of those sucks, and the other lands us in court.
There's really not a whole lot of choice here.
> What's that saying about first impressions...
Something I've been on about myself. Can't be helped, though. *sigh* Sometimes there's just no way to do things nicely; it doesn't matter how polite you are with your error dialogs, they still *look* like they say "You're Stupid" with an "I Know" button.
> I refuse to be told how I am allowed to use
> the things I own
PLEASE put the blame in the right place on this.
The media conglomerates are trying to tell you what you can do with your HD-DVDs. When Vista sees a "bad" media path, it ASKS the DVD what it should do, and the DVD tells it. It's the DVD that says "don't play me!" or "make me look like crap!", and all Vista does is obey the command it's been given.
We *have* to do that. If we don't do what the DVD says to do, we're not allowed to play it; DMCA, and all that rot. The only thing we've done is set up a system that lets you play HD-DVDs legally on a suitably validated signal path.
If you want to make someone suffer over this, Microsoft aren't the right people. It's the media companies who are trying to shove this particular turd into the market and tell you it's chocolate. Boycotting Vista isn't going to send them a message; boycotting HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs sends that message.
I don't expect this to happen, because people care a lot more about watching "Jackass 2" at 1080p than they do about their rights. Ultimately, most of the people who care about the rights will try to get the best of both worlds by ripping and burning all their HD content... but since they can't really say this out loud, the rest of the world will think they bought it, and go out to Best Buy to pick up their own copy. Meanwhile, the people who suffer first are the ones who care about our rights AND the law, and in the end we all lose.
> Didn't you just say a couple of posts ago that
> software developers don't copy because copying
> is bad for business?
No, I said that copying your competitor's entire application was a bad business strategy. If you don't see the difference, you really ought to stop having this conversation.
> if a program's features are being copied that
> the program isn't total shit
It doesn't matter how much treasure you bury in your shit, it's still shit. Recovering the treasure doesn't in any way express admiration of your shit.
> what is Firefox shit compared to?
It's *objectively* shit. I hate it. It keeps hijacking MIME types, refusing to let me change the default browser, running after I've uninstalled it, TRYING to run after I've manually deleted the executable... if I hadn't experienced it, I wouldn't believe it. You probably don't.
> I don't know of any text editors with macros
Amusingly, vim has them. However, for serious programmable macros, you might want to check out Visual SlickEdit, which - like EMACS - has its very own language. Unlike ELISP, SlickC is based on C syntax, which most programmers already know.
> name one text editor that has more features than
> emacs that can be run from the console
The Visual Studio IDE. Unlike EMACS, which uses a toy language for its scripting and extensibility, VS allows you to write extensions in full-blown C++, VB, and C#.
It doesn't run IN the console, but you can run it FROM the console. Is that not what you meant? Details, details, details. Words mean things.
> Can you even name another console text editor?
XEdit. IBM 370 era editor on VM/CMS mainframes. Frequently used to write COBOL. Used REXX as the scripting language.
> at the time DOS was a toy, and Windows 3.x doubly so
Yes, which is why Windows 95 had no effective competition. And your point was...?
> Do you not think that having the application stack as
> well as the API (Win16/32) is not a conflict of interest?
I don't think it's a conflict of interest when a company writes applications for its own operating system. In fact, I think it's NECESSARY, so the company can ensure its API is actually sensible.
> other than the natural network effects
I think the effects you notice with Microsoft are also natural network effects, but that the network is massively large and therefore the effect is massively magnified. The same effects occur with other products, but the network is so small many effects are lost in the noise.
> So you are admitting that Microsoft receives payment for
> services or products rendered by another entity.
No we're not. Look at this timeline.
2005 - School buys 3-year Windows license for 300 PCs.
2006 - You give the school 100 Linux PCs. The school immediately receives 100 Windows licenses for them under the terms of the School Agreement, but PAYS NOTHING. This is Microsoft providing a service. The school does not have to use the licenses unless they want to. But they do. So they will.
2007 - The school gets Vista upgrade licenses for all *400* PCs and does not pay one red cent. This is Microsoft providing software. The school does not have to upgrade anything unless they want to. But they do. So they will.
2008 - Agreement expires. The school may now choose whether to license 300 or 400 PCs for Windows. If they decide to license 300, they switch to Academic Select and pay only for the 300 they want licensed. If they decide to license all 400, they can stay on the School Agreement and pay for all 400. And that's what they'll do.
Notice that the school always gets to choose what they want to do with all 400 computers, and is never forced to pay Microsoft anything for the new ones. In fact, if they like Linux enough, they can at any point decide to install Linux on all 400 machines and not renew the Microsoft license at all.
But they won't. They'll decide all on their own to turn your Linux contribution into another hundred Windows boxes. And when the renewal term comes up, they'll license all 400. We don't have to *make* them do it; they *want* to do it.
Your failure to understand why does not indicate any conspiracy or malfeasance.
> Because of this, most people no longer bother.
;)
Then no matter how long we give them, no alternative will arrive. That's pretty much what I said.
> Innovation is having a flash of insight and
> creating something totally new.
How big does that something have to be before it counts? Look at Office 2007. On the one hand, we've just changed the way the toolbars and menus work. On the other, nothing else has ever worked that way, and it radically alters the way you interact with the applications. We even license this technology to our partners so they can use it in their products. Is that still just incremental?
> Then how to you explain Windows' continual copying
> of IBM's CUA interface standards on the Windows
> desktop?
I'm talking about copying someone else's product when you don't have one. It's a whole different thing when you copy a feature from one application into another application; sometimes that's the same kind of dead-end road, but more frequently it's just a recognition that someone else has already invented this particular wheel and there's no real way to dramatically improve on it. I don't think anyone NEEDS to write an AVL tree implementation from scratch anymore, and I don't think anyone who does is going to make any breakthroughs.
> Sweeping statements about licensing methodologies
> are rarely accurate
The inaccuracy of the statement is sort of the point. When a company claims its competitors will copy its products if it goes open source, that company is using a wrongheaded argument, because copying another company's products is not a competitive advantage. Quite the contrary.
> All free OSes have to do
My original point still stands: if that's all you have to do, why haven't you done it?
> reproduce the API that applications use to get at
> system services. The complete reproduction of the
> Windows kernel, etc., is not a requirement.
It is if you're serious about compatibility. Your alternative operating system isn't really an alternative unless I can run my library of Windows software on it; I have thousands of dollars invested in that software. Reproducing the API requires that your underlying system internals meet certain requirements, and those requirements cascade. By the time your alternative kernel can accurately and reliably load arbitrary Windows device drivers with comparable performance to Windows, it can be productively argued that for all intents and purposes it IS the Windows kernel.
You just can't call it that, because of trademark and the army of lawyers in Redmond.
I'd like to talk to your brother-in-law. Without more understanding of his concerns, I can't really address them. If he's got that many problems with it, and I don't, one of us is very very wrong. It's best for everyone involved - him, me, Microsoft, and the end user - if we start looking at how to fix it.
I'm at the north end of building 26, lab 3117. If he's not on the Redmond campus, he can type "darklock" into the campus directory and get me on Communicator or email.
I suspect he just doesn't understand the business motivation for certain decisions. Testers tend to get very focused on the technical questions, and lose sight of the overall project objectives.
> Firefox was lightyears better than IE 6
Nice and warm in there, is it?
> IE 7 blatantly copied the best features of Firefox
Web browsing is a commodity activity. Eventually, all the browsers are going to be functionally identical. That's normal. It's why Firefox stole those features from Opera in the first place. Remember when frames were the killer feature of Netscape Navigator (not that anyone used them) and AJAX was the killer feature of IE (not that anyone used it) and stylesheets were the killer feature of Opera (not that anyone used them)? I do. Don't lecture me on browser history unless you know what you're talking about.
> It doesn't really have any competitors
There are a great many text editors for a great many platforms which have extensive scripting and macro capabilities.
> Are you trying to say that emacs sucks because
> it doesn't do what Word does?
No, I'm trying to say that it sucks because it sucks.
And just to rub Tom Christiansen's nose in it, I note you make no assertion that Perl doesn't suck.
> Surely you can see the difference?
The difference between competitive and power-hungry is largely about whether you think the loser DESERVED to lose.
I think the loser always deserves to lose. I think that in the vast majority of cases, enough that you can effectively pretend it's ALL cases, the loser loses because of something the loser has done wrong or failed to do altogether.
It is very rarely - almost never - because of anything the winner has done particularly right. It is simply that the winner connected all of the dots without getting them out of order.
But for precisely this reason, it is entirely as valid to say that the winner DID NOT DESERVE TO WIN. In the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, these people would claim that the tortoise cheated. He won by default; the hare wasn't running. If the hare ran, the tortoise would have lost. The race was not fair.
And when you couple this with the idea that nobody deserves to lose, which isn't an uncommon viewpoint among hippies and liberals and the people who run the Special Olympics, you start thinking that the winner is always some kind of villain. After all, the loser didn't deserve to lose, and the winner didn't deserve to win. That's pretty much the definition of "cheating", isn't it? Unfortunately, it's true no matter who wins. Once you accept this idea, EVERYONE who wins by definition cheated to do so. The idea of competition becomes unacceptable. You effectively become a Marxist.
It's all in your perspective. Start looking at what Microsoft's competition did wrong or didn't do at all; the question isn't quite as cut and dried. Most of the time, they were sleeping under a tree and we just wandered past.
False analogy. I'm talking about something which is intended to be a cheaper but otherwise identical alternative. What you're discussing is cheaper and completely different.
Furthermore, Firefox, Perl, and EMACS *are* awful. They're like big pools of warm shit; once you're deep enough in them, you forget they're shit and just happily enjoy how warm they are.
If you use Vista for a couple weeks, long enough that:
...the UAC dialogs go away almost entirely. I haven't seen one on my dev box in weeks.
1. All of your software is installed
2. All of your devices are configured
3. All of your personal preferences are set
That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. I'm also rather worried that so many people who are, apparently, considered qualified to review software in this industry - can't seem to figure out that the first week or two on a new system IS NOT NORMAL USAGE.
Disclosure: I'm a contractor working on Vista at Microsoft.
;)
> What you see here is Microsoft slowly boiling frogs.
You know that doesn't work, right? The frog eventually does jump out of the water. If you extend the analogy to consumers, raising the heat too much does in fact make them leave.
> If Microsoft didn't keep introducing new APIs
> [...] people would gradually come up with
> viable compatibles for DirectX9 and Windows XP.
Wasn't five years long enough? XP came out in 2001, DX9 in 2002, why couldn't the industry produce compatible alternatives over that five year period? Doesn't it seem reasonable to conclude that a market which couldn't produce alternatives in five years is not going to produce them at all?
Microsoft are constantly innovating. A day doesn't go by that we don't have thousands of people looking at our products and saying "how do we make this better?" - because that's our job. That's not going to stop. Even if we wait ten years to produce an upgrade, we're going to be innovating and improving for that entire ten years. So if the industry does happen to produce a clone of our current generation, we just have to look back and find the last RTM-quality build. Then we dump it on the market, and your alternative immediately becomes obsolete. You may as well have never had one at all.
Copying other people is a road to failure. It doesn't lead anywhere else. It's the major reason companies don't want to go open source, because their competition could copy them more easily, and the open source community has a huge body of very intelligent explanations as to why this reason is STUPID. Copying doesn't work. It's a bad business model. It doesn't serve consumers.
Besides, why would I buy a cheap copy of Windows instead of the real thing? After all, you get what you pay for - or, more precisely, you pay for what you get. What am I not getting when I buy this cheap Windows clone? Clearly I'm not getting SOMETHING, or it would cost the same.
> hardly anyone listens to me
I'm listening. I have roughly the influence of a hemorrhoid, but I'm still listening.
> WordPerfect wasn't tied to one OS, wasn't developed
> by a platform developer to tie in to the OS
Word was available for the Mac before Windows was even released.
> why was Windows forever tied to the previous OSes?
Because Microsoft was tied to previous customers who were often tied to thousands of dollars in existing software written for a previous O/S.
> why couldn't the win32api libraries be developed over
> top of a POSIX layer
What's wrong with "Services For Unix"? Granted, it's exactly the opposite - a POSIX layer over top of the Win32 API - but seriously, what's wrong with it?
> You may hate the idea of people not locking their
> applications/data to a particular OS, but that's what
> a lot of us users find handy.
That's inaccurate. I happen to NOT HATE the idea of people LOCKING applications/data to a particular O/S. I agree it's not the greatest thing they could do. I agree it would be better if the applications/data weren't locked. But I do not think failure to do the best possible thing is evil or hateful or even undesirable.
> you don't care what anyone says if it doesn't come in
> a format that recognizes your ignorance?
This is how communication works. You have something to send, and you want me to receive it. So you choose a protocol that both sides understand.
When someone sends me a StarOffice document, he has chosen the wrong protocol. He has done this, not because he doesn't speak Microsoft Office, but because he wants me to speak StarOffice. StarOffice can, after all, produce documents in several formats that Microsoft Office can open - so his choice of a format it CANNOT open is deliberate. He wants me to install StarOffice.
So it is, in effect, a remote code execution exploit. And I refuse those on principle, just like unsigned ActiveX controls and invitations to punch the monkey.
> Well I'm writing this with Firefox, in Gentoo Linux.
And look, it opens great in IE7 on Vista. Isn't interoperability great?
But if it didn't, I wouldn't read it. You're some random guy on the internet. What you say may be very smart and insightful and interesting, but it's not important. I don't NEED to read it any more than you NEED me to read it.
Now, if my manager sends me an important document in StarOffice format, that's another matter. That isn't going to happen here at Microsoft. It never happened when I was working anywhere else, either - except when I was running my own company on "no Microsoft software EVER for ANYTHING", and I sent out important documents in StarOffice format, and then I would get them back with messages saying "WTF, use MS Office".
So I did. You can't run a company doing things your customers hate. It leads to bankruptcy. I flushed about $75,000 down the toilet fighting the good fight on the open source front lines, and then I figured out that you people honestly don't care about me. You don't care if my business succeeds. You don't care if my work gets done. You don't care if my rent gets paid. You only care that I don't use Microsoft products. And that's a pretty sick culture.