You're misrepresenting their pretty public postings on VM hosting. The guest numbers are how many VMs of Windows Server you're allowed to run virtually on the same box you licensed. Standard means you get one physical + one virtual. Enterprise is one physical and four virtual. Datacenter is one physical and unlimited virtual. Anonymous Datacenter is a special SKU used for SPLAs, that is, it's something Amazon might use to host their Windows guests, or RackSpace, or whoever. It gives them the ability to run as many VMs as they want, but not as part of their network.
Your post is pure FUD. I can run a hundred Ubuntu Server VMs on Server Standard, not limited to "one guest" or "four guests" or any of this nonsense.
So to summarize: Windows Server licensing only applies to Windows Server, and Hyper-V can run dozens or hundreds of guests on any edition. In fact, Hyper-V Server is free and supports clustering, high availability and live migration, and optionally can be joined to a AD Domain and managed through that infrastructure. Windows Server licensing with Hyper-V gives you 1...n virtual instances you can run on the same box as virtual machines. On Standard it's 1, on Enterprise it's 4, on Datacenter it's unlimited. That only applies to Windows Server.
The price points are intelligently set as well. If you plan on running more than 2 VMs of Windows Server, it's more cost effective to get Enterprise. If you plan on running more than 4 VMs of Windows Server per processor, it's more cost effective to get Datacenter.
Using those simple guidelines, let's say you have four dual Xeon 5500 boxes. On one you just want domain controller, no VMs. On one you want to run a dozen VMs of Windows Server, and on the other two you want to run fifty VMs of Slackware.
Buy 1x Windows Server Standard, 2x Server Datacenter (for your two processors), and then on the other box put Hyper-V Server for free, store the images on a SAN for high availability.
The modified driver model was set in stone about two years before Vista's release. This was all verified information. You could boot the early milestones of Longhorn very early on and get limited graphics and sound support from beta drivers.
Yet by the time of the release date, Nvidia, Creative Labs, and a half dozen other companies had such severe issues that they collectively caused the vast majority of bluescreens reported. Realtek, Creative, Nvidia and others were all publicly shamed into providing better support, and were dragged kicking and screaming into providing decent drivers.
Creative for example used Windows Vista as an opportunity to deny people access to features on their cards and sell people the same card over again, but with the features enabled.
Your other complaints are valid, but poor driver support is not one of them. They told everyone the spec and gave the hardware folks earlier and more frequent builds than anyone else.
No, there's no IPv6 access because they don't have an IPv6 router. Duh.
I get the same thing on Windows 7 Super Premium Edition, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Ultra Awesome Edition. Because we don't have IPv6 routing, we have no internet access. Seems simple enough to me.:/
When Windows says "IPv4 Connectivity: Internet", they're serious. You can access, or at least appear to be able to access the internet using that connection. No network access means you can't reach the internet and it's unsure that it's configured correctly. You can still ping anything locally using link-local IPv6, or set up teredo, or do half a dozen other things to enable IPv6.
The only reason I think we should have an IPvX, or an extensible standard that allows longer strings, is that you never know what people will use it for in the future. Anticipating future needs and then saying "This is good enough, forever" has never, ever worked. And people have said largely the same thing about every past technology.
Who would ever need four billion addresses? Only COMPUTERS will be using them and only universities and big businesses have those!
Huh? Windows Server 2008 starts around $850 and you own it, and the SA is around $150. Or you can pay $350 for three years and then $150 for every year after that. You can use whoever's cluster management you want. If you want more features, step it up to Enterprise. If you want unlimited VMs, step that up to Datacenter (at a hefty cost, but you get unlimited supported VMs on the server.)
Windows on the desktop is around $200 if you want to buy it outright, or about $100 annually for support.
Your incidents is based on the quantity of your licenses, and you do get hotfixes and premium support if Microsoft is at fault. And they do follow through on this. If it bluescreens and it's a Windows driver, they consider that a serious matter and one that you won't be dinged for as a support incident.
Frankly, I've never had to use a support incident for Windows or Windows Server. Any competent IT or developer should be able to figure it out, and being the most popular desktop OS makes it pretty easy to find fixes. I have called Microsoft support on their other products, and they were fast, escalated the issue quickly and took care of the problem. No support incident was incurred, no charge, no bill or invoice delivered.
Fault them in many ways, like most large businesses they aren't there for your benefit. They're there for their benefit. But providing support to businesses that few people complain about is clearly in their best interest.
Oh, and for a comparison, Red Hat Desktop with premium support is three times the price of Windows Enterprise (the one with all the bells and whistles.) And frankly, offering "unlimited incidents" with a two day turnaround time and no way to directly talk to someone is a joke. The Red Hat Server editions with premium support are right around where the Windows Server prices are for different SKUs.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization isn't even funny. It's $750/socket for 24x7 phone support, per year. Hyper-V is free. Xen is free. KVM is free. ESXi is free. If you don't want Hyper-V without support, buy Windows Server Standard, it's $350 a year for the same support, and it's per server. You don't get dinged by the processor. If you're going to pay through the nose, you better be getting VMWare because at least they have the crazy advanced feature-set to back it up.
Anyhow, that's just the perspective from a midsized (i.e.: tiny and insignificant compared to the big boys) business.
Add ADP's online timeclock solution to the list of idiotic web applications. It's just a dumb site with a button that you click on to click in and clock out, and they only support Firefox + IE and filter everything else by user agent. Google Chrome works fine, as does every other browser in the past decade, I'm sure.
Careful, DMCA also provides for safe harbor provisions. If we strike down the DMCA completely without replacing it, you can kiss Youtube, Slashdot, and every other user-contribution based site goodbye.
I could post the first ten pages of a book on Slashdot and they would be legally liable.
The issue is that Intel has been slowly but surely changing the licensing on everything so that no one else will have the IP rights to put something on a motherboard with an Intel CPU, or at the very least ensuring that they have to go through a route of Intel's choosing.
For example, Nvidia can't utilize QPI or DMI, and make an enthusiast chip for the Lynnfield, Bloomfield or Clarkdale chips so far. And they won't be able to do so for Arrandale in Q1 2010, Gulftown in H1, or other new designs later on.
The goal is that they will own everything on your motherboard. And they will do a lot of dirty things to do it. If you haven't heard about the extent of Intel's abuse of monopoly, I suggest you research it. They've engaged in practices far worse than anything Slashdot has accused Microsoft of, IMO.
Moreover, Microsoft seems to earnestly care about putting the geekiest of the geeks in charge of their language development. They have quite a few functional programmers who have a significant say in the future of languages like F#, and continue to produce great libraries for the CLR.
And now of course, IronPython is a dream scripting language that's incredibly easy to host and entirely open source to boot.
I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right. It worked, and Java lost, despite having done so many things right first, and having nailed cross-platform application and service design. Or at least, Java is in the process of losing.
Is it? Richard Stallman wants a world in which "free" code is placed on a pedestal above all other code, and that users should be warned when their actions will result in the execution of any code that isn't "free" according to his standards.
I believe what I did was apply something called the "Socratic method" to his argument, in asking the argument he made against non-free code running on the browser.
You see, whether the code runs because your browser pressed the right buttons and got the result back from the web farm, or whether the javascript does the same thing locally is purely semantic. Either way, your browser interacted with their server to process data and execute an algorithm. The algorithm is one that you may or may not totally know, and therefore, even if the javascript is all "free," the algorithm itself is not.
But the algorithm for determining the results of any arbitrary action on a website can, and often does go all the way back to their private, internal database--where techniques like dynamic programming in stored procedures can sometimes be regrettably necessary for good performance. So truly, without fully publishing the entirety of their data, one cannot know whether or not your interaction is free or not, whether you're participating in the execution of a free program or not.
In my opinion, this is an exhibit of the lunacy that is RMS' version of the free movement.
Why stop at Javascript? Users computers are causing code to be executed on websites with SOAP and WS-* APIs! How DARE the website expose an API that's non-free. There should be standards for that sort of thing! Why, browsers should detect and warn the user that they are viewing a website designed with a non-free API for user operations. And what about the server? If they publish the PHP, the ASP.NET, the Ruby, the whatever, you can't run it without the server and its configuration!
And the database! *coughing, out of breath wheezing* The stored procedures and queries that are invariably executed as a result of the external API are non-free as well! And they perform actions defined by the site's owner, not the user, against their will or better judgement! And some of these queries even rely on data in the database themselves!
Why, I'm going to take this information to my bank right now and demand their internal database and the source code for all of the interfaces between me and it! Or at the very least my browser should tell me that I might, I just might be doing something, somewhere, that relies on non-free code!
You're seriously calling someone a censor for expressing the view that RMS is batshit crazy and a detriment to any projects he has a voice in, in a public forum?
Apparently if you keep typing after you hit preview, decide it wasn't worth keeping, and then the preview comes up sans your just typed text, and then you hit submit... You get the just typed text too.
Viva la Slashcode.
Anyhow, I might as well finish my sentence.
"If it's unfair to alternative vendors of X, then that's their shitty luck, they will have to compete with free on Windows just like they have to compete with free on Mac, or on Linux."
If Microsoft hadn't crushed the market, there might be more money, blah blah blah.
We can go all day. The point is, if the EU is applying these regulations evenly, Microsoft would be unable to do anything with its OS except provide a kernel. And even then, if they added new functions to the kernel (as they have with every release), the EU would have to mandate that the kernel installed be selected based on a ballot.
At this point, the EU (or rather, the EC) is insane. Microsoft achieved substantial market share. They won that market share by being the best, longest lasting, most well supported product. It's a combination. Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility, Linux has, for a long time, lacked paid support outside of hiring a "Linux guy". They won their position, or at least, they won the business and market share they achieved.
Now what? Is it really the duty of the European Commission to make sure that it's illegal for Microsoft to provide substantive enhancements or additional software with their OS, which all of their competitors are doing? How is that fair?
I use Chrome and VLC, not IE and Media Player. So it's not like I use their software. IMO, Microsoft shouldn't have to participate in a "ballot" for any software any of the other vendors in the top 5 offer. If Apple is giving away X with their OS, Microsoft should be able to compete with that. That's only fair. If it's unfair to alternative vendors of X, then that's their shitty luck,
I lack the statistics, but I'm confident the market share for third party text editors is far smaller than for third party browsers. So by all the definitions the EU has used, the current text editor developers have all been harmed by the mega-corporation Microsoft and should be compensated.
I guess that means there'll be a new ballot screen.
Isn't everything Microsoft includes in their OS damaging to competing markets?
I mean, and this isn't even hypothetical, if no Notepad came with Windows, there'd be many, dozens of alternatives with marginally more features. This was the case even when Windows just came out, that applications with hardly more features were on the market. I don't know about the state of calculators, but certainly Notepad and Wordpad killed an entire marketplace.
If Microsoft in a future version of Windows adds an Expose like functionality, or a virtual desktop functionality (like Mac's "Spaces", or Linux' typically built in virtual desktop functionality) will they be abusing their monopoly? Why? Both of their two largest competitors have those feature built in. What about search? Including decent search in Vista, and even better search in Windows 7 killed at least a handful of worse search engines. Heck, even Google Desktop was pretty significantly hurt by the release of Vista, as poor as the reception was. Windows 7 improves on the indexing and search, and goes further and adds search federation. Is that abusing their monopoly?
This is the problem. Microsoft produces an operating system and desktop environment. What people EXPECT in other operating systems and desktop environments far exceeds what the average Slashdotter would admit should be legal for Microsoft to include. When I run Mac OS X, I expect a lot, ditto with Linux. Yet, for Microsoft to even come close to feature parity would be many, many lawsuits waiting to happen.
I make a competing calculator app. I want mine included in Windows. I feel like my calculator app has more features, greater standards support, and provides more functions.
I also make a competing notepad, sticky note, media player, web browser, desktop shell, icon set, sound theme, etc.
There should be twenty ballots before the user can start Windows. Clearly, Windows has hurt my marketshare in numerous areas. I should be subsidized by the government and people should have to pick between five different calculators, five different shells, five different notepads, etc. It's only fair.
P.S.: I also make a separate kernel, and I think it's unfair that Windows users are forced to use the NT kernel, not to mention the userland.
With a side of Barrelfish, which is released under a BSD style license, if the academic, non-commercial license of Singularity left a sour taste in his mouth.
I like to think of Microsoft Research as the pure heart to Microsoft's seething, burning exterior. Occasionally, perhaps by mistake, they let Microsoft Research produce something good and beautiful, and strangely, free.
No, Vi is definitely harder. I opened it up one day and attempted to write a little parallel application that used neural networks to synergize with the corporate data stream, but I couldn't figure out how.
I opened up Emacs and it was just C-x Meta-e Quasi-butterfly and it was done. I didn't even know I had a butterfly key.
Lucky day for you, Visual C++ express is free, if you wanted to take it for a spin.
Yeah, you can buy it, but buying Visual Studio from Microsoft is for chumps. You either use the express if you're new, or you requisition it at work.:)... Come to think of it, that applies to a lot more Microsoft stuff than just Visual Studio.
Slashdot Mirror
You're misrepresenting their pretty public postings on VM hosting. The guest numbers are how many VMs of Windows Server you're allowed to run virtually on the same box you licensed. Standard means you get one physical + one virtual. Enterprise is one physical and four virtual. Datacenter is one physical and unlimited virtual. Anonymous Datacenter is a special SKU used for SPLAs, that is, it's something Amazon might use to host their Windows guests, or RackSpace, or whoever. It gives them the ability to run as many VMs as they want, but not as part of their network.
Your post is pure FUD. I can run a hundred Ubuntu Server VMs on Server Standard, not limited to "one guest" or "four guests" or any of this nonsense.
So to summarize: Windows Server licensing only applies to Windows Server, and Hyper-V can run dozens or hundreds of guests on any edition. In fact, Hyper-V Server is free and supports clustering, high availability and live migration, and optionally can be joined to a AD Domain and managed through that infrastructure. Windows Server licensing with Hyper-V gives you 1...n virtual instances you can run on the same box as virtual machines. On Standard it's 1, on Enterprise it's 4, on Datacenter it's unlimited. That only applies to Windows Server.
The price points are intelligently set as well. If you plan on running more than 2 VMs of Windows Server, it's more cost effective to get Enterprise. If you plan on running more than 4 VMs of Windows Server per processor, it's more cost effective to get Datacenter.
Using those simple guidelines, let's say you have four dual Xeon 5500 boxes. On one you just want domain controller, no VMs. On one you want to run a dozen VMs of Windows Server, and on the other two you want to run fifty VMs of Slackware.
Buy 1x Windows Server Standard, 2x Server Datacenter (for your two processors), and then on the other box put Hyper-V Server for free, store the images on a SAN for high availability.
Why would we have to run Datacenter if we have more than one Windows guest?
Do you have anything to back that up?
The modified driver model was set in stone about two years before Vista's release. This was all verified information. You could boot the early milestones of Longhorn very early on and get limited graphics and sound support from beta drivers.
Yet by the time of the release date, Nvidia, Creative Labs, and a half dozen other companies had such severe issues that they collectively caused the vast majority of bluescreens reported. Realtek, Creative, Nvidia and others were all publicly shamed into providing better support, and were dragged kicking and screaming into providing decent drivers.
Creative for example used Windows Vista as an opportunity to deny people access to features on their cards and sell people the same card over again, but with the features enabled.
Your other complaints are valid, but poor driver support is not one of them. They told everyone the spec and gave the hardware folks earlier and more frequent builds than anyone else.
No, there's no IPv6 access because they don't have an IPv6 router. Duh.
I get the same thing on Windows 7 Super Premium Edition, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Ultra Awesome Edition. Because we don't have IPv6 routing, we have no internet access. Seems simple enough to me. :/
When Windows says "IPv4 Connectivity: Internet", they're serious. You can access, or at least appear to be able to access the internet using that connection. No network access means you can't reach the internet and it's unsure that it's configured correctly. You can still ping anything locally using link-local IPv6, or set up teredo, or do half a dozen other things to enable IPv6.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that before.
The only reason I think we should have an IPvX, or an extensible standard that allows longer strings, is that you never know what people will use it for in the future. Anticipating future needs and then saying "This is good enough, forever" has never, ever worked. And people have said largely the same thing about every past technology.
Who would ever need four billion addresses? Only COMPUTERS will be using them and only universities and big businesses have those!
Huh? Windows Server 2008 starts around $850 and you own it, and the SA is around $150. Or you can pay $350 for three years and then $150 for every year after that. You can use whoever's cluster management you want. If you want more features, step it up to Enterprise. If you want unlimited VMs, step that up to Datacenter (at a hefty cost, but you get unlimited supported VMs on the server.)
Windows on the desktop is around $200 if you want to buy it outright, or about $100 annually for support.
Your incidents is based on the quantity of your licenses, and you do get hotfixes and premium support if Microsoft is at fault. And they do follow through on this. If it bluescreens and it's a Windows driver, they consider that a serious matter and one that you won't be dinged for as a support incident.
Frankly, I've never had to use a support incident for Windows or Windows Server. Any competent IT or developer should be able to figure it out, and being the most popular desktop OS makes it pretty easy to find fixes. I have called Microsoft support on their other products, and they were fast, escalated the issue quickly and took care of the problem. No support incident was incurred, no charge, no bill or invoice delivered.
Fault them in many ways, like most large businesses they aren't there for your benefit. They're there for their benefit. But providing support to businesses that few people complain about is clearly in their best interest.
Oh, and for a comparison, Red Hat Desktop with premium support is three times the price of Windows Enterprise (the one with all the bells and whistles.) And frankly, offering "unlimited incidents" with a two day turnaround time and no way to directly talk to someone is a joke. The Red Hat Server editions with premium support are right around where the Windows Server prices are for different SKUs.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization isn't even funny. It's $750/socket for 24x7 phone support, per year. Hyper-V is free. Xen is free. KVM is free. ESXi is free. If you don't want Hyper-V without support, buy Windows Server Standard, it's $350 a year for the same support, and it's per server. You don't get dinged by the processor. If you're going to pay through the nose, you better be getting VMWare because at least they have the crazy advanced feature-set to back it up.
Anyhow, that's just the perspective from a midsized (i.e.: tiny and insignificant compared to the big boys) business.
Add ADP's online timeclock solution to the list of idiotic web applications. It's just a dumb site with a button that you click on to click in and clock out, and they only support Firefox + IE and filter everything else by user agent. Google Chrome works fine, as does every other browser in the past decade, I'm sure.
Careful, DMCA also provides for safe harbor provisions. If we strike down the DMCA completely without replacing it, you can kiss Youtube, Slashdot, and every other user-contribution based site goodbye.
I could post the first ten pages of a book on Slashdot and they would be legally liable.
The issue is that Intel has been slowly but surely changing the licensing on everything so that no one else will have the IP rights to put something on a motherboard with an Intel CPU, or at the very least ensuring that they have to go through a route of Intel's choosing.
For example, Nvidia can't utilize QPI or DMI, and make an enthusiast chip for the Lynnfield, Bloomfield or Clarkdale chips so far. And they won't be able to do so for Arrandale in Q1 2010, Gulftown in H1, or other new designs later on.
The goal is that they will own everything on your motherboard. And they will do a lot of dirty things to do it. If you haven't heard about the extent of Intel's abuse of monopoly, I suggest you research it. They've engaged in practices far worse than anything Slashdot has accused Microsoft of, IMO.
Moreover, Microsoft seems to earnestly care about putting the geekiest of the geeks in charge of their language development. They have quite a few functional programmers who have a significant say in the future of languages like F#, and continue to produce great libraries for the CLR.
And now of course, IronPython is a dream scripting language that's incredibly easy to host and entirely open source to boot.
I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right. It worked, and Java lost, despite having done so many things right first, and having nailed cross-platform application and service design. Or at least, Java is in the process of losing.
Turns out the drones use bluetooth. Just the other day my laptop asked me to sync to one when I was put a pringles can on the antenna.
"Windows has found a MQ-9 Reaper, would you like to connect?"
At this point I was (a.) terrified and (b.) glad that somebody with some clout was going to do something about the increased crime in the area.
Defacto standards? GPL (v2 or v3)? BSD (which variant?) MIT (which variant?) CDDL? Artistic? Creative Commons (which variant?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_licenses
Pick one.
Is it? Richard Stallman wants a world in which "free" code is placed on a pedestal above all other code, and that users should be warned when their actions will result in the execution of any code that isn't "free" according to his standards.
I believe what I did was apply something called the "Socratic method" to his argument, in asking the argument he made against non-free code running on the browser.
You see, whether the code runs because your browser pressed the right buttons and got the result back from the web farm, or whether the javascript does the same thing locally is purely semantic. Either way, your browser interacted with their server to process data and execute an algorithm. The algorithm is one that you may or may not totally know, and therefore, even if the javascript is all "free," the algorithm itself is not.
But the algorithm for determining the results of any arbitrary action on a website can, and often does go all the way back to their private, internal database--where techniques like dynamic programming in stored procedures can sometimes be regrettably necessary for good performance. So truly, without fully publishing the entirety of their data, one cannot know whether or not your interaction is free or not, whether you're participating in the execution of a free program or not.
In my opinion, this is an exhibit of the lunacy that is RMS' version of the free movement.
Why stop at Javascript? Users computers are causing code to be executed on websites with SOAP and WS-* APIs! How DARE the website expose an API that's non-free. There should be standards for that sort of thing! Why, browsers should detect and warn the user that they are viewing a website designed with a non-free API for user operations. And what about the server? If they publish the PHP, the ASP.NET, the Ruby, the whatever, you can't run it without the server and its configuration!
And the database! *coughing, out of breath wheezing* The stored procedures and queries that are invariably executed as a result of the external API are non-free as well! And they perform actions defined by the site's owner, not the user, against their will or better judgement! And some of these queries even rely on data in the database themselves!
Why, I'm going to take this information to my bank right now and demand their internal database and the source code for all of the interfaces between me and it! Or at the very least my browser should tell me that I might, I just might be doing something, somewhere, that relies on non-free code!
Well, perhaps he's saying RMS needs to STFU because what he says can sometimes be detrimental to the propagation of his message?
RMS uses fear, pure and simple, to promote the most extreme parts of his message.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
I don't even know where to start, when he starts posting stuff like that.
You're seriously calling someone a censor for expressing the view that RMS is batshit crazy and a detriment to any projects he has a voice in, in a public forum?
I don't know why you would do that.
Oops, am I censor?
Apparently if you keep typing after you hit preview, decide it wasn't worth keeping, and then the preview comes up sans your just typed text, and then you hit submit... You get the just typed text too.
Viva la Slashcode.
Anyhow, I might as well finish my sentence.
"If it's unfair to alternative vendors of X, then that's their shitty luck, they will have to compete with free on Windows just like they have to compete with free on Mac, or on Linux."
If Microsoft hadn't crushed the market, there might be more money, blah blah blah.
We can go all day. The point is, if the EU is applying these regulations evenly, Microsoft would be unable to do anything with its OS except provide a kernel. And even then, if they added new functions to the kernel (as they have with every release), the EU would have to mandate that the kernel installed be selected based on a ballot.
At this point, the EU (or rather, the EC) is insane. Microsoft achieved substantial market share. They won that market share by being the best, longest lasting, most well supported product. It's a combination. Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility, Linux has, for a long time, lacked paid support outside of hiring a "Linux guy". They won their position, or at least, they won the business and market share they achieved.
Now what? Is it really the duty of the European Commission to make sure that it's illegal for Microsoft to provide substantive enhancements or additional software with their OS, which all of their competitors are doing? How is that fair?
I use Chrome and VLC, not IE and Media Player. So it's not like I use their software. IMO, Microsoft shouldn't have to participate in a "ballot" for any software any of the other vendors in the top 5 offer. If Apple is giving away X with their OS, Microsoft should be able to compete with that. That's only fair. If it's unfair to alternative vendors of X, then that's their shitty luck,
I lack the statistics, but I'm confident the market share for third party text editors is far smaller than for third party browsers. So by all the definitions the EU has used, the current text editor developers have all been harmed by the mega-corporation Microsoft and should be compensated.
I guess that means there'll be a new ballot screen.
Isn't everything Microsoft includes in their OS damaging to competing markets?
I mean, and this isn't even hypothetical, if no Notepad came with Windows, there'd be many, dozens of alternatives with marginally more features. This was the case even when Windows just came out, that applications with hardly more features were on the market. I don't know about the state of calculators, but certainly Notepad and Wordpad killed an entire marketplace.
If Microsoft in a future version of Windows adds an Expose like functionality, or a virtual desktop functionality (like Mac's "Spaces", or Linux' typically built in virtual desktop functionality) will they be abusing their monopoly? Why? Both of their two largest competitors have those feature built in. What about search? Including decent search in Vista, and even better search in Windows 7 killed at least a handful of worse search engines. Heck, even Google Desktop was pretty significantly hurt by the release of Vista, as poor as the reception was. Windows 7 improves on the indexing and search, and goes further and adds search federation. Is that abusing their monopoly?
This is the problem. Microsoft produces an operating system and desktop environment. What people EXPECT in other operating systems and desktop environments far exceeds what the average Slashdotter would admit should be legal for Microsoft to include. When I run Mac OS X, I expect a lot, ditto with Linux. Yet, for Microsoft to even come close to feature parity would be many, many lawsuits waiting to happen.
I make a competing calculator app. I want mine included in Windows. I feel like my calculator app has more features, greater standards support, and provides more functions.
I also make a competing notepad, sticky note, media player, web browser, desktop shell, icon set, sound theme, etc.
There should be twenty ballots before the user can start Windows. Clearly, Windows has hurt my marketshare in numerous areas. I should be subsidized by the government and people should have to pick between five different calculators, five different shells, five different notepads, etc. It's only fair.
P.S.: I also make a separate kernel, and I think it's unfair that Windows users are forced to use the NT kernel, not to mention the userland.
With a side of Barrelfish, which is released under a BSD style license, if the academic, non-commercial license of Singularity left a sour taste in his mouth.
I like to think of Microsoft Research as the pure heart to Microsoft's seething, burning exterior. Occasionally, perhaps by mistake, they let Microsoft Research produce something good and beautiful, and strangely, free.
No, Vi is definitely harder. I opened it up one day and attempted to write a little parallel application that used neural networks to synergize with the corporate data stream, but I couldn't figure out how.
I opened up Emacs and it was just C-x Meta-e Quasi-butterfly and it was done. I didn't even know I had a butterfly key.
Lucky day for you, Visual C++ express is free, if you wanted to take it for a spin.
Yeah, you can buy it, but buying Visual Studio from Microsoft is for chumps. You either use the express if you're new, or you requisition it at work. :) ... Come to think of it, that applies to a lot more Microsoft stuff than just Visual Studio.