I am sick and tired of your shady and misinformed "studies"
Studies by Microsoft will point out Microsoft product high points, and competitor's low points. Just as studies by IBM will do the same for IBM, and Novell will do the same for their own studies, and Redhat will do the same for their studies, and Sun will do the same for their studies. Is this really that confusing to people? Banging your chest about it is just...dumb. Ignore it.
Instead of trying to convince people that you have a better operating system, why don't you get off your lazy ass and MAKE A BETTER OPERATING SYSTEM!?
Funny.
Six years ago Slashdotters had a hell of a good perspective to slag Microsoft from, choosing and picking from a huge range of deficiencies of Microsoft's products. Five years ago things got a little rougher, but there was still the 16/32 home OS' to make things fun, and one could pretend that Windows 2000 didn't exist. Three years ago things got rougher, with home users migrating to a pretty good platform as well, and the legacy mess disappearing. Two years ago Microsoft released Windows 2003 - an absolutely kick ass operating system that has proven extraordinarily stable, hugely scalable, and actually quite secure (even out of the box). Shortly they'll be releasing R2 of it, improving it even further.
So I think your advice is a little late. The, pardon the pun, Window with which Microsoft bashers could slam their products on merit has pretty much passed.
Do you believe your study would have been allowed to be published had the results turned out against them?
Unless he can time travel, this is an impossible question to answer.
How many Microsoft-funded studies have been buried because the conclusion was "incorrect"?
Geesh, what world do people live on around here? If Microsoft funds a study, they have every right to bury those that they want to bury. Their are many mult-billion dollar competitors to Microsoft, as well as a huge open-source community, that already handles the anti-Microsoft study angle with gusto.
It is remarkable how any study that finds Linux to be great, whether sponsored by RedHat, IBM, Novell, or whoever, is unimpeachable, but a study that finds in favour only has any merit at all if it's written by the hand of God.
Advising that you do it on purpose is the joke but the examples seem like things I've seen programmers do by accident. It's usually a sign of incompetance rather than an attempt at job security.
Yes - that's the whole foundation of the joke.
I'm proud to say that people don't complain about my code being unmaintainable... Thanks to the fact that I nicely sort the hard parts into functions that everyone else uses
Then they aren't maintaining your code - they're using the API. Good for you, and that's pretty much the norm. However someone in the future is going to come along and have to maintain your code and they will, almost without fail, say "What was this dumbshit thinking? This is an unmaintainable mess! I would have X and Y and Z, and I would have made yet of a [not existing at the time] library and I would have used the new [meme] pattern!". It is pretty much a given.
And don't think I'm saying this defensively about my own code - I've gently corrected coworkers quite a few times for berating some other parties code (even when they've left the company) because I think it's a self-serving, lazy way out most of the time.
CSI:Miami, a TV-show with violent content, is going to go up against violent content in the video game industry?
Um, not - they just want viewers. In the grand scheme of "follow the buck", they aren't trying to make the world a better place or to make some profound social commentary: They're just doing whatever gets the viewers so they can please their advertisers. You know - Just like GTA is just trying to sell games, and they aren't actually trying to get you to kill cops and hookers.
The kind of coder who deliberately writes bad code just to maintain their employment is always the first coder shown the door. Always. It is a complete urban myth that not commenting spaghetti code will keep you in a job. There is always someone else willing to do your job, no matter how specialized you think you may be.
I am amazed that so many people don't realize that this was a joke. It's a joke people. Are all of these people replying seriously 16? I have to suspect so, because this was immediately identifiable as the same sort of joke that has been repeating for years and years - if you've been in the industry more than a year, if anything it sounded cliched.
Having said that - there is some truth to the claims. The reality is that most programmers out there are terribly, terribly lazy, and they'll immediately declare as undecipherable any code that isn't written for a mentally handicapped pigeon. If you've ever developed code to solve a problem of any complexity at all (e.g. more than some sub-100 IQ CRUD type data forms), you've had it declared "spaghetti code" by someone else, and they've probably thrown up their hands and declared that the only solution is to rewrite it (I'm proud to say that I've had this said about some of my historical code. Not because it was written poorly, but rather because it wasn't just a lightweight, superficial wrapper around calls to library functions. Per the prior point, every lazy programmer would rather just write something new themselves than expend the effort understanding existing code). I've seen this in shops where the lazy, lazy, lazy developers always defer all decisions and judgements to the original programmer (and that original programmer is probably wishing they never had anything to do with it, wishing they stuck to implementing high-level scripts).
Very true, but Google had a hand in that, as well. The Google toolbar, with popup blocking, was popular before browsers like Firefox that have integrated popup blocking were part of the mainstream.
Google's toolbar rose at the same time as Firefox did (along with a lot of other third party toolbars. Lots of pop-up blocking toolbars preceded Google in the IE space, for instance): Google doesn't need to be thanked for implementing something so obvious, and they were far from first.
Of course for the people in the know, before the browser clients started implementing this functionality it was the norm to use local proxies that blocked popups, unwanted scripts and cookies, etc. I can't even remember the name of it now, but I used one for about a year.
This is all so ridiculous anyways - for people who haven't noticed, Google has already "evolved" from text ads, to full-graphic banners. It's only a matter of time before they're animated (they probably already are), and who knows from there. Google's ascent was largely to the connected geek crowd, and they differentiated themselves from Excite! and Yahoo by having a tremendously lightweight interface - that's what got them attention. Slowly they introduced text ads, and as we've seen they've grown from there. There is nothing special or benevolent about Google's technique: It was simply their way of getting where they are, and it worked beautifully.
Gee, you must be BWJones to make an accusation like that.
However sorry to bust your conspiracy theory, BW, but no it wasn't me. This is particularly evident given that I was pretty condescending about your infatuation with simpleton memes, so I'm hardly going to be berating someone for being condescending.
Using the Xbox as a media center makes possible lots of new channels for media access that are currently unavailable with present distribution methods.
What "new channel" for media access does it provide that isn't provided by every cheap computer already out there across the nation? It's yet another computer device - BFD. Your dramatization about it is as laughable as the originators.
Chris Anderson has helped popularize the concept of the Long Tail by coining the phrase back in 2004. I sent you to the source with my link. Perhaps reading available information and studying a bit of statistics before you post will help you to understand a bit more than you currently appear to.
Ouch! Zing! You're good, and that burned me good. Wait, no it didn't. And yes, it's a trite, overused saying that the originator is cashing in on at every opportunity, and all of the hanger-ons are repeating like some sort of mantra (when really it's a ridiculous simplification that's often, quite simply, wrong. 99.9% of xbox360 owners will never use it to express the "long tail" advantage).
Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.
So he's interest in it as a media extender....what in the world does that have to do with the "long tail" (sorry - Long Tail)? I realize that it's one of the overused and oversold catch phrases of the day, but really it just makes it sound dumb.
Now I'm going to eat the Long Tail of dinners - pizza. Maybe I'll have a Long Tail drink - a glass of water. Then I'll watch some Long Tail television, and eat a Long Tail snack.
Actually I think it was b/c of the much-maligned ActiveX security vulnerabilities. There are plenty of ActiveX-less websites that are coded solely for IE anyway, so lack of platform-independence is not really the issue.
I had no intention of focusing on ActiveX, but rather was talking about the gamut of technologies that Microsoft had introduced. Microsoft had the first real DHTML capable browser, their object model was worlds ahead of everyone else, they had far better XML/XSLT support, supported XML data islands, and so on and so on.
Not to get too argumentative, but I do disagree issue with a couple of points.
The reason ActiveX was "much maligned" is because it was just DCOM wrapped up in web semantics.
ActiveX was a visual component standard that was really created for Visual Basic. ActiveX had nothing to do with DCOM (of course ActiveX uses COM as the communication method, but in no way does it imply that it's talking to the master via DCOM), but rather was a COM based component that implemented a particular set of visual interfaces to embed it in a container. It was invented for fat development, replacing VBXs (with OCXs), but the black-box type model worked well (at least in the Microsoft world) in the browser. The whole security model element of your comment I'm not really sure how to respond to - Apart from the fact that ActiveX was just a client-side technology, implying nothing about how it communicates with the server, DCOM was, and is, a highly secure (with highly granular ACLs) communication method.
The primary reason nobody adopted it on the web, outside of the compatibility nightmare, was that ActiveX controls required a Microsoft server on the other end, meaning exposing an important service to the internet.
I think you're thinking of something entirely different. An ActiveX control on your webpage is just an OCX resource file that you've stuck on your web server, and adding resource location and versioning info in your HTML. An ActiveX control can be used on pages served from LAMP servers. There is nothing about it that ties the server to Microsoft. I personally used ActiveX for internal webapps, and those controls used HTML to communicate with data sources.
I'm glad you remember to glory days of ActiveX and IIS servers with such a warm fuzzy glow. All I remember were the serious ActiveXploits, IIS worms, and performance problems created by this "fantastic platform."
Oh give me a break. Aside from your blatantly wrong knowledge of the Microsoft platform (BTW: Corba and COM were competing technologies. Your revisionist "COM was a lame ripoff of CORBA" is sadly very wrong, but it's the norm for history to be reinvented for some around these parts), I was specifically talking about internal development. It was a fantastic platform, though like every other platform it did have its hiccups.
No they aren't. Using your own analogy, that's like saying the tortoise can run faster because in a given race he's in the lead - he might be ahead in that race (technology is a race with no winning line), but in no way is he a faster runner.
and had the majority of the capabilities of what will be in Internet Explorer 7 years ago
Just imagine how powerful and profitable Microsoft would be if they weren't always five years late to the party.
Just imagine how...status quo or diminished...Microsoft would be if they weren't intentionally five years late to the party. Seriously.
5 or 6 years ago Microsoft was hugely pushing a lot of very advanced web technologies, including remote scripting, behaviours, client-side XML data islands and heavily programmatically controllable transformations, and even the much-maligned ActiveX. These enabled some remarkable web applications (ActiveX, for instance, allowed you to have auto-updating rich client on the desktop, but retaining all of the advantages of the document model of HTML).
It really was a fantastic platform that they created, and they were light years ahead of everyone else. Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites, but for internal teams that were up on their chops (most aren't, unfortunately), there were some amazing solutions created.
However Microsoft has a so-called-problem that shops like Salesforce don't - they are pulling in billions upon billions a year from their, err, "legacy" products, and often they're their own biggest competitor. The last thing they want to do is pull the carpet out from under their cash cows and enter into a new competition as a new entrant of sorts, eliminating a huge source of income, and a competitive advantage. It's for this reason that the IE team was disbanded years ago, after they shot far ahead of everyone else.
The revisionist history where people imagine that Microsoft is behind because they're just not as advanced as their competitors really is laughable. Microsoft was a mile ahead and then decided they really wanted to run the 20K instead of the 100m.
It might work for home editions or home users, but professional uses - NO. I don't care how contextual the ads are, they are a distraction and I bet they will be flash based or something more silly and obnoxious or at least they will evolve in to those.
No on every single level. Even contextual ads are terrible. This is an unbelievably bad idea, and it really does sadden me that Microsoft is seriously considering this.
I thought about this a bit and realized that I was misinterpreting a bit. However I still think that you're misrepresenting it a bit - a Digital Rebel XT, for instance, doesn't have just 8 million pits, each of them one of the 3 colours, but rather it has the multi-color sensors that can be analyzed to yield 8 million pixels. e.g. my LCD screen has 1,310,720 pixels, but in reality it has 3,932,160 subpixels. I highly doubt the XT only has 8 million pits.
The CCD of your camera does not record enough information for a real 24 bit 8MP picture.
You have a source for this, because honestly it sounds nonsensical. How could the camera guess the colour values for a pixel (if, based upon your claim, they actually have 1/3rd of the colour components) from the neighbouring components if it doesn't have the colours there either?
It sounds like you're describing a camera that does interpolation to make an exaggerated fake resolution. While some cheap cameras do this, the Digital Rebel XT most certainly is not one of them.
Um, no. I live in Canada and work in Canada, so Google isn't an option. However everytime Google is brought up we hear about how extraordinary their workforce is, and there have been some huge examples that it isn't quite as infalliable as myth would have it.
You might get a little more credibility if you canned the circa-1997 "M$" nonsense.
Say what you will about Google, but 4 days is fast.
4 days to fix a security vulnerability in a web app is INCREDIBLY SLOW. Anyways, obviously it's a little easier to patch a website, especially when you have a highly tolerant client base. This is the same Google, though, that released a desktop search that was so terribly security defective that it's hard to believe that their hiring practices are even remotely as selective as they imagine.
TMM raises a valid point, right after we read a story in Wired about how 'digg might bury slashdot', Zonk goes and posts a story that's been in discussion at digg for over a week.
The Globe and Mail story has only been up since yesterday. Even then, unless you're a hopeful-professional-blogger-meme-follower/sheeple , does it really matter? Who friggin' cares. Seriously. It isn't a race, and unless it was something that actually was time sensitive (Rogers dumping Usenet is not really time sensitive to Rogers subscribers, much less the vast majority of non-Rogers subscribers who are seeing this story), then it hardly matters how timely the information comes.
To be effective don't keystroke loggers written for windows need to use system hooks that should make them all relatively easy to detect?
Or they could hook into the keyboard driver itself, or using Detours from Microsoft Resource they can hook themselves into many other system calls (either in memory or on disk). SetWindowsHook(Ex) would pretty much be the most-noob way of doing this.
Of course even doing that, I don't think there's a way to enumerate currently installed hooks - The API doesn't provide that. The best you could do is add a debug hook (that gets informed of all other hooks installed) and try to get it executed first.
What would scare me is when a decent programmer will start to write such programs so that it is completely stealth and doesn't bring the machine to a grinding halt. After all, basically all spyware seems to be badly written and performance not an issue at all. A decent programmer, using all his skills could write a stealth spyware/keylogger that doesn't bog down the computer and goes undetected for a very long time.
Of course there are programs out there doing exactly this - custom made, highly targeted attacks. Just because the standard "look for all the well knowns" don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there, it just means it hasn't been as widespread of an attack to make it visible to them (or it could just be relatively quiet. As we know, Sony was busy owning machines across the land for some time before someone noticed). Of course to defend against event hook detection it would have to install a rootkit, and some of the rootkit detection tools are getting better (though the rootkit people are going to adapt - soon you'll have to run rootkit detection from a bootable CD).
Hrmmm...I wonder if a non-privileged account can install a key sniffer: I do as "su" (RunAs) when I need to launch a system tool as administrator, and I wonder if a keyboard sniffer could capture my password, or whether it itself would have to be installed by an admin.
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
There is so much of a software investment in JPEG that it is very unlikely it is going anywhere anything soon. JPEG2000 once had a futuristic name, but even it has seen pretty much no interest because JPEG has satisfied the market, and entrenched technologies are highly resistant to change.
In any case, one format I'm interested in is the RAW format that Canon uses on its cameras. My Rebel XT saves a 8MP picture in about a 4-5MB JPEG (obviously in fine), but when I go to the apparently lossless RAW it only jumps to 7-8MB. A minor increase in file size, really, to lose no image data.
Of course because software expects JPEGs using that image format is a major pain in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sick and tired of your shady and misinformed "studies"
Studies by Microsoft will point out Microsoft product high points, and competitor's low points. Just as studies by IBM will do the same for IBM, and Novell will do the same for their own studies, and Redhat will do the same for their studies, and Sun will do the same for their studies. Is this really that confusing to people? Banging your chest about it is just...dumb. Ignore it.
Instead of trying to convince people that you have a better operating system, why don't you get off your lazy ass and MAKE A BETTER OPERATING SYSTEM!?
Funny.
Six years ago Slashdotters had a hell of a good perspective to slag Microsoft from, choosing and picking from a huge range of deficiencies of Microsoft's products. Five years ago things got a little rougher, but there was still the 16/32 home OS' to make things fun, and one could pretend that Windows 2000 didn't exist. Three years ago things got rougher, with home users migrating to a pretty good platform as well, and the legacy mess disappearing. Two years ago Microsoft released Windows 2003 - an absolutely kick ass operating system that has proven extraordinarily stable, hugely scalable, and actually quite secure (even out of the box). Shortly they'll be releasing R2 of it, improving it even further.
So I think your advice is a little late. The, pardon the pun, Window with which Microsoft bashers could slam their products on merit has pretty much passed.
The sad reality
Funny of you to say it's a joke and insult anyone who believes it to be true.. then in your next paragraph you say how it actually is true.
No, that isn't funny. I said there is a kernel of truth to it, as there is with virtually all humor. There is nothing particularly funny about that.
Do you believe your study would have been allowed to be published had the results turned out against them?
Unless he can time travel, this is an impossible question to answer.
How many Microsoft-funded studies have been buried because the conclusion was "incorrect"?
Geesh, what world do people live on around here? If Microsoft funds a study, they have every right to bury those that they want to bury. Their are many mult-billion dollar competitors to Microsoft, as well as a huge open-source community, that already handles the anti-Microsoft study angle with gusto.
It is remarkable how any study that finds Linux to be great, whether sponsored by RedHat, IBM, Novell, or whoever, is unimpeachable, but a study that finds in favour only has any merit at all if it's written by the hand of God.
I just did a Google search to check this, and I saw no graphical ads at all. So what are you talking about?
http://www.compucall.co.il/default.aspx?id=133
There's Firefox and Apache for Windows, isn't there?
That would be so much funnier if IIS 6 didn't have so much better of a security track record than Apache has over the same period.
Advising that you do it on purpose is the joke but the examples seem like things I've seen programmers do by accident. It's usually a sign of incompetance rather than an attempt at job security.
Yes - that's the whole foundation of the joke.
I'm proud to say that people don't complain about my code being unmaintainable... Thanks to the fact that I nicely sort the hard parts into functions that everyone else uses
Then they aren't maintaining your code - they're using the API. Good for you, and that's pretty much the norm. However someone in the future is going to come along and have to maintain your code and they will, almost without fail, say "What was this dumbshit thinking? This is an unmaintainable mess! I would have X and Y and Z, and I would have made yet of a [not existing at the time] library and I would have used the new [meme] pattern!". It is pretty much a given.
And don't think I'm saying this defensively about my own code - I've gently corrected coworkers quite a few times for berating some other parties code (even when they've left the company) because I think it's a self-serving, lazy way out most of the time.
CSI:Miami, a TV-show with violent content, is going to go up against violent content in the video game industry?
Um, not - they just want viewers. In the grand scheme of "follow the buck", they aren't trying to make the world a better place or to make some profound social commentary: They're just doing whatever gets the viewers so they can please their advertisers. You know - Just like GTA is just trying to sell games, and they aren't actually trying to get you to kill cops and hookers.
The kind of coder who deliberately writes bad code just to maintain their employment is always the first coder shown the door. Always. It is a complete urban myth that not commenting spaghetti code will keep you in a job. There is always someone else willing to do your job, no matter how specialized you think you may be.
I am amazed that so many people don't realize that this was a joke. It's a joke people. Are all of these people replying seriously 16? I have to suspect so, because this was immediately identifiable as the same sort of joke that has been repeating for years and years - if you've been in the industry more than a year, if anything it sounded cliched.
Having said that - there is some truth to the claims. The reality is that most programmers out there are terribly, terribly lazy, and they'll immediately declare as undecipherable any code that isn't written for a mentally handicapped pigeon. If you've ever developed code to solve a problem of any complexity at all (e.g. more than some sub-100 IQ CRUD type data forms), you've had it declared "spaghetti code" by someone else, and they've probably thrown up their hands and declared that the only solution is to rewrite it (I'm proud to say that I've had this said about some of my historical code. Not because it was written poorly, but rather because it wasn't just a lightweight, superficial wrapper around calls to library functions. Per the prior point, every lazy programmer would rather just write something new themselves than expend the effort understanding existing code). I've seen this in shops where the lazy, lazy, lazy developers always defer all decisions and judgements to the original programmer (and that original programmer is probably wishing they never had anything to do with it, wishing they stuck to implementing high-level scripts).
Very true, but Google had a hand in that, as well. The Google toolbar, with popup blocking, was popular before browsers like Firefox that have integrated popup blocking were part of the mainstream.
Google's toolbar rose at the same time as Firefox did (along with a lot of other third party toolbars. Lots of pop-up blocking toolbars preceded Google in the IE space, for instance): Google doesn't need to be thanked for implementing something so obvious, and they were far from first.
Of course for the people in the know, before the browser clients started implementing this functionality it was the norm to use local proxies that blocked popups, unwanted scripts and cookies, etc. I can't even remember the name of it now, but I used one for about a year.
This is all so ridiculous anyways - for people who haven't noticed, Google has already "evolved" from text ads, to full-graphic banners. It's only a matter of time before they're animated (they probably already are), and who knows from there. Google's ascent was largely to the connected geek crowd, and they differentiated themselves from Excite! and Yahoo by having a tremendously lightweight interface - that's what got them attention. Slowly they introduced text ads, and as we've seen they've grown from there. There is nothing special or benevolent about Google's technique: It was simply their way of getting where they are, and it worked beautifully.
Gee, you must be BWJones to make an accusation like that.
However sorry to bust your conspiracy theory, BW, but no it wasn't me. This is particularly evident given that I was pretty condescending about your infatuation with simpleton memes, so I'm hardly going to be berating someone for being condescending.
Using the Xbox as a media center makes possible lots of new channels for media access that are currently unavailable with present distribution methods.
What "new channel" for media access does it provide that isn't provided by every cheap computer already out there across the nation? It's yet another computer device - BFD. Your dramatization about it is as laughable as the originators.
Chris Anderson has helped popularize the concept of the Long Tail by coining the phrase back in 2004. I sent you to the source with my link. Perhaps reading available information and studying a bit of statistics before you post will help you to understand a bit more than you currently appear to.
Ouch! Zing! You're good, and that burned me good. Wait, no it didn't. And yes, it's a trite, overused saying that the originator is cashing in on at every opportunity, and all of the hanger-ons are repeating like some sort of mantra (when really it's a ridiculous simplification that's often, quite simply, wrong. 99.9% of xbox360 owners will never use it to express the "long tail" advantage).
Anyways, get back to your kool-aid.
Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.
So he's interest in it as a media extender....what in the world does that have to do with the "long tail" (sorry - Long Tail)? I realize that it's one of the overused and oversold catch phrases of the day, but really it just makes it sound dumb.
Now I'm going to eat the Long Tail of dinners - pizza. Maybe I'll have a Long Tail drink - a glass of water. Then I'll watch some Long Tail television, and eat a Long Tail snack.
Actually I think it was b/c of the much-maligned ActiveX security vulnerabilities. There are plenty of ActiveX-less websites that are coded solely for IE anyway, so lack of platform-independence is not really the issue.
I had no intention of focusing on ActiveX, but rather was talking about the gamut of technologies that Microsoft had introduced. Microsoft had the first real DHTML capable browser, their object model was worlds ahead of everyone else, they had far better XML/XSLT support, supported XML data islands, and so on and so on.
Not to get too argumentative, but I do disagree issue with a couple of points.
The reason ActiveX was "much maligned" is because it was just DCOM wrapped up in web semantics.
ActiveX was a visual component standard that was really created for Visual Basic. ActiveX had nothing to do with DCOM (of course ActiveX uses COM as the communication method, but in no way does it imply that it's talking to the master via DCOM), but rather was a COM based component that implemented a particular set of visual interfaces to embed it in a container. It was invented for fat development, replacing VBXs (with OCXs), but the black-box type model worked well (at least in the Microsoft world) in the browser. The whole security model element of your comment I'm not really sure how to respond to - Apart from the fact that ActiveX was just a client-side technology, implying nothing about how it communicates with the server, DCOM was, and is, a highly secure (with highly granular ACLs) communication method.
The primary reason nobody adopted it on the web, outside of the compatibility nightmare, was that ActiveX controls required a Microsoft server on the other end, meaning exposing an important service to the internet.
I think you're thinking of something entirely different. An ActiveX control on your webpage is just an OCX resource file that you've stuck on your web server, and adding resource location and versioning info in your HTML. An ActiveX control can be used on pages served from LAMP servers. There is nothing about it that ties the server to Microsoft. I personally used ActiveX for internal webapps, and those controls used HTML to communicate with data sources.
I'm glad you remember to glory days of ActiveX and IIS servers with such a warm fuzzy glow. All I remember were the serious ActiveXploits, IIS worms, and performance problems created by this "fantastic platform."
Oh give me a break. Aside from your blatantly wrong knowledge of the Microsoft platform (BTW: Corba and COM were competing technologies. Your revisionist "COM was a lame ripoff of CORBA" is sadly very wrong, but it's the norm for history to be reinvented for some around these parts), I was specifically talking about internal development. It was a fantastic platform, though like every other platform it did have its hiccups.
Er, "behind" and "less advanced" are synonymous.
No they aren't. Using your own analogy, that's like saying the tortoise can run faster because in a given race he's in the lead - he might be ahead in that race (technology is a race with no winning line), but in no way is he a faster runner.
and had the majority of the capabilities of what will be in Internet Explorer 7 years ago
I think you missed my point.
Just imagine how powerful and profitable Microsoft would be if they weren't always five years late to the party.
Just imagine how...status quo or diminished...Microsoft would be if they weren't intentionally five years late to the party. Seriously.
5 or 6 years ago Microsoft was hugely pushing a lot of very advanced web technologies, including remote scripting, behaviours, client-side XML data islands and heavily programmatically controllable transformations, and even the much-maligned ActiveX. These enabled some remarkable web applications (ActiveX, for instance, allowed you to have auto-updating rich client on the desktop, but retaining all of the advantages of the document model of HTML).
It really was a fantastic platform that they created, and they were light years ahead of everyone else. Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites, but for internal teams that were up on their chops (most aren't, unfortunately), there were some amazing solutions created.
However Microsoft has a so-called-problem that shops like Salesforce don't - they are pulling in billions upon billions a year from their, err, "legacy" products, and often they're their own biggest competitor. The last thing they want to do is pull the carpet out from under their cash cows and enter into a new competition as a new entrant of sorts, eliminating a huge source of income, and a competitive advantage. It's for this reason that the IE team was disbanded years ago, after they shot far ahead of everyone else.
The revisionist history where people imagine that Microsoft is behind because they're just not as advanced as their competitors really is laughable. Microsoft was a mile ahead and then decided they really wanted to run the 20K instead of the 100m.
It might work for home editions or home users, but professional uses - NO. I don't care how contextual the ads are, they are a distraction and I bet they will be flash based or something more silly and obnoxious or at least they will evolve in to those.
No on every single level. Even contextual ads are terrible. This is an unbelievably bad idea, and it really does sadden me that Microsoft is seriously considering this.
I thought about this a bit and realized that I was misinterpreting a bit. However I still think that you're misrepresenting it a bit - a Digital Rebel XT, for instance, doesn't have just 8 million pits, each of them one of the 3 colours, but rather it has the multi-color sensors that can be analyzed to yield 8 million pixels. e.g. my LCD screen has 1,310,720 pixels, but in reality it has 3,932,160 subpixels. I highly doubt the XT only has 8 million pits.
The CCD of your camera does not record enough information for a real 24 bit 8MP picture.
You have a source for this, because honestly it sounds nonsensical. How could the camera guess the colour values for a pixel (if, based upon your claim, they actually have 1/3rd of the colour components) from the neighbouring components if it doesn't have the colours there either?
It sounds like you're describing a camera that does interpolation to make an exaggerated fake resolution. While some cheap cameras do this, the Digital Rebel XT most certainly is not one of them.
You applied and were not taken in, right-o ? ;)
Um, no. I live in Canada and work in Canada, so Google isn't an option. However everytime Google is brought up we hear about how extraordinary their workforce is, and there have been some huge examples that it isn't quite as infalliable as myth would have it.
You might get a little more credibility if you canned the circa-1997 "M$" nonsense.
Say what you will about Google, but 4 days is fast.
4 days to fix a security vulnerability in a web app is INCREDIBLY SLOW. Anyways, obviously it's a little easier to patch a website, especially when you have a highly tolerant client base. This is the same Google, though, that released a desktop search that was so terribly security defective that it's hard to believe that their hiring practices are even remotely as selective as they imagine.
TMM raises a valid point, right after we read a story in Wired about how 'digg might bury slashdot', Zonk goes and posts a story that's been in discussion at digg for over a week.
e , does it really matter? Who friggin' cares. Seriously. It isn't a race, and unless it was something that actually was time sensitive (Rogers dumping Usenet is not really time sensitive to Rogers subscribers, much less the vast majority of non-Rogers subscribers who are seeing this story), then it hardly matters how timely the information comes.
The Globe and Mail story has only been up since yesterday. Even then, unless you're a hopeful-professional-blogger-meme-follower/sheepl
To be effective don't keystroke loggers written for windows need to use system hooks that should make them all relatively easy to detect?
Or they could hook into the keyboard driver itself, or using Detours from Microsoft Resource they can hook themselves into many other system calls (either in memory or on disk). SetWindowsHook(Ex) would pretty much be the most-noob way of doing this.
Of course even doing that, I don't think there's a way to enumerate currently installed hooks - The API doesn't provide that. The best you could do is add a debug hook (that gets informed of all other hooks installed) and try to get it executed first.
What would scare me is when a decent programmer will start to write such programs so that it is completely stealth and doesn't bring the machine to a grinding halt. After all, basically all spyware seems to be badly written and performance not an issue at all. A decent programmer, using all his skills could write a stealth spyware/keylogger that doesn't bog down the computer and goes undetected for a very long time.
Of course there are programs out there doing exactly this - custom made, highly targeted attacks. Just because the standard "look for all the well knowns" don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there, it just means it hasn't been as widespread of an attack to make it visible to them (or it could just be relatively quiet. As we know, Sony was busy owning machines across the land for some time before someone noticed). Of course to defend against event hook detection it would have to install a rootkit, and some of the rootkit detection tools are getting better (though the rootkit people are going to adapt - soon you'll have to run rootkit detection from a bootable CD).
Hrmmm...I wonder if a non-privileged account can install a key sniffer: I do as "su" (RunAs) when I need to launch a system tool as administrator, and I wonder if a keyboard sniffer could capture my password, or whether it itself would have to be installed by an admin.
Then what Free format was designed to replace JPEG?
There is so much of a software investment in JPEG that it is very unlikely it is going anywhere anything soon. JPEG2000 once had a futuristic name, but even it has seen pretty much no interest because JPEG has satisfied the market, and entrenched technologies are highly resistant to change.
In any case, one format I'm interested in is the RAW format that Canon uses on its cameras. My Rebel XT saves a 8MP picture in about a 4-5MB JPEG (obviously in fine), but when I go to the apparently lossless RAW it only jumps to 7-8MB. A minor increase in file size, really, to lose no image data.
Of course because software expects JPEGs using that image format is a major pain in the ass.