Apple software has plenty of bugs too. The system update that would hose disk partitions if they were labeled with spaces in their names.
I don't think they make perfect code. In fact, I don't think any team makes perfect code without generally unreasonable costs (e.g. costs that only a space program can accept - though even they don't make perfect code). I don't think any scrum group, agile/XP group, or any other methodology makes perfect code.
Microsoft is lauding scrum for assisting them in delivering a product late and with a smaller featureset than originally planned? Ok, that's certainly an interesting approach.
I've noticed a tremendous correlation between organizations, groups, and individuals in trouble (late projects, lack of talent and capability, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the capabilities of competing groups) and an acceptance and evangelizing of silver-bullet methodologies. It's like the long-time alcoholic giving speeches on how great it is to sober, or the homeless guy talking about the importance of going to school: It's the wrong person to be talking about it. Maybe serving as a ominous warning, but not as a credible source of advice about the right course of action.
Personally I'd like to hear what "methodology" Apple uses - They seem to continually manage to release great software. They don't seem to be buzzword laden, or full of ridiculous concepts like pair programming, but seem to use "traditional" programming models on reasonable plans with involved, motivated employees.
Google will buy this company. This would be great for intergration with their already pritty good photo software.
If it works, then sure. I highly, highly suspect that it doesn't work. I've RTFA, and I've gone through their information pages, and something is incredibly suspicious.
Let me put it another way - anyone with an ounce of lateral thinking, when first introduced to the Flickr concept, thought "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to tag this stuff - If Flickr could do this for me by identifying what and who I'm taking a picture of" (actually this happened way before flickr - when you were first able to categorize and tag photos, which has existed for years, it just seemed like a desirable thing for the PC to do). Everyone thought of this. There's a bit of a gap coming up with the "innovative" idea of automatic recognition, and actually implementing.
I am highly suspicious as to whether these gaps actually made it across that chasm, or whether they just thought "Gee, what a clever idea we had! Let's make a website and talk about it as if we invented it, and if we get enough attention and funding, then we'll invent it". Their "Screenshots" look completely bogus, and no one can actually test it out - instead you have to sign up for their "invite only" (if it's invite only, then why do you have to email them? Sounds more like random draw only) usage. Could a Slashdotter that "got in" tell us how good it works? I'm waiting.
If you had RTFA, you might have noticed that they key to it working is limiting data points
If you had read my comment, you might have noticed that I said that "ideal" situations include highly dissimilar people. Having pictures that are largely full of family members is a nightmare situation for facial recognition - most algorithms have a tough enough time even figuring out where faces are, much less differentiating between kin. The scam sensor went off even more when they made a big deal about the fact that it recognizes shirt color - yeah, that's useful: If all of your pictures are of hobos.
In other words, the population it works on is always small, just the people in the pictures you have in you picture collection.
My picture collection has dozens of people that faze in and out. Again, it would be cleaning up the mess of this things inaccurate guessing more than it would be helpful.
Thats because its not the same thing. Facebook cannot be trained to recognize faces. You have to tag it for every picture manually. The only doofus is you.
I'll bet in actual practice they are largely the same. I read this story and the "Begging for VC funding by grossly overstating capabilities" flag in my mind was waving at full mast. Face recognition is a technology in the infantile stage, and every demo that I've ever seen has used a database with just a couple of largely distinct faces: In reality with a large group of similar faces under less than ideal scenarios, it is close to useless. I know a lot of large organizations and security shops are being sold the face rec B.S., but face recognition in practice is close to useless.
Of course in this case I'm sure you're hoping that you "train" it with a set of just a few faces, and I'm sure then it could randomly guess and (if you have 4 faces) people would be amazed if it was right 25% of the time. Saying "oh it works but isn't really that accurate---but it's alpha!" is nonsense. They either have the technology, or they don't, and if it's marginally accurate (so you're spending most of your time correcting it) then it's truly worse than nothing.
Paternity tests...god...give me a break. This story has every hallmark of a scam. It sounds like the endless "super compression" stories.
More like, "Google uses it, and Microsoft invented it".
Indeed. This story is absolutely unbelievable revisionist history and nonsense. I've written about my feelings of AJAX (in fact I was honored to see that an AC already referenced it in this thread), and this article is exactly what pisses me off about the new-to-web-apps "AJAX" converts. This messaging expert is yet another dumb-ass trying to get in on the Web 2.0 action to earn some VC funding. She even used the word "paradigm" to really put up the flags.
It sounds like you're describing a situation like the current one with Internet Explorer.
Exactly. Even in cases where Internet Explorer is domainant, the web road is still open to alternative browsers, so there hasn't been lock-in. It is very comparable.
I agree that this sucks, but it really isn't that bad
I can appreciate that my post may have sound cynical or anti-Microsoft, but it was nothing of the sort - it was a completely emotionless, pragmatic guess of what's going to happen with this over the coming years. The ODF isn't exclusive of Microsoft, so if it "wins" (which I think it will), Microsoft can still win on the client side by adopting and embracing it (which I think they will). Mind you the open, unencumbered format will allow for a lot more dynamics on the server side (e.g. document parsers and processors, etc), but I think the ascent of ODF in no way indicates that OpenOffice is going to make headway.
Several posts were bizarrely moderated. I think a very angry person got mod points today.:-)
I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment
While I could imagine some division heads or rogue employees putting intentional "quirks" in, I think just as a nature of the beast OpenDocument isn't an absolutely literally interpreted format (e.g. it isn't an output layout format like PDF), so like HTML there will be some variations in the way it is interpreted. If Office becomes the dominant platform, it will also be considered the "right" platform, regardless of how correct or not that is. If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
Honestly I don't think I was being pessimistic - in the Office wars I do think Microsoft has a vastly superior offering, and if it's just a matter of supporting this format to make some states happy, then after a brief resistance I think they will. Everything will go on just like it was, albeit with a new document format.
Three years from now OpenDocument will be pervasive (the momentum is getting too great for it to fail now, especially when organizations face just as big of a transition to OfficeXML if they decided to go that route), and the #1 implementation, by far, will be Microsoft Office. All of the state governments will be running Office 12+OpenDocument SP1, and interacting just like they did previously. Of course a document opened in OpenOffice, or others, will be slightly different, and users will attribute it to quirks of OpenOffice, further marginalizing it.
Sidenote: That bloody PIX SPORTS ad does more to encourage ad blocking software than any counter-commercial advocate.
[This is not my field, so I'm likely just talking nonsense. All apologies]
You've brought up some great points, but ultimately you've offered nothing to quantify if such a feat is actually impossible - yes, it's difficult and it will take advances, but simply saying "sounds big...impossible" seems incredibly short sighted. 5 years ago I was using an Olympus digital SLR that offered 1MP, and had an ISO selection of 25 or 50. I now have a Canon Digital Rebel XT SLR that offers 8MP with a better picture at an ISO of 1600 than that prior camera managed at ISO 25. I imagine then there was someone saying "we're pushing the limits of CCD technology here".
Regarding whether you're getting down to the photon level - that seems a bit ridiculous. You can get a clear, fully defined image through a single strand of fiberglass.
A lens of the size that will fit into a cellphone is never going to be good enough to take very good pictures. The quality is not a function of materials, but of size.
Never say never.:-) Seriously, CCDs are gaining sensitivity (and losing noise) by leaps and bounds, and with time they will be able to pack the density into such a small package that a tiny lens will be completely sufficient.
Those camera phones? They're fine for people wanting to just send a quick pic to their friends---hey, look, I'm in Rome---but I don't know of anybody who would consider any of them good enough for taking photos that they want to keep.
They're getting there. Personally I think they're generally garbage, but at some point the CCDs are going to get sensitive and small enough, and the lenses high enough of quality, that it will start eating into the low end digicam market (indeed - it already has). You can now get cell phones with 1MP+ digital cameras in there. It's only a matter of time.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
Umm...probably not what you think it will be?
The amount of power that a cell phone is using constantly keeping in touch with the cell tower, powering the display, and carrying out a conversation (where it becomes a radio station) is enormous compared to the miniscule power needs of an MP3 player. The power impact of playing MP3s on a cell phone would be marginal at best.
I want specialized devices, not a "jack of all trades, master of none" device and I don't think I am alone in this.
This line gets dragged out everytime this gets brought up, yet already our electronics have seen integration, and it is only going to continue - indeed accelerate. There is a point in PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones, where it is good enough to completely satsify the majority of consumers - it is, in effect, a master of the realm if it satisfies the consumer, even if a specialized high-end stand-alone unit lets them add irrelevant effects to their music. I love my Digital Rebel XT, yet there are a lot of people for whom the digital camera in their cell phone is more than adequate (with extreme portability to boot).
My cell phone already has a pretty powerful processor in it, a good colour screen, a very capable data entry/navigation system, it's tiny, and has a fantastic battery. Flash memory is getting ultra cheap, so it's obvious that cell phones are increasibly going to integrate MP3 players (and FM radios), and even video and PDA functionality (of course you could say that PDAs are integrating cell phones - it's all the same thing). Why should I carry three different devices - all of them powered by general purpose CPUs (often the SAME CPU) just running different software, with a slightly different form?
Hate to point out the obvious, but apple does like control over products using it's services. Is it really that far fetched?
Of course it isn't - if you're leveraging Apple's stuff, then prepare for them to protect their own best interests as well. However the idea that they were trying to sour consumers on the idea of integrated devices sounds a little bit ridiculous (though it earned that terribly-heavyweight site lots of views) - Consumers don't have such a disconnect between devices, and a good MP3 player, whether a part of a cellphone, a PDA, or a stand-alone, is a good MP3 player, and the bad ones are bad ones. Indeed, there are a lot of terrible stand-alone MP3 players by shoddy companies, but I'd hardly say that it "soured the market" such that the iPod couldn't happen. It sounds more likely that Apple wanted to limit how much the specific device ate into their own sales - all of the advantages of the iPod, but with a couple of limitations. It says or predicts nothinga bout competing devices.
Personally I think the time is long overdue for good integrated cell/pda/mp3 players. MP3 playing in particular is so trivial that it's absurd that we have such powerful electronics that we lug around, but they can't credibly and easily play mp3s. Usually the implementation is ridiculously short sighted (I got a PDA to double as an MP3 player, and everything worked great but the DAC was terribly low quality. A couple of cents and they destroyed that entire use).
and what happened to Mike Rowe ? the dude that owned mikerowesoft website ? that doesnt even apply to trademark rules because it his his freaking name (poor dude) and he can't use it ?
You are infringing if you're intentionally, or even unintentionally, causing significant consumer confusion. e.g. If your name is Nissan and you run a computer store, but you decide that you'll stick car advertisements on your domain, then that causes consumer confusion. If your name is Mike Rowe, and to capitalize on the confusion and similarity to the largest software company in the world you call yourself MikeRoweSoft, verbally indistinguishable.
There is no blanket judgement that can be passed, but ultimately it is in the consumers best interest that we aren't being deceived by similar or manipulative names. I don't want a restaurant serving me Koke if I asked for a coke, and I don't want my car serviced with Genuine Hawnda Parts.
investor: "Wow, Microsoft is really going to push that online stuff. Let me call my broker."
Yeah because they're squeaking by with only about $13 billion in profits a quarter. Hopefully they can try to get into a lucrative online game like advertising.... zzzzz...
Have you ever tried developing software using nothing more than the platform SDK? Or the.Net SDK for that matter? For anything more than a couple files, using it becomes unwieldy. That is, of course, unless you like writing nmake makefiles.
Right. We're comparing against open-source, free development tools, which are often of the nmake variety.
I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one. I don't know where you got this idea that you get absolutely no optimization in the Express editions, but it's wrong.
"Calling bullshit" and simply saying "sorry that's wrong" are two different things. Note the prior poster who corrected my statement (I was obviously thinking of the free C++ compiler that Microsoft released). Nonetheless, no serious developer is using Express editions to do their work.
Second, there is a surpising number of people who believe that pirating software is unethical.
What's your point? You're going completely offtrack.
Releasing full fledged free development tools that target the.Net framework could speed its adoption quite nicely. It might cut into a very small portion of the market that would purchase VS Standard, but it could also increase the market size, and sell both more copies of VS Pro/MSDN Universal and licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server.
You're just fully missing the point. Of course there's a strategic reason for Microsoft doing this, just like they've always basically given away software, be it SDKs, educational copies, friends-of-Microsoft employee discounts, free with events (what do you know - I just got a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Biztalk 2006, and SQL Server 2005 Standard today for going to a useful Microsoft event), etc. Obviously they do this for a reason, but the whole point of this discussion was that it isn't, and has never been, because they're learning from or competing against open source. Indeed, open source and "free as in beer" software was, in wide proliferation, late to the game. That technique has been used for years... neigh decades.
Someone in Microsoft finally clued into the fact that giving away this software would make them far more money than selling it ever would.
What utter nonsense.
Firstly, as the other person mentioned - the thread was explicitly about SQL Server Express Edition, which is a variation of something that Microsoft has been doing since SQL Server 7 (when the MSDE first appeared). Not to mention things like the JET engine have always been freely distributable.
Secondly, Microsoft has offered a free SDK/Platform SDK for years. This is a very comprehensive kit that can be used to develop software.
The whole focus is wrong anyways - the Express editions of Visual Studio, which have some killer limitations (e.g. complete lack of optimization), are targetted at dabblers. These dabblers would never, in a million years, try getting going with Eclipse or the like. At the most they'd warez an ISO of Visual Studio Pro.
Which brings up the next point - Microsoft has always been relatively hands off about piracy of Visual Studio. That is their tacit real "Free" version. Even Visual Studio 2005 doesn't include activation or any other anti-warez measures.
Okay...are you refuting something I said? My original reply was to someone who claimed that China's great ascent happened without any of the downsides of the countries that preceded her. I refuted that.
Slashdot Mirror
A 3GB drive is decidely un-tiny.
Apple software has plenty of bugs too. The system update that would hose disk partitions if they were labeled with spaces in their names.
I don't think they make perfect code. In fact, I don't think any team makes perfect code without generally unreasonable costs (e.g. costs that only a space program can accept - though even they don't make perfect code). I don't think any scrum group, agile/XP group, or any other methodology makes perfect code.
Microsoft is lauding scrum for assisting them in delivering a product late and with a smaller featureset than originally planned? Ok, that's certainly an interesting approach.
I've noticed a tremendous correlation between organizations, groups, and individuals in trouble (late projects, lack of talent and capability, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the capabilities of competing groups) and an acceptance and evangelizing of silver-bullet methodologies. It's like the long-time alcoholic giving speeches on how great it is to sober, or the homeless guy talking about the importance of going to school: It's the wrong person to be talking about it. Maybe serving as a ominous warning, but not as a credible source of advice about the right course of action.
Personally I'd like to hear what "methodology" Apple uses - They seem to continually manage to release great software. They don't seem to be buzzword laden, or full of ridiculous concepts like pair programming, but seem to use "traditional" programming models on reasonable plans with involved, motivated employees.
Oh and I've read the claims by the only "alpha tester" that I could find, but that alone doesn't convince me. Something sounds fishy...
Google will buy this company. This would be great for intergration with their already pritty good photo software.
If it works, then sure. I highly, highly suspect that it doesn't work. I've RTFA, and I've gone through their information pages, and something is incredibly suspicious.
Let me put it another way - anyone with an ounce of lateral thinking, when first introduced to the Flickr concept, thought "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to tag this stuff - If Flickr could do this for me by identifying what and who I'm taking a picture of" (actually this happened way before flickr - when you were first able to categorize and tag photos, which has existed for years, it just seemed like a desirable thing for the PC to do). Everyone thought of this. There's a bit of a gap coming up with the "innovative" idea of automatic recognition, and actually implementing.
I am highly suspicious as to whether these gaps actually made it across that chasm, or whether they just thought "Gee, what a clever idea we had! Let's make a website and talk about it as if we invented it, and if we get enough attention and funding, then we'll invent it". Their "Screenshots" look completely bogus, and no one can actually test it out - instead you have to sign up for their "invite only" (if it's invite only, then why do you have to email them? Sounds more like random draw only) usage. Could a Slashdotter that "got in" tell us how good it works? I'm waiting.
If you had RTFA, you might have noticed that they key to it working is limiting data points
If you had read my comment, you might have noticed that I said that "ideal" situations include highly dissimilar people. Having pictures that are largely full of family members is a nightmare situation for facial recognition - most algorithms have a tough enough time even figuring out where faces are, much less differentiating between kin. The scam sensor went off even more when they made a big deal about the fact that it recognizes shirt color - yeah, that's useful: If all of your pictures are of hobos.
In other words, the population it works on is always small, just the people in the pictures you have in you picture collection.
My picture collection has dozens of people that faze in and out. Again, it would be cleaning up the mess of this things inaccurate guessing more than it would be helpful.
Thats because its not the same thing. Facebook cannot be trained to recognize faces. You have to tag it for every picture manually. The only doofus is you.
I'll bet in actual practice they are largely the same. I read this story and the "Begging for VC funding by grossly overstating capabilities" flag in my mind was waving at full mast. Face recognition is a technology in the infantile stage, and every demo that I've ever seen has used a database with just a couple of largely distinct faces: In reality with a large group of similar faces under less than ideal scenarios, it is close to useless. I know a lot of large organizations and security shops are being sold the face rec B.S., but face recognition in practice is close to useless.
Of course in this case I'm sure you're hoping that you "train" it with a set of just a few faces, and I'm sure then it could randomly guess and (if you have 4 faces) people would be amazed if it was right 25% of the time. Saying "oh it works but isn't really that accurate---but it's alpha!" is nonsense. They either have the technology, or they don't, and if it's marginally accurate (so you're spending most of your time correcting it) then it's truly worse than nothing.
Paternity tests...god...give me a break. This story has every hallmark of a scam. It sounds like the endless "super compression" stories.
It will be interesting to see how long it will take the free software world to come up with something similar :)
Aren't there quite a few Java Operating System initiatives out there already? (both free and open source, and commercial) Basically the same idea.
More like, "Google uses it, and Microsoft invented it".
Indeed. This story is absolutely unbelievable revisionist history and nonsense. I've written about my feelings of AJAX (in fact I was honored to see that an AC already referenced it in this thread), and this article is exactly what pisses me off about the new-to-web-apps "AJAX" converts. This messaging expert is yet another dumb-ass trying to get in on the Web 2.0 action to earn some VC funding. She even used the word "paradigm" to really put up the flags.
It sounds like you're describing a situation like the current one with Internet Explorer.
Exactly. Even in cases where Internet Explorer is domainant, the web road is still open to alternative browsers, so there hasn't been lock-in. It is very comparable.
I agree that this sucks, but it really isn't that bad
I can appreciate that my post may have sound cynical or anti-Microsoft, but it was nothing of the sort - it was a completely emotionless, pragmatic guess of what's going to happen with this over the coming years. The ODF isn't exclusive of Microsoft, so if it "wins" (which I think it will), Microsoft can still win on the client side by adopting and embracing it (which I think they will). Mind you the open, unencumbered format will allow for a lot more dynamics on the server side (e.g. document parsers and processors, etc), but I think the ascent of ODF in no way indicates that OpenOffice is going to make headway.
Are the mods huffing kittens or something?
:-)
Several posts were bizarrely moderated. I think a very angry person got mod points today.
I agree that Microsoft will try (RTF, anyone?), but long term I think that Microsoft just has too many anti-trust watchers breathing down their necks at the moment
While I could imagine some division heads or rogue employees putting intentional "quirks" in, I think just as a nature of the beast OpenDocument isn't an absolutely literally interpreted format (e.g. it isn't an output layout format like PDF), so like HTML there will be some variations in the way it is interpreted. If Office becomes the dominant platform, it will also be considered the "right" platform, regardless of how correct or not that is. If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
Honestly I don't think I was being pessimistic - in the Office wars I do think Microsoft has a vastly superior offering, and if it's just a matter of supporting this format to make some states happy, then after a brief resistance I think they will. Everything will go on just like it was, albeit with a new document format.
Three years from now OpenDocument will be pervasive (the momentum is getting too great for it to fail now, especially when organizations face just as big of a transition to OfficeXML if they decided to go that route), and the #1 implementation, by far, will be Microsoft Office. All of the state governments will be running Office 12+OpenDocument SP1, and interacting just like they did previously. Of course a document opened in OpenOffice, or others, will be slightly different, and users will attribute it to quirks of OpenOffice, further marginalizing it.
Sidenote: That bloody PIX SPORTS ad does more to encourage ad blocking software than any counter-commercial advocate.
Seriously, there are physical laws involved here.
[This is not my field, so I'm likely just talking nonsense. All apologies]
You've brought up some great points, but ultimately you've offered nothing to quantify if such a feat is actually impossible - yes, it's difficult and it will take advances, but simply saying "sounds big...impossible" seems incredibly short sighted. 5 years ago I was using an Olympus digital SLR that offered 1MP, and had an ISO selection of 25 or 50. I now have a Canon Digital Rebel XT SLR that offers 8MP with a better picture at an ISO of 1600 than that prior camera managed at ISO 25. I imagine then there was someone saying "we're pushing the limits of CCD technology here".
Regarding whether you're getting down to the photon level - that seems a bit ridiculous. You can get a clear, fully defined image through a single strand of fiberglass.
A lens of the size that will fit into a cellphone is never going to be good enough to take very good pictures. The quality is not a function of materials, but of size.
:-) Seriously, CCDs are gaining sensitivity (and losing noise) by leaps and bounds, and with time they will be able to pack the density into such a small package that a tiny lens will be completely sufficient.
Never say never.
Those camera phones? They're fine for people wanting to just send a quick pic to their friends---hey, look, I'm in Rome---but I don't know of anybody who would consider any of them good enough for taking photos that they want to keep.
They're getting there. Personally I think they're generally garbage, but at some point the CCDs are going to get sensitive and small enough, and the lenses high enough of quality, that it will start eating into the low end digicam market (indeed - it already has). You can now get cell phones with 1MP+ digital cameras in there. It's only a matter of time.
increasibly? Now that's an interesting new word. Make that increasingly.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
Umm...probably not what you think it will be?
The amount of power that a cell phone is using constantly keeping in touch with the cell tower, powering the display, and carrying out a conversation (where it becomes a radio station) is enormous compared to the miniscule power needs of an MP3 player. The power impact of playing MP3s on a cell phone would be marginal at best.
I want specialized devices, not a "jack of all trades, master of none" device and I don't think I am alone in this.
This line gets dragged out everytime this gets brought up, yet already our electronics have seen integration, and it is only going to continue - indeed accelerate. There is a point in PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones, where it is good enough to completely satsify the majority of consumers - it is, in effect, a master of the realm if it satisfies the consumer, even if a specialized high-end stand-alone unit lets them add irrelevant effects to their music. I love my Digital Rebel XT, yet there are a lot of people for whom the digital camera in their cell phone is more than adequate (with extreme portability to boot).
My cell phone already has a pretty powerful processor in it, a good colour screen, a very capable data entry/navigation system, it's tiny, and has a fantastic battery. Flash memory is getting ultra cheap, so it's obvious that cell phones are increasibly going to integrate MP3 players (and FM radios), and even video and PDA functionality (of course you could say that PDAs are integrating cell phones - it's all the same thing). Why should I carry three different devices - all of them powered by general purpose CPUs (often the SAME CPU) just running different software, with a slightly different form?
Hate to point out the obvious, but apple does like control over products using it's services. Is it really that far fetched?
Of course it isn't - if you're leveraging Apple's stuff, then prepare for them to protect their own best interests as well. However the idea that they were trying to sour consumers on the idea of integrated devices sounds a little bit ridiculous (though it earned that terribly-heavyweight site lots of views) - Consumers don't have such a disconnect between devices, and a good MP3 player, whether a part of a cellphone, a PDA, or a stand-alone, is a good MP3 player, and the bad ones are bad ones. Indeed, there are a lot of terrible stand-alone MP3 players by shoddy companies, but I'd hardly say that it "soured the market" such that the iPod couldn't happen. It sounds more likely that Apple wanted to limit how much the specific device ate into their own sales - all of the advantages of the iPod, but with a couple of limitations. It says or predicts nothinga bout competing devices.
Personally I think the time is long overdue for good integrated cell/pda/mp3 players. MP3 playing in particular is so trivial that it's absurd that we have such powerful electronics that we lug around, but they can't credibly and easily play mp3s. Usually the implementation is ridiculously short sighted (I got a PDA to double as an MP3 player, and everything worked great but the DAC was terribly low quality. A couple of cents and they destroyed that entire use).
and what happened to Mike Rowe ? the dude that owned mikerowesoft website ? that doesnt even apply to trademark rules because it his his freaking name (poor dude) and he can't use it ?
o wesoft.settle.ap/
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/26/miker
You are infringing if you're intentionally, or even unintentionally, causing significant consumer confusion. e.g. If your name is Nissan and you run a computer store, but you decide that you'll stick car advertisements on your domain, then that causes consumer confusion. If your name is Mike Rowe, and to capitalize on the confusion and similarity to the largest software company in the world you call yourself MikeRoweSoft, verbally indistinguishable.
There is no blanket judgement that can be passed, but ultimately it is in the consumers best interest that we aren't being deceived by similar or manipulative names. I don't want a restaurant serving me Koke if I asked for a coke, and I don't want my car serviced with Genuine Hawnda Parts.
investor: "Wow, Microsoft is really going to push that online stuff. Let me call my broker."
Yeah because they're squeaking by with only about $13 billion in profits a quarter. Hopefully they can try to get into a lucrative online game like advertising.... zzzzz...
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/11/01.html#a149
Have you ever tried developing software using nothing more than the platform SDK? Or the .Net SDK for that matter? For anything more than a couple files, using it becomes unwieldy. That is, of course, unless you like writing nmake makefiles.
.Net framework could speed its adoption quite nicely. It might cut into a very small portion of the market that would purchase VS Standard, but it could also increase the market size, and sell both more copies of VS Pro/MSDN Universal and licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server.
... neigh decades.
Right. We're comparing against open-source, free development tools, which are often of the nmake variety.
I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one. I don't know where you got this idea that you get absolutely no optimization in the Express editions, but it's wrong.
"Calling bullshit" and simply saying "sorry that's wrong" are two different things. Note the prior poster who corrected my statement (I was obviously thinking of the free C++ compiler that Microsoft released). Nonetheless, no serious developer is using Express editions to do their work.
Second, there is a surpising number of people who believe that pirating software is unethical.
What's your point? You're going completely offtrack.
Releasing full fledged free development tools that target the
You're just fully missing the point. Of course there's a strategic reason for Microsoft doing this, just like they've always basically given away software, be it SDKs, educational copies, friends-of-Microsoft employee discounts, free with events (what do you know - I just got a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Biztalk 2006, and SQL Server 2005 Standard today for going to a useful Microsoft event), etc. Obviously they do this for a reason, but the whole point of this discussion was that it isn't, and has never been, because they're learning from or competing against open source. Indeed, open source and "free as in beer" software was, in wide proliferation, late to the game. That technique has been used for years
Someone in Microsoft finally clued into the fact that giving away this software would make them far more money than selling it ever would.
What utter nonsense.
Firstly, as the other person mentioned - the thread was explicitly about SQL Server Express Edition, which is a variation of something that Microsoft has been doing since SQL Server 7 (when the MSDE first appeared). Not to mention things like the JET engine have always been freely distributable.
Secondly, Microsoft has offered a free SDK/Platform SDK for years. This is a very comprehensive kit that can be used to develop software.
The whole focus is wrong anyways - the Express editions of Visual Studio, which have some killer limitations (e.g. complete lack of optimization), are targetted at dabblers. These dabblers would never, in a million years, try getting going with Eclipse or the like. At the most they'd warez an ISO of Visual Studio Pro.
Which brings up the next point - Microsoft has always been relatively hands off about piracy of Visual Studio. That is their tacit real "Free" version. Even Visual Studio 2005 doesn't include activation or any other anti-warez measures.
That can be said of any country's history.
Okay...are you refuting something I said? My original reply was to someone who claimed that China's great ascent happened without any of the downsides of the countries that preceded her. I refuted that.
HAHA... spoken like a person who's never lived and worked there
I'm not talking about China 2005 - I'm talking about China 1985, or even 1995. China has made tremendous progress in the past several decades.