If you've got firebug enabled, it tends to chew through memory more rapidly. Most of the memory issues are due to circular references between the DOM and javascript on Web 2.0y sites that do a lot of DOM manipulation: http://blog.grimpoteuthis.org/2005/01/dhtml-leaks-like-sieve.html
Actually, having read the book, that's not it at all. The thesis of the book is that success is not the product of pure personal genius. The chapters go on to illustrate that the very top tiers of success, the outliers, got their not from inherent ability, but by the combined force of access, lucky breaks, effort, societal influence demonstrating the rewards of hard work, etc. It argues that an appreciation of these facts can help society not lose out on those who don't have these contributors to their success by providing them (for example, far more children would do well in school simply from longer hours and breaking up the school year so that classes start at different times based on 3-month age brackets instead of 12).
Actually, Sun essentially forced MS to fight against Java by not letting MS devs take the idea and run with it (which in a sense, is understandable since one of the goals of Java is interoperability). This meant that if an MS dev wanted to play with the language runtime idea, they had to do it on their own and thus the CLR was born, and C#, and Anders etc. In my mind this kind of competition is a good thing, especially as I watch the evolution of C# vs Java which started from a similar base. Java seems to be going down the path of conceptual purity and simplicity when it comes to the language while C# is introducing all sorts of convenience features such as LINQ, closures and other craziness (which in my mind just makes hard to read code, but then, there's always disagreements about where to draw the line).
Really? To me it sounds like a typical pie-in-the-sky, "we haven't actually implemented this but we think it should work with just a little more effort" typical research paper to me. MSR is often more tied to academia than it is to product development although they've been working to better push ideas to the development side of the R&D slider.
The main issue right now is that a given web page often displays information from separate sources. The classic example at this point is that if I want to display ads on my web page, I have to bring in content from another source, and I essentially have to trust that content not to do tricky things with JavaScript to muck with my page - you know, display obnoxious, or worse, spoof UI, scrape user data, attack a browser vulnerability, all sorts of nastiness. Ads aren't the only example of this, the same is true of mashups ala housingmaps.com etc.
Relying on the OS is essentially what this paper is proposing as far as I can tell. They suggest that each part of a page that is relying on a different source for its content be sandboxed in its own process. However, doing this requires changes to the browser since current browsers don't do this (although Chrome and IE8 do work to isolate each tab in its own process). There are other proposals out there in the wild such as Web Sandbox discussed recently: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F28%2F188254&from=rss , which takes a different approach (sanitizing javascript for badness and restricting its access to the main page).
Actually, they murdered them for competition, as Corporations tend to do (I'm pretty sure there's no one on any side of these markets that would turn away market share).
I think you're forgetting the D part of R&D. R&D covers regular product development (Windows, Office etc - the bread and butter of MS), not just whatever crazy ideas come out of MSR.
Didn't do any specific tests. The marketing material for W7 claims better battery life, but I'm not sure the comparison point (presumably Vista). It did manage to last something over 3 hours of active use web browsing while still reporting about 50% juice left. Not sure how that compares to the pre-installed Linux shell, which was a piece of crap. Wireless connectivity was flakey as hell, usually wouldn't even connect until I installed W7 at which point it worked flawlessly. Must be a driver thing, but you'd think the manufacturer would have that one figured out. Anyway, because of this I didn't really try it out since it really took the "net" out of netbook.
And actually, Windows 7, with all the eye candy, runs great on netbooks (one of the selling points). My girlfriend just got an Eee PC 1000, and we installed the beta. Runs great, all the graphical goodies (including whatever they're calling Aero Glass for Win7). If you take a look around the web, you'll see others have found the same thing. One of my coworkers dropped it on his Samsung netbook with similar results - it even boots, goes to sleep and wakes up faster than XP which came installed on it
That's just moronic. In a free market there would be no restriction on the flow of goods or labor. Microsoft would hire whoever the heck it wanted from whatever country they wanted instead of having to pay much more to hire immigration lawyers and sponsor visas and get a limited stream as they do now.
Besides which, as someone who works at Microsoft, I can also say my coworkers from other countries are, if anything, generally better quality than locals because it's such a pain in the ass to deal with visa issues that you better make sure they're worth it when you hire them. As far as pay goes, the pay scale is exactly the same and having spoken to my coworkers at the same level of seniority and performance, as myself, they get paid pretty much the same as me. This whole xenophobia thing is unbecoming.
Actually, you'd be surprised how much of Microsoft software does ship with source, or has source available (albeit under sometimes restrictive licensing terms). Most libraries like MFC, ATL, CRT, STL, and.Net do.
Funny, I always thought American business is a game where the winners are those who make the most money.
It's the rules of the game that determine what actions make the most money. If a company is allowed to save money by setting up shell ip holding corporations in countries with low (or no) taxes, it's not the company's fault. The only rational thing to do would be to create a shell holding company.
While I would never want to do it, the PM role (misleading in that it has the word "manager" in it - you don't actually have any control over people) might be for you. PMs do a lot of things from managing schedules, spec'ing features to inter-group communications. At a place like Microsoft, some teams have as much as a 1:2 ratio of PMs to devs. I imagine you'd mostly be looking at large companies that have a large number of nodes that need to communicate to reach that ratio.
If you read the rest of the sentence, they're referring to no new features since the M3 builds and the pre-beta from PDC. Also, that's based on the guy's limited playing around with the build. If you want to see the full review with a list-out of new features you can see it here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3223
Until you think that hey, I've got about 20 processes running and most of them are inactive most of the time. Why not free up RAM for disk caching for the active processes?
Of course, as a hardware manufacturer, it's in Apple's best interest to convince their users that in order to upgrade their software, they need to buy a shiny new box. Hence overstating system requirements as you note. So their decisions are just as avaricious, there are just different motivating factors.
Personally, I'd enjoy a more gender balanced workplace. The industry also stands to benefit greatly if we aren't turning away half the potential candidates.
I agree that the reason women aren't entering the field is because it's not attractive to them. I think it's extremely difficult to tell if a tendency like that is socialized, however evidence is mounting that it is. Girls have recently surpassed boys in standardized math testing while for years it was taken for granted that boys were just naturally better at math. Other cultures show different balances between women and men entering the same fields. Personally, given my experience with intro CS and the kinds of people who take it, I'm not surprised that it can turn off many women. It's not just creepy guys, there seemed to be an abundance of obnoxious, smelly and socially inept guys who thought they were all that. These people rarely actually were, but the bravado would be enough to turn many normal people away (not just women).
Yeah, and offer medical treatment to women whose health is at risk because of pregnancy and expect Christians to blow up doctors. (and that's limiting myself to modern atrocities - include historical ones and you have a lot worse stuff to bring up from inquisitions, crusades, witchcraft trials etc) Come on, quit associating an entire religion (including Atheism - the worlds worst mass murderers were communists like Stalin and Mao) with some wacko subset of it is bullshit. Agnostics are pretty much the only people who cannot blame their actions on faith (since you have to have faith that there is no god of which you are unaware to be an atheist).
Which is why the MS ads are advertising ninjitsu. They're taking the Mac ads and turning them into an insult to anyone running Windows (90% of the population). It's not that big of a leap and if Apple keeps doing them, that will be the impression people get.
Apple already comes off as stuck up. No one I know likes Justin Long's character. Pretty much everyone loves John Hodgman. The new ads work.
Believe me, MS has a lot more than $300M sitting in the bank so this isn't really a zero sum game. I imagine they've figured out that spending $300M on advertising has the potential to earn back more than $300M while hiring another 300 devs for a year doesn't (I'm just guessing, but I imagine it would cost about 1 million per developer per year when you add in a matching SDET, half a PM, a quarter of a manager, a twentieth of an admin, plus office space, hardware, it support, dev branches and build labs etc). Besides, if you check out the E7 blog, with 1000 devs already on Windows, the team might be at a point where the incremental cost of adding another dev in terms of productivity lost in terms of communication exceeds the productivity of that person.
Chances are, if you've got 2 or more gigs of RAM and a reasonable graphics card, Vista may be even faster in some respects than XP, particularly application startup and switching which window is on top.
The two perf hits most people run into is the additional graphics memory required to handle windows as textures on a surface (bitmaps essentially) instead of GDI draw calls (draw this line here, that box there etc) and the fact that a lot of the handy features like search indexing and preloading of frequently used applications in memory eat up a lot of system memory as well. 64-bit can also increase usage since all your pointers will end up taking up twice the space.
To be fair, MS made the mistake of not pushing these two items in the whole "Vista Capable" badging. In the memos released as part of the "Capable" lawsuite, it sounds like Intel trying to sell crappy integrated graphics chipsets was the culprit here, but MS probably shouldn't have caved. Especially since caving actually made Vista look painfully slow, it actually would have been in Vista's best interest to only certify graphics cards with acceptable perf.
Getting an adequate Vista PC is pretty cheap too - pretty much any modern processor will do and RAM is like $30/gig these days. Most graphics cards will do the trick now, even the integrated Intel ones. I think a lot of the confusion is that the typical items pushed by oems in the past as making things faster - more MHz, bigger HD aren't the keys to perf in Vista where RAM and having a graphics card with memory adequate for the resolution you're running at (a card with 256MB should be pretty safe and less than $100) are the number 1 concern for most users (you'll still need your fast proc if you're doing a lot of media encoding/decoding I suppose).
As opposed to having to install a plugin from Adobe that only works on "approved" (WTF - you mean browsers which have enough users to justify writing a plugin for? At least MS is supporting the Moonlight project, even paying for their plugin licensing so there's even an open source option for Silverlight) browsers?
Every time Microsoft opens more protocols, releases more code, and tries to work with the OSS community, instead of acting like children and calling names, I think the community should encourage Microsoft to continue the trend of migrating to a more open company.
Heck, I'd be a lot more surprised if the OSS crowd stopped acting like children and calling names. Or at least the/. crowed:).
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If you've got firebug enabled, it tends to chew through memory more rapidly. Most of the memory issues are due to circular references between the DOM and javascript on Web 2.0y sites that do a lot of DOM manipulation: http://blog.grimpoteuthis.org/2005/01/dhtml-leaks-like-sieve.html
As far as I know, IE8 is the first browser to actually fix this problem, which is awesome: http://blogs.msdn.com/ben_anderson/archive/2009/02/25/circular-references-no-more.aspx
Actually, having read the book, that's not it at all. The thesis of the book is that success is not the product of pure personal genius. The chapters go on to illustrate that the very top tiers of success, the outliers, got their not from inherent ability, but by the combined force of access, lucky breaks, effort, societal influence demonstrating the rewards of hard work, etc. It argues that an appreciation of these facts can help society not lose out on those who don't have these contributors to their success by providing them (for example, far more children would do well in school simply from longer hours and breaking up the school year so that classes start at different times based on 3-month age brackets instead of 12).
Actually, Sun essentially forced MS to fight against Java by not letting MS devs take the idea and run with it (which in a sense, is understandable since one of the goals of Java is interoperability). This meant that if an MS dev wanted to play with the language runtime idea, they had to do it on their own and thus the CLR was born, and C#, and Anders etc. In my mind this kind of competition is a good thing, especially as I watch the evolution of C# vs Java which started from a similar base. Java seems to be going down the path of conceptual purity and simplicity when it comes to the language while C# is introducing all sorts of convenience features such as LINQ, closures and other craziness (which in my mind just makes hard to read code, but then, there's always disagreements about where to draw the line).
Really? To me it sounds like a typical pie-in-the-sky, "we haven't actually implemented this but we think it should work with just a little more effort" typical research paper to me. MSR is often more tied to academia than it is to product development although they've been working to better push ideas to the development side of the R&D slider.
The main issue right now is that a given web page often displays information from separate sources. The classic example at this point is that if I want to display ads on my web page, I have to bring in content from another source, and I essentially have to trust that content not to do tricky things with JavaScript to muck with my page - you know, display obnoxious, or worse, spoof UI, scrape user data, attack a browser vulnerability, all sorts of nastiness. Ads aren't the only example of this, the same is true of mashups ala housingmaps.com etc.
Relying on the OS is essentially what this paper is proposing as far as I can tell. They suggest that each part of a page that is relying on a different source for its content be sandboxed in its own process. However, doing this requires changes to the browser since current browsers don't do this (although Chrome and IE8 do work to isolate each tab in its own process). There are other proposals out there in the wild such as Web Sandbox discussed recently: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F28%2F188254&from=rss , which takes a different approach (sanitizing javascript for badness and restricting its access to the main page).
Actually, they murdered them for competition, as Corporations tend to do (I'm pretty sure there's no one on any side of these markets that would turn away market share).
I think you're forgetting the D part of R&D. R&D covers regular product development (Windows, Office etc - the bread and butter of MS), not just whatever crazy ideas come out of MSR.
Didn't do any specific tests. The marketing material for W7 claims better battery life, but I'm not sure the comparison point (presumably Vista). It did manage to last something over 3 hours of active use web browsing while still reporting about 50% juice left. Not sure how that compares to the pre-installed Linux shell, which was a piece of crap. Wireless connectivity was flakey as hell, usually wouldn't even connect until I installed W7 at which point it worked flawlessly. Must be a driver thing, but you'd think the manufacturer would have that one figured out. Anyway, because of this I didn't really try it out since it really took the "net" out of netbook.
And actually, Windows 7, with all the eye candy, runs great on netbooks (one of the selling points). My girlfriend just got an Eee PC 1000, and we installed the beta. Runs great, all the graphical goodies (including whatever they're calling Aero Glass for Win7). If you take a look around the web, you'll see others have found the same thing. One of my coworkers dropped it on his Samsung netbook with similar results - it even boots, goes to sleep and wakes up faster than XP which came installed on it
I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is no software engineer working as a full time employee at Microsoft making only $30k a year.
Sounds like your company had either a very poor or no interview process. That's not the case with Microsoft.
That's just moronic. In a free market there would be no restriction on the flow of goods or labor. Microsoft would hire whoever the heck it wanted from whatever country they wanted instead of having to pay much more to hire immigration lawyers and sponsor visas and get a limited stream as they do now.
Besides which, as someone who works at Microsoft, I can also say my coworkers from other countries are, if anything, generally better quality than locals because it's such a pain in the ass to deal with visa issues that you better make sure they're worth it when you hire them. As far as pay goes, the pay scale is exactly the same and having spoken to my coworkers at the same level of seniority and performance, as myself, they get paid pretty much the same as me. This whole xenophobia thing is unbecoming.
Actually, you'd be surprised how much of Microsoft software does ship with source, or has source available (albeit under sometimes restrictive licensing terms). Most libraries like MFC, ATL, CRT, STL, and .Net do.
Funny, I always thought American business is a game where the winners are those who make the most money.
It's the rules of the game that determine what actions make the most money. If a company is allowed to save money by setting up shell ip holding corporations in countries with low (or no) taxes, it's not the company's fault. The only rational thing to do would be to create a shell holding company.
While I would never want to do it, the PM role (misleading in that it has the word "manager" in it - you don't actually have any control over people) might be for you. PMs do a lot of things from managing schedules, spec'ing features to inter-group communications. At a place like Microsoft, some teams have as much as a 1:2 ratio of PMs to devs. I imagine you'd mostly be looking at large companies that have a large number of nodes that need to communicate to reach that ratio.
If you read the rest of the sentence, they're referring to no new features since the M3 builds and the pre-beta from PDC. Also, that's based on the guy's limited playing around with the build. If you want to see the full review with a list-out of new features you can see it here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3223
Until you think that hey, I've got about 20 processes running and most of them are inactive most of the time. Why not free up RAM for disk caching for the active processes?
Of course, as a hardware manufacturer, it's in Apple's best interest to convince their users that in order to upgrade their software, they need to buy a shiny new box. Hence overstating system requirements as you note. So their decisions are just as avaricious, there are just different motivating factors.
Personally, I'd enjoy a more gender balanced workplace. The industry also stands to benefit greatly if we aren't turning away half the potential candidates.
I agree that the reason women aren't entering the field is because it's not attractive to them. I think it's extremely difficult to tell if a tendency like that is socialized, however evidence is mounting that it is. Girls have recently surpassed boys in standardized math testing while for years it was taken for granted that boys were just naturally better at math. Other cultures show different balances between women and men entering the same fields. Personally, given my experience with intro CS and the kinds of people who take it, I'm not surprised that it can turn off many women. It's not just creepy guys, there seemed to be an abundance of obnoxious, smelly and socially inept guys who thought they were all that. These people rarely actually were, but the bravado would be enough to turn many normal people away (not just women).
Yeah, and offer medical treatment to women whose health is at risk because of pregnancy and expect Christians to blow up doctors. (and that's limiting myself to modern atrocities - include historical ones and you have a lot worse stuff to bring up from inquisitions, crusades, witchcraft trials etc) Come on, quit associating an entire religion (including Atheism - the worlds worst mass murderers were communists like Stalin and Mao) with some wacko subset of it is bullshit. Agnostics are pretty much the only people who cannot blame their actions on faith (since you have to have faith that there is no god of which you are unaware to be an atheist).
Which is why the MS ads are advertising ninjitsu. They're taking the Mac ads and turning them into an insult to anyone running Windows (90% of the population). It's not that big of a leap and if Apple keeps doing them, that will be the impression people get.
Apple already comes off as stuck up. No one I know likes Justin Long's character. Pretty much everyone loves John Hodgman. The new ads work.
Believe me, MS has a lot more than $300M sitting in the bank so this isn't really a zero sum game. I imagine they've figured out that spending $300M on advertising has the potential to earn back more than $300M while hiring another 300 devs for a year doesn't (I'm just guessing, but I imagine it would cost about 1 million per developer per year when you add in a matching SDET, half a PM, a quarter of a manager, a twentieth of an admin, plus office space, hardware, it support, dev branches and build labs etc). Besides, if you check out the E7 blog, with 1000 devs already on Windows, the team might be at a point where the incremental cost of adding another dev in terms of productivity lost in terms of communication exceeds the productivity of that person.
Chances are, if you've got 2 or more gigs of RAM and a reasonable graphics card, Vista may be even faster in some respects than XP, particularly application startup and switching which window is on top.
The two perf hits most people run into is the additional graphics memory required to handle windows as textures on a surface (bitmaps essentially) instead of GDI draw calls (draw this line here, that box there etc) and the fact that a lot of the handy features like search indexing and preloading of frequently used applications in memory eat up a lot of system memory as well. 64-bit can also increase usage since all your pointers will end up taking up twice the space.
To be fair, MS made the mistake of not pushing these two items in the whole "Vista Capable" badging. In the memos released as part of the "Capable" lawsuite, it sounds like Intel trying to sell crappy integrated graphics chipsets was the culprit here, but MS probably shouldn't have caved. Especially since caving actually made Vista look painfully slow, it actually would have been in Vista's best interest to only certify graphics cards with acceptable perf.
Getting an adequate Vista PC is pretty cheap too - pretty much any modern processor will do and RAM is like $30/gig these days. Most graphics cards will do the trick now, even the integrated Intel ones. I think a lot of the confusion is that the typical items pushed by oems in the past as making things faster - more MHz, bigger HD aren't the keys to perf in Vista where RAM and having a graphics card with memory adequate for the resolution you're running at (a card with 256MB should be pretty safe and less than $100) are the number 1 concern for most users (you'll still need your fast proc if you're doing a lot of media encoding/decoding I suppose).
As opposed to having to install a plugin from Adobe that only works on "approved" (WTF - you mean browsers which have enough users to justify writing a plugin for? At least MS is supporting the Moonlight project, even paying for their plugin licensing so there's even an open source option for Silverlight) browsers?
Every time Microsoft opens more protocols, releases more code, and tries to work with the OSS community, instead of acting like children and calling names, I think the community should encourage Microsoft to continue the trend of migrating to a more open company.
Heck, I'd be a lot more surprised if the OSS crowd stopped acting like children and calling names. Or at least the /. crowed :).