So they took the clean code they had from their server core (maybe from the next server edition, maybe from 2003?) and then used that to create Longhorn. So no, they didn't start from scratch, but they aren't building upon the XP quicksand foundation either.
XP quicksand? You do realize, don't you, that Windows 2003 is an updated version of XP (plus several updated Windows 2000 Server components), right? Just because XP targeted the desktop userbase doesn't mean that it was from a less stable code branch.
I find it remarkable that in all of the talk here...
No one has mentioned that one of the reasons insiders say that Vista was rebuilt was because they first tried to do it largely in.NET. In the rebuild they just did a Get Latest of Windows Server 2003 and updated the modules in classic Win[32/64] style.
That anyone actually believes the "rebuilt from scratch". That is unbelievably nonsensical. If "by scratch" they mean "the largely superficial eyecandy from scratch", then sure, but if anyone thinks they started the OS from the ground up...
I got this all the time too - apparently this isn't a Firefox problem but instead a memory leak in the Flash plugin.
I read the blog and it doesn't seem convincing - there is a bit of a comment about Flash being the culprit, but then he/she segues to limiting the use of memory for caching.
Of course countless expanding memory caches have been misidentified as "leaks" over the years - SQL Server, for instance, will gobble up all available memory to use as a data cache, but it does it slowly as it pulls in data (just like Firefox does as you browses the web), utilizing memory as a much faster way of accessing data. As such there have been endless claims of SQL Server's "memory leak", and how people "solved" it by setting the governor limiting how much memory SQL Server will consume (all so they can sit and admire the high amount of unutilized available memory on their boxen). It should be noted that SQL Server relinquishes memory as other applications start asking for it (dunno if Firefox does the same).
Where's the proof this guy is a Microsoft employee?
How many Microsoft employees have disputed it? Mini has stated a lot of inside information that real employees of Microsoft could easily confirm or deny, and I have never heard a viable claim that Mini isn't real. It's pretty much considered a given that Mini is real, and their comments have been validated by known insiders quite a few times.
would they make similar comments if they worked at some other large corporation?
Most large corporations suck, and that is precisely what Mini has been trying to say all along. Saying that HP is even more sucky says nothing, and pretty much entirely misses the whole point. In Vietnam people work in sweat shops from 6am to 11pm every day for pennies, but I'm not going to use that to validate poor working conditions here.
I've worked at several corporations, and while a couple were pretty good, there were some terrible corporations that are nothing but endless shuffles of executives building empires and covering their asses (and absolutely RAPING the financials of the company for themselves), building a world of executives, and a completely separate world of plebs. Mini's various comments makes it sound like Microsoft is evolving to this, and given Microsoft's storied past that is quite simply sad.
Sigh. Pedantry is lame, but rediculous has been a particularly virulent misspelling. ridiculous. If I can stop just one person from perpetuating this, then this post will be worth it.
Unlike this "$30 million dollars to piss in the public's faces" lab
To use some of their own lame terminology, I want the magic of the movies to continue. I want them to spend $300 million on the next hyper-realistic super-imaginary world, and I'm willing to be one of those few stupid people to see it in a theatre, or to buy it or rent it on DVD. If the investment needs protecting to be financially viable in the future, then they should go nuts. If it thwarts you and your false-moral belief that you have some sort of God given right to free Olsen twins movies, well that's too bad for you.
I should note that the article claims that it detects the special properties of camera lenses. I'd guess that they must be using a certain wavelength of IR, and detecting the magnesium flouride that is often used an an antireflective coating on lenses. Of course they claim it's some sort retroreflective counting, so who knows.
But if the beam is going to be strong enough to completely blind a camera, I'd be really concerned about what it could do for the eyes.
It isn't the IR that blinds the camera - the IR is simply to look for reflections, like those given off by lenses (and, of course, eyeglasses). When the IR gets a "hit", a directed beam of light (flashlight on a servo?) is aimed at the lens. Pretty low tech really. Given that we've had "lens detection" devices for years (decades? The military is a big fan), the real story seems to be the rather lame application. I guess the "amorous couple" (per the article) is going to carry around some sort of detection/light device with them? Give me a break.
You can use VS2005 Beta 2 in a release environment: it's got a Go Live license.
Very good point, and that clarification is necessary as I was ambiguous in my first post. Instead I meant that until the final release, few organizations want to, or will allow, the use of Whidbey, for development. It is a rare, edge shop that is actually taking advantage of the Go Live license.
No, I said nothing about any sort of user voting or promotion to the main site.
I would just like the ability to see all of the rejected submissions, with or without the ability for user comments. I have a general feeling that a lot of useful tech news is passed through Slashdot every day, but of course much of it gets rejected.
Wouldn't you just love to see the news stories that CmdrTaco reject this morning in favor of this one?
I would love to see the rejected stories. Slashdot should publish rejected stories via a voluntary feed, and let us (the readership) choose what is important and interesting or not. Obviously it would be vulnerable to spamming and trolling, but both could largely be taken care of with a half decent bayesian filter.
Fat clients? You do know that the majority of.NET development occurs in the web services/web app space, right? Even then, middle-tier services in.NET are just as usable by a web facade as they are a fat client. In no way is this a fat client-only technology.
One area of intensive research in IT for years is setting up a portable high-performance disconnect between database and other tiers.
It is high-performance. Watch the demo - at one point Anders sets up a log, and you can see that the LINQ query was transformed into the appropriate, performant T-SQL which is passed to the RDBMS. It isn't doing the standard, shittacular "pull everything back in a terribly unscalable manner and then filter it in the middle tier", but rather appears to be analyzing the whole of the query and communicating it effectively to the source.
Embedded SQL in computer languages has been around for a very long time
It isn't embedded SQL. It's set operations that obviously share commonalities with SQL, but are largely different. Again, have you watched the video or read the spec? DLINQ, by the way, is the ORM system that makes the objectpersistence "transparent" (leaky abstraction, like all ORMs, but still).
Also, I can't believe that MS C# is going to include support for MySQL, Postgresql etc, like Hibernate, NHibernate, JDO etc.
I doubt it'll include support either, out of the box. Instead, like always, they've created a generalized data services layer that any provider can plug into - create a ADO.NET 3.0 data provider for MySQL, and your data service can be the target of LINQ operations.
But then, Bill Gates himself said that the only thing wrong with Delphi was that it wasn't a Microsoft product.
What are you talking about? I used Delphi for years, and then switched to.NET, and while Anders of course brought a lot of Delphi-ism to the.NET Framework and C#, these new C# 3.0 additions are nothing like Delphi, and C# 2.0 is already worlds beyond what Delphi ever achieved. LINQ, and DLINQ, are very exciting improvements in removing the disconnect between the database and the middle/front tier, and given the tremendous importance of that it will be remarkable.
The toughest thing about this sort of technology, though, is that it isn't complete and usable in real projects, so as developers we're uncertain how much time to waste playing with the demos and learning (how many developers must be pissed seeing the hype machine starting over C# 3.0, when they still don't even have the ability to use C# 2.0 in production - e.g. VS.NET 2005 is only at the RC stage). Unless you're a blogger or writer making money writing about how much it makes you wet your pants, there's just no practicality in it.
Natural or man-made, if things continue to get warmer, we're going to have to figure something out, or else risk losing our civilization as we know it.
Isn't that a bit dramatic? Or by "as we know it" do you mean "exactly like it is today"? If so that is an untenable goal, and we'd have to fight nature tooth and nail to maintain - how and where we live, the energy we use, and how we adapt to the environment will be changing for time eternal, just as it has changed for time eternal.
As another poster rightly mentioned, about 10,000 years ago there was an ice age. Where I am sitting, here in the Toronto area, was under massive glaciers (oh noes! The oceans must have run out of water!). 10,000 years - that is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket of Earth history, yet there were giant 100s of feet deep glaciers covers 10s of millions of sq. km of land. Imagine the ecological "damage" this unleashed, such a dramatic, extraordinary earth change? Damn you mother nature!
This isn't to discount the reality that we as humans need to absolutely understand our impact on our environment, but it isn't a simple case of "every change is negative, and every change is caused by humans, and every change is well understood". Even if humans are indeed causing the Earth to heat up, an opinion that there is not any moderate amount of scientific consensus on, then perhaps it's avoiding the next ice age - Imagine all of the poor animals that will be saved.
Yes, for several years the PPC604 and G3 were faster than x86 by quite a bit.
I don't dispute that they were competitive at times, but I remember at the time it was much more of an even race (at least when compared by less biased sources than Mac fanzines), or with x86 in the lead. e.g. As has been the history of the PPC, they would come out of the gates with grand claims of remarkable performance, and then the real-world benchmarkers would get ahold of it and render the claims ludicrous.
Because apple doesn't care about top-end performance.
Have Apple PCs ever been ahead in performance? Of course I'm talking about real performance, and not ridiculously narrow, artificial tests to highlight a largely irrelevant strong point.
I don't mean this to discount Apple, and the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with, but I just don't buy the mythology of the hyper-super-mega PowerPC chips - always barnburners on paper when they're long in the future.
"Those delays are set to end late next year with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95."
This quote comes from the article, not Microsoft (though it might have indirectly), however this same claim is made for every single generational release. Every media outlet picks it up and repeats it like a mantra "Most important, most significant release since Windows 95". Blah.
This doesn't imply that there's such a vast bulk of Slashdotters that they overwhelmed him - I'd bet a dozen users simultaneously going to his site crashed it. It appears that he's running a database driven instance of Wordpress, so of course it's all being generated from the db for every request (I don't use or know much about Wordpress - does it even do caching?). I chose a blog package specifically because it allowed me to generate entirely static content, avoiding endlessly, and redundantly, rebuilding the same page.
and Airgo seems to be trying to get their own proprietary technology out there in front of the legitimate standards process
It'll probably be a kick in the ass of the standards process (which tend to be long and drawn out while various corporations fight over triviality, each trying to choose the colour of the shed). In any case, this is exactly what happened with 802.11g. In fact my router was a pre-g, which I then firmware updated to the real g when it was finally standardized. If some companies didn't vault out of the gate early, they'd probably still be arguing over nomenclature.
Most spammer businesses seem to be based out of Boca Raton, FL
The businesses themselves might be, but the hordes of trojaned or rented computers circle the globe. This service is merely tracing the source IP and mapping that.
Personally I think it's pretty craptacular. I was expecting something like colour coding of each country per the current volume of spam emanating from them, perhaps zoomable to political subdivisions (state, etc). Some lamely coded pushpins doesn't really provide a lot of info.
bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them
You say this like bloggers are polluting the work of some sort of all-knowing illuminati - an illuminati that is trusted with the responsibility of all outgoing links, carefully and in an unbiased manner choosing their link wording and targets to best serve the search community and the workings of Google's algorithm and PageRank(TM). Such an ideal doesn't exist, and has never existed.
For time eternal, since the origins of the web, people have linked to their pet interests, quid pro quoing links or favouring friends (even amongst the big sites one can see seemingly meaningless links appearing to partners and friends, and you know it's such PageRank goodness). "Bloggers", a term which encompasses just about everyone in either fact or capability, are just playing the game that existed since search engines started counting links and considering them votes. Of course there are a lot of bloggers, and they tend to link other bloggers, so there has been a deflation in the value of individual links. You can read more about my thoughts on this on my super important best blog in the world (I joke with the link text, as Slashdot uses nofollow, so that should be meaningless to search engines).
True enough. The wood was also very prevalent. I remember once I made a webpage with fall leaves as the background (this was very early on). You couldn't read any of the text, but "OMG! Look at how cool the leaves look!"
Slashdot Mirror
XP quicksand? You do realize, don't you, that Windows 2003 is an updated version of XP (plus several updated Windows 2000 Server components), right? Just because XP targeted the desktop userbase doesn't mean that it was from a less stable code branch.
I find it remarkable that in all of the talk here...
I got this all the time too - apparently this isn't a Firefox problem but instead a memory leak in the Flash plugin.
I read the blog and it doesn't seem convincing - there is a bit of a comment about Flash being the culprit, but then he/she segues to limiting the use of memory for caching.
Of course countless expanding memory caches have been misidentified as "leaks" over the years - SQL Server, for instance, will gobble up all available memory to use as a data cache, but it does it slowly as it pulls in data (just like Firefox does as you browses the web), utilizing memory as a much faster way of accessing data. As such there have been endless claims of SQL Server's "memory leak", and how people "solved" it by setting the governor limiting how much memory SQL Server will consume (all so they can sit and admire the high amount of unutilized available memory on their boxen). It should be noted that SQL Server relinquishes memory as other applications start asking for it (dunno if Firefox does the same).
I suspect the Firefox "fix" is much the same.
Where's the proof this guy is a Microsoft employee?
How many Microsoft employees have disputed it? Mini has stated a lot of inside information that real employees of Microsoft could easily confirm or deny, and I have never heard a viable claim that Mini isn't real. It's pretty much considered a given that Mini is real, and their comments have been validated by known insiders quite a few times.
would they make similar comments if they worked at some other large corporation?
Most large corporations suck, and that is precisely what Mini has been trying to say all along. Saying that HP is even more sucky says nothing, and pretty much entirely misses the whole point. In Vietnam people work in sweat shops from 6am to 11pm every day for pennies, but I'm not going to use that to validate poor working conditions here.
I've worked at several corporations, and while a couple were pretty good, there were some terrible corporations that are nothing but endless shuffles of executives building empires and covering their asses (and absolutely RAPING the financials of the company for themselves), building a world of executives, and a completely separate world of plebs. Mini's various comments makes it sound like Microsoft is evolving to this, and given Microsoft's storied past that is quite simply sad.
hope you dont invalidate it because i misspelled something, but i know thats just the way some people cope with ideas they do not like
No, people usually do that with a strawman and caricatures.
Don't be rediculous
Sigh. Pedantry is lame, but rediculous has been a particularly virulent misspelling. ridiculous. If I can stop just one person from perpetuating this, then this post will be worth it.
Unlike this "$30 million dollars to piss in the public's faces" lab
To use some of their own lame terminology, I want the magic of the movies to continue. I want them to spend $300 million on the next hyper-realistic super-imaginary world, and I'm willing to be one of those few stupid people to see it in a theatre, or to buy it or rent it on DVD. If the investment needs protecting to be financially viable in the future, then they should go nuts. If it thwarts you and your false-moral belief that you have some sort of God given right to free Olsen twins movies, well that's too bad for you.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=russia+ship+la ser+canadian+helicopter&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
I should note that the article claims that it detects the special properties of camera lenses. I'd guess that they must be using a certain wavelength of IR, and detecting the magnesium flouride that is often used an an antireflective coating on lenses. Of course they claim it's some sort retroreflective counting, so who knows.
But if the beam is going to be strong enough to completely blind a camera, I'd be really concerned about what it could do for the eyes.
It isn't the IR that blinds the camera - the IR is simply to look for reflections, like those given off by lenses (and, of course, eyeglasses). When the IR gets a "hit", a directed beam of light (flashlight on a servo?) is aimed at the lens. Pretty low tech really. Given that we've had "lens detection" devices for years (decades? The military is a big fan), the real story seems to be the rather lame application. I guess the "amorous couple" (per the article) is going to carry around some sort of detection/light device with them? Give me a break.
Lame.
You can use VS2005 Beta 2 in a release environment: it's got a Go Live license.
Very good point, and that clarification is necessary as I was ambiguous in my first post. Instead I meant that until the final release, few organizations want to, or will allow, the use of Whidbey, for development. It is a rare, edge shop that is actually taking advantage of the Go Live license.
No, I said nothing about any sort of user voting or promotion to the main site.
I would just like the ability to see all of the rejected submissions, with or without the ability for user comments. I have a general feeling that a lot of useful tech news is passed through Slashdot every day, but of course much of it gets rejected.
Wouldn't you just love to see the news stories that CmdrTaco reject this morning in favor of this one?
I would love to see the rejected stories. Slashdot should publish rejected stories via a voluntary feed, and let us (the readership) choose what is important and interesting or not. Obviously it would be vulnerable to spamming and trolling, but both could largely be taken care of with a half decent bayesian filter.
Come on Taco - do it.
All hail our new fat client overloads. Oh joy.
.NET development occurs in the web services/web app space, right? Even then, middle-tier services in .NET are just as usable by a web facade as they are a fat client. In no way is this a fat client-only technology.
Fat clients? You do know that the majority of
One area of intensive research in IT for years is setting up a portable high-performance disconnect between database and other tiers.
It is high-performance. Watch the demo - at one point Anders sets up a log, and you can see that the LINQ query was transformed into the appropriate, performant T-SQL which is passed to the RDBMS. It isn't doing the standard, shittacular "pull everything back in a terribly unscalable manner and then filter it in the middle tier", but rather appears to be analyzing the whole of the query and communicating it effectively to the source.
Embedded SQL in computer languages has been around for a very long time
It isn't embedded SQL. It's set operations that obviously share commonalities with SQL, but are largely different. Again, have you watched the video or read the spec? DLINQ, by the way, is the ORM system that makes the objectpersistence "transparent" (leaky abstraction, like all ORMs, but still).
Also, I can't believe that MS C# is going to include support for MySQL, Postgresql etc, like Hibernate, NHibernate, JDO etc.
I doubt it'll include support either, out of the box. Instead, like always, they've created a generalized data services layer that any provider can plug into - create a ADO.NET 3.0 data provider for MySQL, and your data service can be the target of LINQ operations.
But then, Bill Gates himself said that the only thing wrong with Delphi was that it wasn't a Microsoft product.
.NET, and while Anders of course brought a lot of Delphi-ism to the .NET Framework and C#, these new C# 3.0 additions are nothing like Delphi, and C# 2.0 is already worlds beyond what Delphi ever achieved. LINQ, and DLINQ, are very exciting improvements in removing the disconnect between the database and the middle/front tier, and given the tremendous importance of that it will be remarkable.
What are you talking about? I used Delphi for years, and then switched to
The toughest thing about this sort of technology, though, is that it isn't complete and usable in real projects, so as developers we're uncertain how much time to waste playing with the demos and learning (how many developers must be pissed seeing the hype machine starting over C# 3.0, when they still don't even have the ability to use C# 2.0 in production - e.g. VS.NET 2005 is only at the RC stage). Unless you're a blogger or writer making money writing about how much it makes you wet your pants, there's just no practicality in it.
http://www.wimaxtrends.com/articles/archives/a0314 05a.htm
Natural or man-made, if things continue to get warmer, we're going to have to figure something out, or else risk losing our civilization as we know it.
Isn't that a bit dramatic? Or by "as we know it" do you mean "exactly like it is today"? If so that is an untenable goal, and we'd have to fight nature tooth and nail to maintain - how and where we live, the energy we use, and how we adapt to the environment will be changing for time eternal, just as it has changed for time eternal.
As another poster rightly mentioned, about 10,000 years ago there was an ice age. Where I am sitting, here in the Toronto area, was under massive glaciers (oh noes! The oceans must have run out of water!). 10,000 years - that is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket of Earth history, yet there were giant 100s of feet deep glaciers covers 10s of millions of sq. km of land. Imagine the ecological "damage" this unleashed, such a dramatic, extraordinary earth change? Damn you mother nature!
This isn't to discount the reality that we as humans need to absolutely understand our impact on our environment, but it isn't a simple case of "every change is negative, and every change is caused by humans, and every change is well understood". Even if humans are indeed causing the Earth to heat up, an opinion that there is not any moderate amount of scientific consensus on, then perhaps it's avoiding the next ice age - Imagine all of the poor animals that will be saved.
Yes, for several years the PPC604 and G3 were faster than x86 by quite a bit.
I don't dispute that they were competitive at times, but I remember at the time it was much more of an even race (at least when compared by less biased sources than Mac fanzines), or with x86 in the lead. e.g. As has been the history of the PPC, they would come out of the gates with grand claims of remarkable performance, and then the real-world benchmarkers would get ahold of it and render the claims ludicrous.
e.g.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/96/11/270/
Era of the Pentium Pro and the PPC 604e. They found them to be evenly matched overall.
Because apple doesn't care about top-end performance.
Have Apple PCs ever been ahead in performance? Of course I'm talking about real performance, and not ridiculously narrow, artificial tests to highlight a largely irrelevant strong point.
I don't mean this to discount Apple, and the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with, but I just don't buy the mythology of the hyper-super-mega PowerPC chips - always barnburners on paper when they're long in the future.
Is SVG dead?
"Those delays are set to end late next year with the simultaneous launch of new versions of Windows and the Office suite of PC applications in the company's most significant new product cycle since Windows 95."
This quote comes from the article, not Microsoft (though it might have indirectly), however this same claim is made for every single generational release. Every media outlet picks it up and repeats it like a mantra "Most important, most significant release since Windows 95". Blah.
This doesn't imply that there's such a vast bulk of Slashdotters that they overwhelmed him - I'd bet a dozen users simultaneously going to his site crashed it. It appears that he's running a database driven instance of Wordpress, so of course it's all being generated from the db for every request (I don't use or know much about Wordpress - does it even do caching?). I chose a blog package specifically because it allowed me to generate entirely static content, avoiding endlessly, and redundantly, rebuilding the same page.
and Airgo seems to be trying to get their own proprietary technology out there in front of the legitimate standards process
It'll probably be a kick in the ass of the standards process (which tend to be long and drawn out while various corporations fight over triviality, each trying to choose the colour of the shed). In any case, this is exactly what happened with 802.11g. In fact my router was a pre-g, which I then firmware updated to the real g when it was finally standardized. If some companies didn't vault out of the gate early, they'd probably still be arguing over nomenclature.
Most spammer businesses seem to be based out of Boca Raton, FL
The businesses themselves might be, but the hordes of trojaned or rented computers circle the globe. This service is merely tracing the source IP and mapping that.
Personally I think it's pretty craptacular. I was expecting something like colour coding of each country per the current volume of spam emanating from them, perhaps zoomable to political subdivisions (state, etc). Some lamely coded pushpins doesn't really provide a lot of info.
bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them
You say this like bloggers are polluting the work of some sort of all-knowing illuminati - an illuminati that is trusted with the responsibility of all outgoing links, carefully and in an unbiased manner choosing their link wording and targets to best serve the search community and the workings of Google's algorithm and PageRank(TM). Such an ideal doesn't exist, and has never existed.
For time eternal, since the origins of the web, people have linked to their pet interests, quid pro quoing links or favouring friends (even amongst the big sites one can see seemingly meaningless links appearing to partners and friends, and you know it's such PageRank goodness). "Bloggers", a term which encompasses just about everyone in either fact or capability, are just playing the game that existed since search engines started counting links and considering them votes. Of course there are a lot of bloggers, and they tend to link other bloggers, so there has been a deflation in the value of individual links. You can read more about my thoughts on this on my super important best blog in the world (I joke with the link text, as Slashdot uses nofollow, so that should be meaningless to search engines).
I thought that was the wood panel background?
True enough. The wood was also very prevalent. I remember once I made a webpage with fall leaves as the background (this was very early on). You couldn't read any of the text, but "OMG! Look at how cool the leaves look!"