The secret to any software product's success is appealling to the masses. Which masses? These ones:
The masses who bought or used the last version of the product
The masses who will buy or use a product if it has n critical changes for the next version
The masses who use a competitor's product but will gleefully throw it out if yours does it cheaper, faster, easier, better, or any combination thereof
Hint - the programmers throwing the baby out with the bathwater rarely results in a successful product - the other reply to yours about the GIMP does indeed apply quite nicely here. Why exactly did Photoshop top the Novell list of "I wish I had it on Linux"? Oh yeah. Because it does what the Adobe "Biz Guy's" (multiple levels of them, surely) discovered customers actually wanted. Otherwise you end up playing a game of telephone (surely you remember that from your childhood) as software development. Which doesn't bode well for any product's success (software or otherwise).
Unless you have direct customer feedback driving every aspect of product development, you may as well describe any modelling, specification, or design phase as GIGO.
Things to do with a Media Center:
1: PVR (I use my 2 year old Windows MCE system for this pretty much every day.
2: Music storage. Trust me - it's more convenient when the discs are in one place on one HDD, accessible from one, easy UI. No more jewel boxes or Case Logic bags...
3: DVD playback (I rarely do this with mine, since I use Media Center Extenders - which don't support DVD playback over the wire).
4: Picture storage (I haven't discovered the nirvana of using this yet, myself)
5: Video storage (see 4 - I record tons of video - but haven't made the plunge of taking it all to the HDD)
No - since it is technically OEM only, as with all other OEM versions of Windows - it's clean install, and there's no financial upgrade path (i.e. reduced price) to replacing Pro with Media Center.
NTFS source code is not available for license. Winternals (Sysinternals) also never had source code access to NTFS when NTFSDOS was developed, and still don't. NTFSDOS uses a captive NTFS driver - doesn't do anything direct to NTFS itself.
Mark doesn't have access to NT source code. Never has. This is a common misconception.
He's a technical writer, not a psychologist. Why should he write about motivations. A classic adage goes, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Steve jumped the gun in a BIG way. Microsoft's actions over time have been explained by many as being malicious. I never saw Microsoft as malicious at the coder level. Most developers at Microsoft love their jobs and could give a crap about a competitor - let alone coding in something to "cut off their air supply".
Windows sucks for the reason you have pinpointed. It is backward compatible to the point of killing itself. Compatibility code was one of the single largest attack surfaces I recall hearing about during the security code review in 2001. Windows doesn't get culled regularly for "old code" or "bad code" as those aren't binary values - those are hard things to discern in an automated fashion, so they get effectively swept under the rug. Code doesn't get removed in Windows. It just gets forgotten. Seriously.
Source is moot in this argument, as it was not used by either person. Mark does not have source code access - the poster who stated otherwise was incorrect.
I don't think I'd describe the guy who showed how to hack Windows NT Workstation into NT Server, who showed how to bypass group policy as a local limited User, and similar Windows cracks as a Microsoft apologist...
NT never ran on SPARC boxes (I'm assuming that you meant that when you said a Sun box.
Windows NT was actually first written for, and using, MIPS processors - NOT X86 (while knowing that X86 would be a destination architecture, but not the only one.
The NT family has been supported on:
- MIPS (RS4000) - (NT 3.1)
- X86 (beginning with the 386) - (NT 3.1)
- Alpha - (NT 3.1)
- PowerPC - IBM architecture, not the Mac - (NT 3.51)
- Itanic (excuse me, Itanium) - (Windows XP (5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (5.2))
- AMD64 (yeah, yeah, X64) - (Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (5.2))
There have been others developed for, but not released. In fact, the ONLY version of Windows NT that supported just one architecture was Windows 2000, which had Alpha support cut from it mid-development.
And actually, Dave Cutler, the chief architect of NT (and VMS) put(s) quite a bit of focus into architectural portability when designing NT from the beginning. You might want to learn a bit about Windows before badmouthing it in incorrect suppositions.
Also note that the Xbox 360 - which uses the NT kernel - does not run on an X86 (whereas the first one did) proving that the code portability is still quite there.
Is that the same lovely usability logic that justifies a "no mouse button" as usable?
The Media Center remote - compared to the POS that came with my DV box (Time Warner) is very usable. 6 buttons could not possibly create a usable solution if one were attempting to cram 100% of the features from Media Center into a Mac.
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Hint - the programmers throwing the baby out with the bathwater rarely results in a successful product - the other reply to yours about the GIMP does indeed apply quite nicely here. Why exactly did Photoshop top the Novell list of "I wish I had it on Linux"? Oh yeah. Because it does what the Adobe "Biz Guy's" (multiple levels of them, surely) discovered customers actually wanted. Otherwise you end up playing a game of telephone (surely you remember that from your childhood) as software development. Which doesn't bode well for any product's success (software or otherwise).
UML, shmooml...
Unless you have direct customer feedback driving every aspect of product development, you may as well describe any modelling, specification, or design phase as GIGO.
Yes. It's a shame that they haven't mastered self-debugging scripting.
Things to do with a Media Center: 1: PVR (I use my 2 year old Windows MCE system for this pretty much every day. 2: Music storage. Trust me - it's more convenient when the discs are in one place on one HDD, accessible from one, easy UI. No more jewel boxes or Case Logic bags... 3: DVD playback (I rarely do this with mine, since I use Media Center Extenders - which don't support DVD playback over the wire). 4: Picture storage (I haven't discovered the nirvana of using this yet, myself) 5: Video storage (see 4 - I record tons of video - but haven't made the plunge of taking it all to the HDD)
Go to newegg (product is right here, and you can buy it. Really. It's that simple.
No - since it is technically OEM only, as with all other OEM versions of Windows - it's clean install, and there's no financial upgrade path (i.e. reduced price) to replacing Pro with Media Center.
Not many that aren't gamer focused systems.
NTFS source code is not available for license. Winternals (Sysinternals) also never had source code access to NTFS when NTFSDOS was developed, and still don't. NTFSDOS uses a captive NTFS driver - doesn't do anything direct to NTFS itself.
Mark doesn't have access to NT source code. Never has. This is a common misconception.
He's a technical writer, not a psychologist. Why should he write about motivations. A classic adage goes, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Steve jumped the gun in a BIG way. Microsoft's actions over time have been explained by many as being malicious. I never saw Microsoft as malicious at the coder level. Most developers at Microsoft love their jobs and could give a crap about a competitor - let alone coding in something to "cut off their air supply".
Windows sucks for the reason you have pinpointed. It is backward compatible to the point of killing itself. Compatibility code was one of the single largest attack surfaces I recall hearing about during the security code review in 2001. Windows doesn't get culled regularly for "old code" or "bad code" as those aren't binary values - those are hard things to discern in an automated fashion, so they get effectively swept under the rug. Code doesn't get removed in Windows. It just gets forgotten. Seriously.
Source is moot in this argument, as it was not used by either person. Mark does not have source code access - the poster who stated otherwise was incorrect.
An important correction in your post. Mark does not, and has not ever, had NT (or any other Windows) source code access.
I don't think I'd describe the guy who showed how to hack Windows NT Workstation into NT Server, who showed how to bypass group policy as a local limited User, and similar Windows cracks as a Microsoft apologist...
NT never ran on SPARC boxes (I'm assuming that you meant that when you said a Sun box.
Windows NT was actually first written for, and using, MIPS processors - NOT X86 (while knowing that X86 would be a destination architecture, but not the only one.
The NT family has been supported on:
- MIPS (RS4000) - (NT 3.1)
- X86 (beginning with the 386) - (NT 3.1)
- Alpha - (NT 3.1)
- PowerPC - IBM architecture, not the Mac - (NT 3.51)
- Itanic (excuse me, Itanium) - (Windows XP (5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (5.2))
- AMD64 (yeah, yeah, X64) - (Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (5.2))
There have been others developed for, but not released. In fact, the ONLY version of Windows NT that supported just one architecture was Windows 2000, which had Alpha support cut from it mid-development. And actually, Dave Cutler, the chief architect of NT (and VMS) put(s) quite a bit of focus into architectural portability when designing NT from the beginning. You might want to learn a bit about Windows before badmouthing it in incorrect suppositions.
Also note that the Xbox 360 - which uses the NT kernel - does not run on an X86 (whereas the first one did) proving that the code portability is still quite there.
Is that the same lovely usability logic that justifies a "no mouse button" as usable? The Media Center remote - compared to the POS that came with my DV box (Time Warner) is very usable. 6 buttons could not possibly create a usable solution if one were attempting to cram 100% of the features from Media Center into a Mac.
At least one of those speakers - I'll leave it to you to decode which - doesn't have an "American accent", as they are not from the United States.