Oh - i didn't mean to put words in your mouth and accuse _you_ of the OMGZORZ stuff. I was just addressing commonly heard points of view that are related to the topic at hand.
WPA was somewhat of a departure at the time from WEP, because it had some aspect of certificates and key management. Our WPA stuff is linked to our domain credentials and gets pushed down via group policy / certificate enrollment. _that_ certainly wasn't very common in 2001 or so.
As far as ISA server goes - I can't say for sure or not. Last time i looked, the external hostnames of the proxy cluster were tideXX.microsoft.com (i.e. tide55.microsoft.com). (I'm not disclosing secret info here or anything either - any cursory examination of HTTP logs would reveal lots and lots of hits from these addresses).
Assuming you can find a sufficiently ethical/legal way to do tcp fingerprinting, you might try it on one of those machines and see what it comes back as. I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but i absolutely know for a fact that all my outbound traffic goes through ISA server. There are some good reasons to use it, btw. HTTPS stream inspection, for one, and also, for policy based logging, allowing non-HTTPS traffic out but according to centralized rules, etc.
funny you mention that - all outbound internet traffic from Microsoft's internal network goes through...
wait for it..
Microsoft ISA Server.
There may be other stuff out in front of that, but I have no evidence that there is.
I happen to dislike ISA server - because all of my traffic to the outside world goes through it, and if i notice it, its because it did something i didn't like (like forgot how to resolve hostnames - that's pretty common). I used to complain about it every day.. i'd say stuff like "ISA server makes me want to quit my job" or "maybe i could buy a 28.8 modem and get reliable fast internet access while at work). But, ISA server has gotten a lot better and the # of times a week I curse my existance has gone way down. I'll complain to co-workers that "there is no excuse for this - i've run Squid before and there are never any problems", but to be honest, i've never run a squid cluster with over 100 nodes serving over 100,000 PCs, so its not precisely apples to apples. And i've never put pre-production Squid code into a production environment -- which is exactly what we do with everything we make. My inbox has been on beta exchange for months, and over half the domain controllers here in Fargo are running Longhorn server builds.
Same thing with wireless. We deployed WPA before most of the outside world had heard of it. Internally, it was the only way to get wireless at all. If your device didn't do WPA, you didn't get to connect.
There are a few well-known "MS uses linux!!!!@#$!@#$ OMGZORZ!!!" stories out there, so i'll address the ones i am familiar with
MS uses Linux to host MS.Com
False. Microsoft.Com runs on windows servers. Microsoft has contracted with akamai to do geocaching of various web properties, and akamai uses linux to a large extent. This is why when you look at some MS.Com "machines" with tools like nmap, they'll come back as Linux boxes. they aren't MS machines, they aren't in any MS datacenter, and they aren't MS managed.
Hotmail is all linux
False. Hotmail was never linux. Hotmail has a distributed architecture, and at the time of acquisition, the front end machines were FreeBSD, and the back ends were Ultra enterprise 4500s. Eventually, the FE's were moved to Windows Server. My understanding is that they tried the transision using NT4 and it was miserable, and tried again with W2k and it was much much better. Eventually, all the Fe's got moved onto one of the server products (i dont remember if it was w2k or w2k3 before it was "done") and the hotmail capacity went UP.. i.e. re-writing the hotmail stuff natively for the new windows based platform has allowed hotmail to run more efficiently on less hardware, with lower management costs. The backend machines were still enormous sun boxes last time i asked about it a few years ago.. for a few reaons. 1) the investment in those was huge 2) the filesystem was completely customized for the application. I wouldn't be surprised if the back ends have also moved off of Sun machines. The back end boxes apparently did almost nothing with CPUs.. but lots and lots of disk IO. The custom filesystem is probably the biggest reason that moving back ends didn't happen earlier.
It's important to Microsoft to run our own stuff everywhere we can, because it demonstrates to customers that the product can meet their capacity needs, and because real world use is the best test of big complex systems. There are a few things we are NOT self hosting on yet - for instance, I am in the Business Division and while we sell a variety of ERP programs (from companies we've acquired), we still use 3rd party ERP systems to run "Microsoft, the Company". Those of you with ERP experience will understnad that this is not something you transition "over nite" or "just because". It is a goal for us in the Business Division to move MS onto our ERP stuff internally - it adds additional credibility to our products when we can tell customers "it can run Microsoft, so it can probably run your stuff". And our competitors _love_ saying things like "why buy MS's version of blah, they dont even use it themselves!"
The US system is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay
The average teacher salary is higher in public schools than private schools. And the % of non-teaching staff is higher in public schools as well.
The US public school system is filled with mediocre teachers because it is run by the government, which optimizes around inefficiency and ineffectiveness, because it has no competition (the government never tolerates competition). Additionally, it is nearly impossible for a government employee to lose their job due to underperformance.
but I believe everyone should be trained as an engineer
A few years ago I might have agreed, but the world needs artists too. So long as we keep them starving:) Above, you say that the education you received sucked the love and interest of learning out of kids. There are kids out there that would HATE to build a go-kart with other kids. It would bore or frighten them to death. What of them?
Oh yeah, and get rid of the summer vacation thing. The agrarian society is over, so the number of kids working in the fields is too small to penalize all the rest.
Or get rid of public school, and then each family can choose best how they want their childrens educational schedule to operate.
I went to public schools K-12, and then a state university. I've done quite well career wise, so you might wonder what I'm complaining about. Well, I can only surmise that I got lucky -- we lived in 7 different places in the same town over the span of the 15 years i was living there. My dad made sure that the school district we'd live in was the right one, and I tested into advanced/AP classes from 2nd grade onward. In highschool I was able to do university level math courses because _1_ math teacher in the school also taught at a local university and made arrangements with our HS to each a 3rd semester calc section there in the highschool. There were perhaps 15 students out of 450 seniors that took this class, and I hear that it pretty much dissolved the year after we did it.
My wife's highschool education was completely inexcusable, and she went to a prestigious well-rated school. They ran out of money after building a _stadium_, and so the math department got laid off. I wish I was making this up.
I've got relatives that are teachers in the public school system and it sucks for them too - they can't teach at the level they'd like because they're really babysitters for the uninterested and underperforming kids.
For the last 7+ years I've been reading slashdot, there has not been one positive story or comment about how great smart kids have it in Americas schools. Everyone is dissatisfied with the system. I don't think the answer is "more money" -- the cost-per-student in American public schools is higher than its ever been - in real CPI/inflation adjusted dollars.
An answer worth looking into more closely is "new management" coupled with "customer choice".
My understanding of clickOnce is that administrators have a large degree of control (via policies) of what an and user can click-once run. Infact, i think you ahve to explicitly trust a clickonce server via a policy installation before C-O from that server can run.
For that matter, IIRC domain admins can set Group Policy appropriately to prevent Browser Addon installations alltogether.
So while I agree that users shouldn't be installing dumb software from the internet, I disagree that your hands are tied and therever no software should be distributed from the internet. What you _want_ is the ability to restrict/control what your users can do to their machines, and ClickOnce should get you closer to that.
I've been using it for the last 6 months. Both my home machines now run it, as well as 2 of my 3 work machines.
If i could think of one feature all by itself that makes upgrading Vista worthwhile on my home machines it is this one:
Per-Application Volume Control
Sounds ridiculous, right? in XP, turning up the volume in media player to hear that low-volume encoded movie got really irritating just about the time outlook told you that you got new mail, or a new IM contact signed in. The deafening "DING!@#$" was not appreciated.
The Vista volume applet gives you a separate slider (and MUTE!) for each application using the sound device.
The second thing I love:
Shell File operations are Less Dumb.
Every shell file oepration you might do - extracting files from a zip file, copying, moving, etc, now has its own separate window with minimize and close controls, and they show up on the task bar in explorer. Additionally, they don't block the UI painting of any other explorer windows. Essentially, the shell file management experience has become much less awful.
The Third Thing I Love:
Massive improvements to the VM system
VM system optimized for specific scenarios. Hibernate/resume are much faster than XP. The "lunch" scenario in vista is much better. The lunch scenario, breifly, is the phenomena where you walk away from an XP machine for 1 hour and then sit back down at it and it takes 10-45s for outlook to become usable. During this time there is massive disk thrashing as all of the pageouts get paged back in. Vista has gotten much smarter about paging and the laptop experience with Vista crushes Xp. Hibernate/resume is much improved, and sleep/wake on my antiquated Dell D600 (Vista Experience Index: 1.0) is at least as fast as OSX sleep/wake on my wifes ibook - by the time the lid is at the right viewing angle, the machine is ready.
Fourth Thing:
Media Center
Media Center in Vista isn't its own hard-to-get SKU, its included in the higher end home SKUs. Also, it supports ATSC tuners natively. It is easier to get fansubbed content working properly under MCE than it was on MCE2005 (not sure why, it just seems to be. Install CCCP and set Haali to auto-load VSFilter, and you are done). the music management stuff in MCE (and WMP11) are nicer than MCE05
Fifth Thing:
Asian Language Fonts
Ok, this isn't a big deal, but I appreciate it. Vista has Japanese and other east asian fonts ready to go out of the box. This means that when you get this weeks hottest J-Pop MP3s media player and friends don't draw a zillion empty box glphys - you get beautiful anti-aliased Kanji/kana. On XP installing the east asian fonts required access to the XP Cds and a reboot:)
Sixth Thing
Parental Controls
This isn't something I need to use currently, but I've looked at it a bit and it seems like a pretty good idea. the User Accounts stuff in vista has been redone so taht in non-domain joined machines, its more like "Family And Accounts Center". The idea is that everyone in your house gets a non-admin account, and on any non-admin account, the admin user can setup different parental type controls, including logging of IM conversations, web browsing history, etc etc. Obviously there are probably ways to circumvent this, but the distance between "zero" and what Vista gets you is pretty tremendous, and if technology companies don't start doing stuff to make this easy and effective for normal people, Legislators will, and it will be Bad(tm). Plus, it continues to push Windows to a multi-user, not-everyone-is-admin type model.
7th Thing
network locations
When you join a new network (be it wireless, wired, VPN, or whatever), you can specify what type of network it is (home, work, public place) and a bunch of settings (like filesharing, firewall permissiveness, etc) are set for you. Vista remembers networks you've been to befo
The reason to be mad at SUVs is that they're so good at killing people while providing no benefits whatsoever.
I'm not "progressive" enough to want to legislate them away (controlling people is for more "enlightened" political ideologies), but they piss me off. I wouldn't argue on the fuel aspects because I happen to like high-horsepower cars. Of course, the # of fatalities involving speeding porsches is quite low.
Everyone should visit http://iihs.org/ and look at the "technical data" Section for the car(s) in question. One of the tests they do is a 31mph side-impact collision with an SUV-sized deformable barrier (it simulates getting t-boned by a Ford Eliminator or whatever they're called now). One of the standard measures is the # of centimeters BEYOND the vertical centerline of the drivers front seat the B pillar (the peice of metal that stretches from floor to roof that makes up the back edge of the drivers front door, and the front edge of drivers side rear door on a 4 door car) comes to rest inside the vehicle cabin. As in, more than half of the drivers body had better not be where it was at the start of the collision, because there is a lot of crushed car there afterwards... Some of the best cars have _negative_ values, i.e. you don't have a complete displacement/crushing of the left half of the drivers body.
cars have gotten better at offset frontal collisions, so the # of fatal 2 car accidents has swayed increasingly towawrds SUVS or trucks t-boning other cars. If you have a small framed wife or teenage child, this is especially onerous, as those body sizes get especially torn up - lots of brain in the grill of the oncoming Dodge Ram (lovely name).
A significant improvement to safety from getting your shit ruined by some inattentive truck/SUV driver is side-curtain airbags.. which primarily do 3 things
- prevent your head from doing part of the job of slowing down the truck - prevent your head from doing the work of slowing down all that broken glass - prevent your head from hitting the roof / A pillar of your own car.
Crashes with no head hit are apparently much more survivable. If i were shopping for a newish car I wouldn't consider one with no side curtain airbags.. and I am anti-safety nazis and generally not a fan of exploding balloons in my car. The data suggests too strongly hwoever, that side curtain bags make a real difference in side impacts, which are now more often fatal than frontal offsets.
I'm not Korean (or even of asian descent) but my understanding is that there is a lot of bitterness and difference to overcome. IOW, I don't think what you suggest is "that simple".
For instance, it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that those in NK would prefer the SK lifestyle. The best preserved examples of traditional "Korean" (North Korea vs South Korea is a political thing, not something with any historical or cultural basis) culture like architecture, are all in North Korea. Many in the North (and more so in the South) lament the westernization of South Korea.
A few generations have grown up in the closed world of NK. Overcoming what they've been taught their entire life will be difficult. While it is difficult for Americans to get inside NK, plenty of Chinese/Japanese other tourists visit NK frequently. There was a message board thread i saw that had tourist photos of NK.. some authorized.. some not. Yes, foreigners get a government escort when they're visiting, and soldiers tell you what you can and cannot take pictures of.. but things obviously fall through the cracks. I think at least some of the NK soldiers _do_ have a sense of the western lifestyle and economy. They're still in the NK army _anyway_.
Consider how bloody the US civil war was, and how much closer the North and South in the US were than the 50 years of isolation that has transpired on the korean peninsula.
But, it has a cost. I don't know how often you've tried to use cash-accepting vending machines in the US, but even with our uniform sized notes, my entire life I've come to expect that there is a 5-20% failure rate on a given machine accepting a given note. Imagine my total surprise when i found that machines in Germany had no problem accepting the different sized Euro notes without trouble.
Significant retooling will be required by all commercial entities in the US that deal with automated cash handling machines. ATMs, food vending, etc etc.
Analagously, ADA rules have prevented my wife from opening a small business - the mandatory changes required to the building simply destroyed the budget for the project.
ADA Compliance / Accessability has a cost, and it tends to be an up-front cost.
On the positive side, it may have unintended benefits later - for instance, the pervasive keyboard/accessibility support in the Windows platform and applicatinos make UI automation of Microsoft programs somewhat easier than some other systems.
I think people fall into a trap and use emotional based reasoning too often. There are real costs and real disadvantages to making things Accessible. From a business perspective, it is often "not worth it". Certainly there exists some disability such that it is completely ridiculous to try and support persons with that condition.
There's been a lot of "innovation" in US currency lately. The people that work on this sort of stuff are being paid with tax dollars... tax dollars that might be better spent elsewhere.
Ok, who am I kidding. My tax dollars never get spent well. Might as well use it on resizing currency notes:)
That's the sound of another problem that vanishes when there are no more government run schools, government paid teachers, and government employees teachers unions.
Support school choice. Vote with your feet and your dollars.
Er, how about not making everything such a gigantic, monolithic, unwieldy piece-o'-crap that you have subtle bugs propogate through your system? How about using the magic of 'make' and not rebuilding everything? I know that there's value in a 'make clean ; make', but I'm guessing that if my stuff took hours to build, I'd invest a lot of effort to minimize those needs.
Subtle bugs appear for all sorts of reasons whereever there is component interaction. Component interaction is the name of the game in software engineering. I didn't specify wether we were talking 1 binary or 100 binaries, but it doesn't matter since if even one of them didn't need to be there, it wouldn't be.
Make requires that the cross-target dependancies can be calculated and that there are no cycles in the graph. That may not always be true. Multi-pass make can often be faster than dependancy-compute make.
That said - we do precisely that (rebuild just what is needed) - in the single-developer, iterative scenario. But in general, there's a lot more going on in this build process than calling cl.exe. Nobody is thrilled with the perf, a few people have looked at making it better, and it used to be worse.
And how 'bout distributed compilation? I mean, I'm basically my own administrator and chief developer, and I setup icecream (http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream) on about 30 processors in only a few minutes. I know there's other stuff with distcc and some caching junk to speed things up even more, but I only have about 14k lines of code in my main project (well, soon to be at least an order of magnitude greater once I begin integration), and it takes only seconds to compile. Surely this is a job for oodles of $400 blades with Athlons and dual Gig-E NICs that you can channel bond for bitchin' throughput.
Which scenario are you talking about.. central builds, or builds on my own workstation? distributed builds don't necessarily help me that much in the latter case. In the former, various teams are using various distributed build technologies as required. There are a lot of high latency activities in an "official" build - like shipping binaries to other campuses (ours go to Redmond and Denmark) or sending the build off of the magic elves that sign bits with the well-known Microsoft keys.
To me it sounds like the whole build process needs a hell of a rethink by some people who know what they're about
No argument there. If you can solve Microsoft's build problems to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders, you could be a very wealthy man. Finding good build engineers is tricky - you have to know a little about everything and people with that talent are usually solving other types of problems.
Just how much bigger is your tool than gcc
My "tool" is an ERP system. It includes its own object oriented language, p-code compiler, p-code interpreter, base class library, debugger, IDE, intellisense, and context-sensitive help.
Those are just the language features for the customization and application runtime system. They're part of the trivial million to 1.5 million lines of C++ code. The real meat of the application is in the additional several million lines of 4GL code that rest on top of it. Things that keep track of tax rules in different EU countries, for instance.
and *why*?
As they say in "the biz".. "the reasons are historical":)
My team is working on fixing some of them, but no customer has ever said "Microsoft, it takes you too long to compile the code you end up selling me".
The second answer is - the fundamental complexity of gcc is trivial compared to an ERP system.
Re:The modern DVCSs would all do better
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I work on a different project (not windows) and use the same repository system. (not the same actual repository, of course)
The branching / merging etc in the tool set (which btw we didn't invent, we source licensed from someone else and then have been continually improving) are quite good actually.
I don't know for a fact that the systems you mention arne't "up to the job", but how many multi-TB bitkeeper repositories are there? How many concurrent developers do any of these support? How many branches? How often are RI/FI done? How often do developers sync? What is the churn rate?
I think you also don't understand the problem. The SCCS can RI and FI (reverse integrate, forward integrate, respectively.. those are the terms we use for moving changes from a descendante branch upstream or moving fixes in a parent branch downstream) quickly and efficiently but there are reasons not to. The 99 USENIX paper on the MS internal SCCS talks about some of these issues. For isntance - what good is there in propogating a fix to every sub-tree or branch in a matter of minutes when it subtly breaks 80% of them?
The issue with lots of branching isn't the SCCS. It is the gating that you say "should be possible". Not only is it possible - its standard procedeure. And as your code gets closer to the root of the tree, the quality gates get harder to pass through. The latency involved in turning the crank on a regression test in Windows is very high, and if you got it wrong, the latency of a build is high, etc etc.
So it's not the underlying SCCS, it's the processes built on top of it. Everyone hates process when it slows them down and everyone wants more process when someone else breaks them. "We should put a process in place to prevent that guy from breaking me, but uh, i should be exempt".
As an aside, there are "fast track" branches/processes that let critical changes move through the tree very quickly.. on the order of a day or two from developers workstation to something that shows up in the next main-line build that an admin assistant could install.
When I work with our repository, which is on the order of 10GB and a few hundred thousand files, a new branch create takes a few minutes. Pulling down the repository takes hours. Our churn rate is such that with a handful of developers, ~5 days worth of changes can take 30mins to sync down.
When I RI or FI, it happens only in my client view. This gives me a chance to do merge resolution, and then to build and run our regression tests before "infecting" the target branch with potentially bad code. If building takes on the order of hours (not minutes), you've got latency of hours above the actual RI/FI time. If running tests takes hours (not minutes), you've got more latency. If after a build + test cycle, you see an integration problem, now you've blown a day before you've even found the problem.
I don't mean to say that there aren't problems, i'm just pointing out that like most process problems, this is death by 1000 cuts. The SCCM isn't a key limitation - even for the windows project (at least, not to my knowledge).
What you read was that the SCCm sucks. What I'm hoping to illustrate is that the process is unweildy at times, not due to any particular technology limitation.
However, you can bet your MP3 player (whatever it is) that there are a bunch of someones at Microsoft reading every public comment about the Zune that they can get their eyeballs on. It's just as important to know what customers think is stupid or otherwise dislike as it is to know what they do like
I really and truly hope so, because "they" have been resoundingly ignoring the sentiments of many internal Microsoft employees. People like me that are predisposed to choose the "home team", all things being equal, but in the case of the Zune simply cannot do so because it was intentionally designed to piss me off.
I've got a very sour feeling about the Zune right now. My only hope on this device is along about the time of ZuneOS SP4 they'll have removed all of the things that make the Zune anti-consumer. They clearly did extra dev work to try and limit what people could do, and that really upsets me. I am sure somebody somewhere has some explanation for it, but its not being broadly shared with internal employees, and unlike the usual open discourse within Microsoft amongst engineers, our positioning on media related issues is almost entirely dark, and the more somethings "seems" anti-consumer, the more non-project employees get told to stop asking questions about it.
As a resident of North Dakota, I take pleasure in frequently reminding those with disparaging remarks about ND of two "interesting" factoids:
- ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds wheat - ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds nuclear weapons
Oddly enough, MS has a development office in ND and employs around 1100 people here. None of them work on wheat or nuke distribution, to my knowledge:)
Of the things you quote, only Matthew and Luke deal with Jesus in a historical sense (any old testament reference to Jesus is prophetic, and nothing you list is a prophecy saying 'Jesus will come and tell you that the law still applies exactly as written'), so only those two passages could possibly be construed as what Jesus has to say about the law.
It is only with the new covenant (God has made several covenents with man, btw.) that Jesus and freedom from persecution from not keeping the law comes into affect.
Much of Leviticus deals specifically with what animals are to be sacrificed in what amounts. This no longer applies, by Jesus decree. Even though it was commanded once upon a time, it is no longer commanded and should no longer be "kept".
You have choosen to create controvsery because it fits your aims - why not let Christians worry about how to resolve these "difficulties" for themselves?
Incidentally, as often as people say that they refuse to beleive due to apparent contradictions in the Bible, when speaking at length with such people there is almost always a deepeer reason, and the tired claim of inconsistency is a pleasant veneer.. an excuse, if you will.
I get that you don't like Christianity. However, I imagine that if you weren't predisposed to disliking it for some other reason, you'd be able to resovle any apparent contradictions to a level of satisfaction that didn't preclude you from participating. Many people much smarter than you or I, who have thought about it much harder seem to have been able to do so.
Personally, I think Luigi is the better plumber, because he's the obvious sidekick/underdog.
All of the things you refer to are the Hebrew Law, which Jesus specifically released us from. He didn't say "they still apply", he said that someone that tried to live by the law and the law alone could never be found righteous in the eyes of God. Therefore Jesus released everyone from the bondage of the law, even if a particular law happened to be a pretty good idea.
The message of Jesus is that no man is good enough to be right with God from adherence the law alone - even if it was possible to truly be adherent to the law. The law arguably was "version 1" at trying to get man to behave. The Philistines still managed to royally screw up and pervert the law into treachery.
Jesus saying that we are released from the law (so long as we accept Jesus's gift) doesn't mean that anything in the Old Testament is invalid. Much of it is historically accurate.
Now, all of that said - I've got some friends that are predisposed to be Young Earth Creationists and it drives me nuts. If for no other reason than I can't understand why God would give us brains and senses and reasoning that all lead pretty conclusively to a much older earth, with a variety of self corroborating(sp?) observations (U238 dating, astronomical phenomena, etc) only to have it be a big sham.
IOW, if you beleive God designed the universe and its rules, our sensory perception, and our minds, and only violates the understood rules of the universe for spiritually relevant occasions (i.e. "Miracles"), then you have to ask God:
"Why would you stack the deck with evidence that points to something that isn't true?"
Some people would say "any science that appears to contradict the bible is clearly evidence planting/manipulation by the Devil"
To which i say "if the devil can influence our senses and minds so completely that we cannot to some extent trust what our senses tell us, what's the point? Do we really have free will? If every peice of data we have must be treated as suspect, how can any possible decision be made? no decision exists without inputs, and if the inputs are suspect, its game over"
The Bible doesn't spend a great deal of ink specifying the details of the creation story, leading me to the following conclusion:
the details of, or reaching consensus on, the exact nature of the creation story isn't instrumental to the faith. People that make this the central issue of Christianity "don't get it".
One could say that the stock market is a well understood system. We know that for an individual security, lots of buying drives the price up, lots of selling drives the price down. Generally, the price of things goes up.. the market, taken in average, goes up. We understand that it is a complex system, and we have lots of models that predict aspects of its behavior very predictably. We can do experiments on a small scale to verify our models our correct. We can look at past market data to validate our models further. There is no guestimating about what happened to the market in the past - our past market data is essentially perfect (i.e. the manner of interpreting the closing share price on a given date for a given security is not in dispute.. unlike reading geological evidence, ice cores, etc)
We know a lot about the complex system called the stock market. But nobody knows what it will do in 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. As good as our models are, they're just models, and while we can make them line up with past observations, its harder to make them accurately predict the future.
Do you think the climate of the earth is more or less complex than the stock market? Do you think the rules governing it are understood better or worse than the stock market? Do you think there are more individual actors who's decisions are difficult to accurately model in world climate or the stock market?
People that understand the advantages of models also understand their disadvantages. And a common attribute of models of complex systems is that their utility falls off drastically the further into the future you ask them to predice. Which is what beyond a week or so, temperature forecasting is no more accurate than just seeing what the historical average temperature was. At least that's what a meterologist told me a while back:)
The problem I have with a hysterical call to arms about climate change is that it combines everything humanity is bad at:
1) accurately predicting the future 2) creating public policy or legislation that acheives a desired result 2a) also without horrible unenvisioned side effects, often worse than the original problem 3) calls for statist/authoritarian control by the few at the expense of the many
I don't mean to sound like the ostrich, but humanity is much better at coming up with distributed solutions to pressing in-your-face problems. Some will argue that by the time Joe Sixpack figures out that climate change is a problem, it will be "too late". I call shenanigans.
Preventative measures are a good thing. But the cost of the prevention has to be considered in light of our confidence that the problem is as bad as we fear, and that the prevention is better than the cure. Even amongst people that beleive that climate change is happening, and may be a problem, convincing people that any particular course of chemotherapy is worth the price in reduced cancer later is tenuous.
As much as I think the guy is a dork, and as much as I dislike the wedding of hollywood and politics, I appreciate someone trying to contribute to discourse on a topic. Everyone should be heard - they're either self evidently an idiot, or they're worth hearing. Just because this movie doesn't convince me I need to live in a grass hut covered in solar panels doesn't mean the next one won't:)
1. Cached Exchange Mode. All versions of outlook without this are absolute unusable garbage. This feature was what allowed me to stop using PINE+IMAP at work.
2. RPC over HTTPS. This is _huge_ for mobile workers.
I happen to really like Outlook 2007. I've not noticed any speed problems with it. They've done a good job since OL2k of removing possible high-latency calls on UI threads, making the client much more interactive in a variety of situations. In 2000 Outloook+Exchange were unusable. I remember the exchange team having an "SP1 ship party" and thinking I'd run over there and choke all of them, perhaps screaming "get back in your f@#$king offices and fix this bullshit until i can read email as quickly and easily as me and _50000_ other students could using pine+sendmail on a 2 proc dec alpha"
Outlook and Exchange have gotten _much_ better since then. I can use them without wanting to kill people, which has left me free to be angry about other Microsoft intolerables, like DRM, windows stealing focus, and long path name support:)
I wish I could disagree with you (I'm an anti-DRM Microsoft employee), but I'm not sure that I can.
Based on conversations I've had with "the people that know", content protection features in some of our products go above and beyond what is strictly required by the letter of the law. What I cannot get a straight answer on is if it is because of contractual obligations we have or for some other reason.
It is very frustrating because the people involved (and some of them are lawyers) are not especially helpful or forthcoming when it comes to explaining their decisions. MS is a relatively open company internally - you can candidly ask any employee about what they work on, challenge their judgement, etc. Usuaully you find out they're pretty smart and had good reasons for doing what they did. It's a good system - 90% of the time I can agree with a point of view or a decision I didn't initially agree with, because I replace my (incorrect/incomplete) assumptinos with real data/knowledge from the people that directly attacked the problem. But that hasn't always been the case when trying to understand why certain content-protection behaviors are the way they are. There's a growing undercurrent of employees that are at least as ugly as some slashdot trolls anytime some new person says "i was trying to do thing X with my media and i can't.. why not?". We'll spout off answers like "because MS is the bitch of hollywood, not the company that cares about its customers" and the baiting goes pretty much unanswered/unchallenged.
I've been barking up a lot of trees in my internal anti-DRM crusades and the answers sound a lot like "we're not talking to YOU about this". I wonder if it is just me, but the people I've tlaked to that aren't quite as obnoxious as I am get about the same treatment.
So yeah. Some of it, maybe even most of it, is us trying to cover our asses legally. But not 100% of it. And that non-zero amount really pisses me off.
I don't know what is public knowledge about vista SKUs and Vista licensing, but I'll say a few things
- it is NOT expected that large organizations will be deploying the Ultimate SKU on their desktops. There are business focused SKUs, and those are what most business desktops will be running. Do you want Media center on all of your employee machines?
- there has been a lot of new feature work in key/activation/whatever handling for the enterprise desktop scenario. AFAIK, this work only applies to the business focused SKU(s). It's what microsoft will be using internally and it has over 100k PCs to manage (not including unmanaged assets like lab hardware)
Based on what I know (and I don't know everything, nor am I an authority on these specific areas) you can safely assume the following:
- imaging is a supported and important scenario - assuming the right SKUs / supporting infrastructure, individual employees will not need to worry about product keys or activation.
The claim goes, for every 1 drug that a company brings to market after years of painful research failures, there are a bunch that didn't pan out, and the one that did took years of people working tirelessly to create.
If the drug companies weren't granted monopoly distribution rights via protectionist government intervention, this basic drug research would not be possible because the basic investment would never pay back - generics would undersell the "inventor" of the drug everytime.
How sure are people of this?
Is intellectual property law really acceptible? Does it really get "goodness" into the hands of the public sooner?
Would basic drug research and development continue without intellectual property protection?
What things can and cannot be intellectual property, and why? Isn't it possible to patent a process that has business value? Suppose that someone had patented the process for doing a heart transplant and refused to allow other hospitals to do heart transplants?
The current model of IP protection is _one_ model. I'd argue that it has been badly twisted and perverted by content organizations like the MPAA/RIAA, and by brand holders like Disney, and by many others.
There may be other models that do NOT rely upon the government-sponsored artificial construct called "intellectual property", yet still allow people that work hard to be fairly compensated and still allow good contributions to be made to society.
The road that the US (and by extension, the world) is headed down is not sustainable. Soon it will be illegal to create new inventions or content without infringing on something else pre-existing, and more and more, intellectual property owners will attempt to maximally monetize their intellectual property in a direction orthogonal to or even opposite of the path of ethics and societal responsibility. And because the whole scheme is artificially created by government, no market correction can exist or happen.
I currently enjoy my livelihood because of "today's model" but I am pretty frustrted with some of the things my employer is doing because of "today's model". It's got me thinking about other ones.
Any discussion about intellectual property starts and ends with the problem of drugs - society measurably suffers because of IP protection for drug designs. The only question is - does society measurably suffer without IP protection for drug designs? The people might be willing to try "the grand experiment". But the companies that bought our legal system won't hear of it.
No Comprendo. Verzeihung. Viederholst, bitte. sumimasen, wakarimasen.
all i can figure is that you are making some pun/joke about setting language preferences, in which case, i'll elaborte.
Haali Media Splitter lets you set audio/subtitle language sets in a prioritized list, so soft subbed content in MKV or OGM containers can display the right streams according to your preferences.
If i can get it, i like japanese audio with english subtitles, but if i cant, i like english audio with no subtitles. Haali contains all of the stream mathcing/selection logic to encode my preferences so that i dont need to hit any buttons to get the right language/subtitle tracks, assuming the MKV is authored with language tags on the streams. If not, MKVToolnix can add the tags and re-encode the media (without actually doing a decode/re-encode of any streams... it just updates stream metadata)
The CCCP is a great project, and i've dropped into their IRC channel before with bug reports / problems / questions. CCCP works on Vista and lets you get softsubs, mkv support, etc under Media Center on both XP and Vista.
I've only found a small sampling of content that doesn't "just work" with CCCP, in which case, VLC usually suffices. To be fair, to get CCCP playing how i want in MCE i usally set Haali to always load VSFilter, and i set ffdaudio to SPDIF passthrough for ac3/dts, which means i can only mute/unmute those audio streams with the MCE remote. Also, I configure the Haali splitter for my language preferences so that i don't have to try and get WMP/MCE to talk to the stream switchers in those formats (it doesn't).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh - i didn't mean to put words in your mouth and accuse _you_ of the OMGZORZ stuff. I was just addressing commonly heard points of view that are related to the topic at hand.
WPA was somewhat of a departure at the time from WEP, because it had some aspect of certificates and key management. Our WPA stuff is linked to our domain credentials and gets pushed down via group policy / certificate enrollment. _that_ certainly wasn't very common in 2001 or so.
As far as ISA server goes - I can't say for sure or not. Last time i looked, the external hostnames of the proxy cluster were tideXX.microsoft.com (i.e. tide55.microsoft.com). (I'm not disclosing secret info here or anything either - any cursory examination of HTTP logs would reveal lots and lots of hits from these addresses).
Assuming you can find a sufficiently ethical/legal way to do tcp fingerprinting, you might try it on one of those machines and see what it comes back as. I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but i absolutely know for a fact that all my outbound traffic goes through ISA server. There are some good reasons to use it, btw. HTTPS stream inspection, for one, and also, for policy based logging, allowing non-HTTPS traffic out but according to centralized rules, etc.
funny you mention that - all outbound internet traffic from Microsoft's internal network goes through...
wait for it..
Microsoft ISA Server.
There may be other stuff out in front of that, but I have no evidence that there is.
I happen to dislike ISA server - because all of my traffic to the outside world goes through it, and if i notice it, its because it did something i didn't like (like forgot how to resolve hostnames - that's pretty common). I used to complain about it every day.. i'd say stuff like "ISA server makes me want to quit my job" or "maybe i could buy a 28.8 modem and get reliable fast internet access while at work). But, ISA server has gotten a lot better and the # of times a week I curse my existance has gone way down. I'll complain to co-workers that "there is no excuse for this - i've run Squid before and there are never any problems", but to be honest, i've never run a squid cluster with over 100 nodes serving over 100,000 PCs, so its not precisely apples to apples. And i've never put pre-production Squid code into a production environment -- which is exactly what we do with everything we make. My inbox has been on beta exchange for months, and over half the domain controllers here in Fargo are running Longhorn server builds.
Same thing with wireless. We deployed WPA before most of the outside world had heard of it. Internally, it was the only way to get wireless at all. If your device didn't do WPA, you didn't get to connect.
There are a few well-known "MS uses linux!!!!@#$!@#$ OMGZORZ!!!" stories out there, so i'll address the ones i am familiar with
MS uses Linux to host MS.Com
False. Microsoft.Com runs on windows servers. Microsoft has contracted with akamai to do geocaching of various web properties, and akamai uses linux to a large extent. This is why when you look at some MS.Com "machines" with tools like nmap, they'll come back as Linux boxes. they aren't MS machines, they aren't in any MS datacenter, and they aren't MS managed.
Hotmail is all linux
False. Hotmail was never linux. Hotmail has a distributed architecture, and at the time of acquisition, the front end machines were FreeBSD, and the back ends were Ultra enterprise 4500s. Eventually, the FE's were moved to Windows Server. My understanding is that they tried the transision using NT4 and it was miserable, and tried again with W2k and it was much much better. Eventually, all the Fe's got moved onto one of the server products (i dont remember if it was w2k or w2k3 before it was "done") and the hotmail capacity went UP.. i.e. re-writing the hotmail stuff natively for the new windows based platform has allowed hotmail to run more efficiently on less hardware, with lower management costs. The backend machines were still enormous sun boxes last time i asked about it a few years ago.. for a few reaons. 1) the investment in those was huge 2) the filesystem was completely customized for the application. I wouldn't be surprised if the back ends have also moved off of Sun machines. The back end boxes apparently did almost nothing with CPUs.. but lots and lots of disk IO. The custom filesystem is probably the biggest reason that moving back ends didn't happen earlier.
It's important to Microsoft to run our own stuff everywhere we can, because it demonstrates to customers that the product can meet their capacity needs, and because real world use is the best test of big complex systems. There are a few things we are NOT self hosting on yet - for instance, I am in the Business Division and while we sell a variety of ERP programs (from companies we've acquired), we still use 3rd party ERP systems to run "Microsoft, the Company". Those of you with ERP experience will understnad that this is not something you transition "over nite" or "just because". It is a goal for us in the Business Division to move MS onto our ERP stuff internally - it adds additional credibility to our products when we can tell customers "it can run Microsoft, so it can probably run your stuff". And our competitors _love_ saying things like "why buy MS's version of blah, they dont even use it themselves!"
The average teacher salary is higher in public schools than private schools. And the % of non-teaching staff is higher in public schools as well.
The US public school system is filled with mediocre teachers because it is run by the government, which optimizes around inefficiency and ineffectiveness, because it has no competition (the government never tolerates competition). Additionally, it is nearly impossible for a government employee to lose their job due to underperformance.
A few years ago I might have agreed, but the world needs artists too. So long as we keep them starving
Or get rid of public school, and then each family can choose best how they want their childrens educational schedule to operate.
I went to public schools K-12, and then a state university. I've done quite well career wise, so you might wonder what I'm complaining about. Well, I can only surmise that I got lucky -- we lived in 7 different places in the same town over the span of the 15 years i was living there. My dad made sure that the school district we'd live in was the right one, and I tested into advanced/AP classes from 2nd grade onward. In highschool I was able to do university level math courses because _1_ math teacher in the school also taught at a local university and made arrangements with our HS to each a 3rd semester calc section there in the highschool. There were perhaps 15 students out of 450 seniors that took this class, and I hear that it pretty much dissolved the year after we did it.
My wife's highschool education was completely inexcusable, and she went to a prestigious well-rated school. They ran out of money after building a _stadium_, and so the math department got laid off. I wish I was making this up.
I've got relatives that are teachers in the public school system and it sucks for them too - they can't teach at the level they'd like because they're really babysitters for the uninterested and underperforming kids.
For the last 7+ years I've been reading slashdot, there has not been one positive story or comment about how great smart kids have it in Americas schools. Everyone is dissatisfied with the system. I don't think the answer is "more money" -- the cost-per-student in American public schools is higher than its ever been - in real CPI/inflation adjusted dollars.
An answer worth looking into more closely is "new management" coupled with "customer choice".
My understanding of clickOnce is that administrators have a large degree of control (via policies) of what an and user can click-once run. Infact, i think you ahve to explicitly trust a clickonce server via a policy installation before C-O from that server can run.
For that matter, IIRC domain admins can set Group Policy appropriately to prevent Browser Addon installations alltogether.
So while I agree that users shouldn't be installing dumb software from the internet, I disagree that your hands are tied and therever no software should be distributed from the internet. What you _want_ is the ability to restrict/control what your users can do to their machines, and ClickOnce should get you closer to that.
I've been using it for the last 6 months. Both my home machines now run it, as well as 2 of my 3 work machines.
:)
If i could think of one feature all by itself that makes upgrading Vista worthwhile on my home machines it is this one:
Per-Application Volume Control
Sounds ridiculous, right? in XP, turning up the volume in media player to hear that low-volume encoded movie got really irritating just about the time outlook told you that you got new mail, or a new IM contact signed in. The deafening "DING!@#$" was not appreciated.
The Vista volume applet gives you a separate slider (and MUTE!) for each application using the sound device.
The second thing I love:
Shell File operations are Less Dumb.
Every shell file oepration you might do - extracting files from a zip file, copying, moving, etc, now has its own separate window with minimize and close controls, and they show up on the task bar in explorer. Additionally, they don't block the UI painting of any other explorer windows. Essentially, the shell file management experience has become much less awful.
The Third Thing I Love:
Massive improvements to the VM system
VM system optimized for specific scenarios. Hibernate/resume are much faster than XP. The "lunch" scenario in vista is much better. The lunch scenario, breifly, is the phenomena where you walk away from an XP machine for 1 hour and then sit back down at it and it takes 10-45s for outlook to become usable. During this time there is massive disk thrashing as all of the pageouts get paged back in. Vista has gotten much smarter about paging and the laptop experience with Vista crushes Xp. Hibernate/resume is much improved, and sleep/wake on my antiquated Dell D600 (Vista Experience Index: 1.0) is at least as fast as OSX sleep/wake on my wifes ibook - by the time the lid is at the right viewing angle, the machine is ready.
Fourth Thing:
Media Center
Media Center in Vista isn't its own hard-to-get SKU, its included in the higher end home SKUs. Also, it supports ATSC tuners natively. It is easier to get fansubbed content working properly under MCE than it was on MCE2005 (not sure why, it just seems to be. Install CCCP and set Haali to auto-load VSFilter, and you are done). the music management stuff in MCE (and WMP11) are nicer than MCE05
Fifth Thing:
Asian Language Fonts
Ok, this isn't a big deal, but I appreciate it. Vista has Japanese and other east asian fonts ready to go out of the box. This means that when you get this weeks hottest J-Pop MP3s media player and friends don't draw a zillion empty box glphys - you get beautiful anti-aliased Kanji/kana. On XP installing the east asian fonts required access to the XP Cds and a reboot
Sixth Thing
Parental Controls
This isn't something I need to use currently, but I've looked at it a bit and it seems like a pretty good idea. the User Accounts stuff in vista has been redone so taht in non-domain joined machines, its more like "Family And Accounts Center". The idea is that everyone in your house gets a non-admin account, and on any non-admin account, the admin user can setup different parental type controls, including logging of IM conversations, web browsing history, etc etc. Obviously there are probably ways to circumvent this, but the distance between "zero" and what Vista gets you is pretty tremendous, and if technology companies don't start doing stuff to make this easy and effective for normal people, Legislators will, and it will be Bad(tm). Plus, it continues to push Windows to a multi-user, not-everyone-is-admin type model.
7th Thing
network locations
When you join a new network (be it wireless, wired, VPN, or whatever), you can specify what type of network it is (home, work, public place) and a bunch of settings (like filesharing, firewall permissiveness, etc) are set for you. Vista remembers networks you've been to befo
The reason to be mad at SUVs is that they're so good at killing people while providing no benefits whatsoever.
I'm not "progressive" enough to want to legislate them away (controlling people is for more "enlightened" political ideologies), but they piss me off. I wouldn't argue on the fuel aspects because I happen to like high-horsepower cars. Of course, the # of fatalities involving speeding porsches is quite low.
Everyone should visit http://iihs.org/ and look at the "technical data" Section for the car(s) in question. One of the tests they do is a 31mph side-impact collision with an SUV-sized deformable barrier (it simulates getting t-boned by a Ford Eliminator or whatever they're called now). One of the standard measures is the # of centimeters BEYOND the vertical centerline of the drivers front seat the B pillar (the peice of metal that stretches from floor to roof that makes up the back edge of the drivers front door, and the front edge of drivers side rear door on a 4 door car) comes to rest inside the vehicle cabin. As in, more than half of the drivers body had better not be where it was at the start of the collision, because there is a lot of crushed car there afterwards... Some of the best cars have _negative_ values, i.e. you don't have a complete displacement/crushing of the left half of the drivers body.
cars have gotten better at offset frontal collisions, so the # of fatal 2 car accidents has swayed increasingly towawrds SUVS or trucks t-boning other cars. If you have a small framed wife or teenage child, this is especially onerous, as those body sizes get especially torn up - lots of brain in the grill of the oncoming Dodge Ram (lovely name).
A significant improvement to safety from getting your shit ruined by some inattentive truck/SUV driver is side-curtain airbags.. which primarily do 3 things
- prevent your head from doing part of the job of slowing down the truck
- prevent your head from doing the work of slowing down all that broken glass
- prevent your head from hitting the roof / A pillar of your own car.
Crashes with no head hit are apparently much more survivable. If i were shopping for a newish car I wouldn't consider one with no side curtain airbags.. and I am anti-safety nazis and generally not a fan of exploding balloons in my car. The data suggests too strongly hwoever, that side curtain bags make a real difference in side impacts, which are now more often fatal than frontal offsets.
I'm not Korean (or even of asian descent) but my understanding is that there is a lot of bitterness and difference to overcome. IOW, I don't think what you suggest is "that simple".
For instance, it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that those in NK would prefer the SK lifestyle. The best preserved examples of traditional "Korean" (North Korea vs South Korea is a political thing, not something with any historical or cultural basis) culture like architecture, are all in North Korea. Many in the North (and more so in the South) lament the westernization of South Korea.
A few generations have grown up in the closed world of NK. Overcoming what they've been taught their entire life will be difficult. While it is difficult for Americans to get inside NK, plenty of Chinese/Japanese other tourists visit NK frequently. There was a message board thread i saw that had tourist photos of NK.. some authorized.. some not. Yes, foreigners get a government escort when they're visiting, and soldiers tell you what you can and cannot take pictures of.. but things obviously fall through the cracks. I think at least some of the NK soldiers _do_ have a sense of the western lifestyle and economy. They're still in the NK army _anyway_.
Consider how bloody the US civil war was, and how much closer the North and South in the US were than the 50 years of isolation that has transpired on the korean peninsula.
But, it has a cost. I don't know how often you've tried to use cash-accepting vending machines in the US, but even with our uniform sized notes, my entire life I've come to expect that there is a 5-20% failure rate on a given machine accepting a given note. Imagine my total surprise when i found that machines in Germany had no problem accepting the different sized Euro notes without trouble.
:)
Significant retooling will be required by all commercial entities in the US that deal with automated cash handling machines. ATMs, food vending, etc etc.
Analagously, ADA rules have prevented my wife from opening a small business - the mandatory changes required to the building simply destroyed the budget for the project.
ADA Compliance / Accessability has a cost, and it tends to be an up-front cost.
On the positive side, it may have unintended benefits later - for instance, the pervasive keyboard/accessibility support in the Windows platform and applicatinos make UI automation of Microsoft programs somewhat easier than some other systems.
I think people fall into a trap and use emotional based reasoning too often. There are real costs and real disadvantages to making things Accessible. From a business perspective, it is often "not worth it". Certainly there exists some disability such that it is completely ridiculous to try and support persons with that condition.
There's been a lot of "innovation" in US currency lately. The people that work on this sort of stuff are being paid with tax dollars... tax dollars that might be better spent elsewhere.
Ok, who am I kidding. My tax dollars never get spent well. Might as well use it on resizing currency notes
That's the sound of another problem that vanishes when there are no more government run schools, government paid teachers, and government employees teachers unions.
Support school choice. Vote with your feet and your dollars.
Subtle bugs appear for all sorts of reasons whereever there is component interaction. Component interaction is the name of the game in software engineering. I didn't specify wether we were talking 1 binary or 100 binaries, but it doesn't matter since if even one of them didn't need to be there, it wouldn't be.
Make requires that the cross-target dependancies can be calculated and that there are no cycles in the graph. That may not always be true. Multi-pass make can often be faster than dependancy-compute make.
That said - we do precisely that (rebuild just what is needed) - in the single-developer, iterative scenario. But in general, there's a lot more going on in this build process than calling cl.exe. Nobody is thrilled with the perf, a few people have looked at making it better, and it used to be worse.
Which scenario are you talking about.. central builds, or builds on my own workstation? distributed builds don't necessarily help me that much in the latter case. In the former, various teams are using various distributed build technologies as required. There are a lot of high latency activities in an "official" build - like shipping binaries to other campuses (ours go to Redmond and Denmark) or sending the build off of the magic elves that sign bits with the well-known Microsoft keys.
No argument there. If you can solve Microsoft's build problems to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders, you could be a very wealthy man. Finding good build engineers is tricky - you have to know a little about everything and people with that talent are usually solving other types of problems.
My "tool" is an ERP system. It includes its own object oriented language, p-code compiler, p-code interpreter, base class library, debugger, IDE, intellisense, and context-sensitive help.
Those are just the language features for the customization and application runtime system. They're part of the trivial million to 1.5 million lines of C++ code. The real meat of the application is in the additional several million lines of 4GL code that rest on top of it. Things that keep track of tax rules in different EU countries, for instance.
As they say in "the biz".. "the reasons are historical"
My team is working on fixing some of them, but no customer has ever said "Microsoft, it takes you too long to compile the code you end up selling me".
The second answer is - the fundamental complexity of gcc is trivial compared to an ERP system.
I work on a different project (not windows) and use the same repository system. (not the same actual repository, of course)
The branching / merging etc in the tool set (which btw we didn't invent, we source licensed from someone else and then have been continually improving) are quite good actually.
I don't know for a fact that the systems you mention arne't "up to the job", but how many multi-TB bitkeeper repositories are there? How many concurrent developers do any of these support? How many branches? How often are RI/FI done? How often do developers sync? What is the churn rate?
I think you also don't understand the problem. The SCCS can RI and FI (reverse integrate, forward integrate, respectively.. those are the terms we use for moving changes from a descendante branch upstream or moving fixes in a parent branch downstream) quickly and efficiently but there are reasons not to. The 99 USENIX paper on the MS internal SCCS talks about some of these issues. For isntance - what good is there in propogating a fix to every sub-tree or branch in a matter of minutes when it subtly breaks 80% of them?
The issue with lots of branching isn't the SCCS. It is the gating that you say "should be possible". Not only is it possible - its standard procedeure. And as your code gets closer to the root of the tree, the quality gates get harder to pass through. The latency involved in turning the crank on a regression test in Windows is very high, and if you got it wrong, the latency of a build is high, etc etc.
So it's not the underlying SCCS, it's the processes built on top of it. Everyone hates process when it slows them down and everyone wants more process when someone else breaks them. "We should put a process in place to prevent that guy from breaking me, but uh, i should be exempt".
As an aside, there are "fast track" branches/processes that let critical changes move through the tree very quickly.. on the order of a day or two from developers workstation to something that shows up in the next main-line build that an admin assistant could install.
When I work with our repository, which is on the order of 10GB and a few hundred thousand files, a new branch create takes a few minutes. Pulling down the repository takes hours. Our churn rate is such that with a handful of developers, ~5 days worth of changes can take 30mins to sync down.
When I RI or FI, it happens only in my client view. This gives me a chance to do merge resolution, and then to build and run our regression tests before "infecting" the target branch with potentially bad code. If building takes on the order of hours (not minutes), you've got latency of hours above the actual RI/FI time. If running tests takes hours (not minutes), you've got more latency. If after a build + test cycle, you see an integration problem, now you've blown a day before you've even found the problem.
I don't mean to say that there aren't problems, i'm just pointing out that like most process problems, this is death by 1000 cuts. The SCCM isn't a key limitation - even for the windows project (at least, not to my knowledge).
What you read was that the SCCm sucks. What I'm hoping to illustrate is that the process is unweildy at times, not due to any particular technology limitation.
I really and truly hope so, because "they" have been resoundingly ignoring the sentiments of many internal Microsoft employees. People like me that are predisposed to choose the "home team", all things being equal, but in the case of the Zune simply cannot do so because it was intentionally designed to piss me off.
I've got a very sour feeling about the Zune right now. My only hope on this device is along about the time of ZuneOS SP4 they'll have removed all of the things that make the Zune anti-consumer. They clearly did extra dev work to try and limit what people could do, and that really upsets me. I am sure somebody somewhere has some explanation for it, but its not being broadly shared with internal employees, and unlike the usual open discourse within Microsoft amongst engineers, our positioning on media related issues is almost entirely dark, and the more somethings "seems" anti-consumer, the more non-project employees get told to stop asking questions about it.
The whole thing stinks.
As a resident of North Dakota, I take pleasure in frequently reminding those with disparaging remarks about ND of two "interesting" factoids:
:)
- ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds wheat
- ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds nuclear weapons
Oddly enough, MS has a development office in ND and employs around 1100 people here. None of them work on wheat or nuke distribution, to my knowledge
BLACKER than the BLACKEST BLACK... Times Infinity!!
Plus, in the capitalist model, you can pay someone else to figure out what you like for you, since choice can be Hard Work.
Congratulations, you've grown the economy!
Of the things you quote, only Matthew and Luke deal with Jesus in a historical sense (any old testament reference to Jesus is prophetic, and nothing you list is a prophecy saying 'Jesus will come and tell you that the law still applies exactly as written'), so only those two passages could possibly be construed as what Jesus has to say about the law.
It is only with the new covenant (God has made several covenents with man, btw.) that Jesus and freedom from persecution from not keeping the law comes into affect.
Much of Leviticus deals specifically with what animals are to be sacrificed in what amounts. This no longer applies, by Jesus decree . Even though it was commanded once upon a time, it is no longer commanded and should no longer be "kept".
You have choosen to create controvsery because it fits your aims - why not let Christians worry about how to resolve these "difficulties" for themselves?
Incidentally, as often as people say that they refuse to beleive due to apparent contradictions in the Bible, when speaking at length with such people there is almost always a deepeer reason, and the tired claim of inconsistency is a pleasant veneer.. an excuse, if you will.
I get that you don't like Christianity. However, I imagine that if you weren't predisposed to disliking it for some other reason, you'd be able to resovle any apparent contradictions to a level of satisfaction that didn't preclude you from participating. Many people much smarter than you or I, who have thought about it much harder seem to have been able to do so.
Personally, I think Luigi is the better plumber, because he's the obvious sidekick/underdog.
All of the things you refer to are the Hebrew Law, which Jesus specifically released us from. He didn't say "they still apply", he said that someone that tried to live by the law and the law alone could never be found righteous in the eyes of God. Therefore Jesus released everyone from the bondage of the law, even if a particular law happened to be a pretty good idea.
The message of Jesus is that no man is good enough to be right with God from adherence the law alone - even if it was possible to truly be adherent to the law. The law arguably was "version 1" at trying to get man to behave. The Philistines still managed to royally screw up and pervert the law into treachery.
Jesus saying that we are released from the law (so long as we accept Jesus's gift) doesn't mean that anything in the Old Testament is invalid. Much of it is historically accurate.
Now, all of that said - I've got some friends that are predisposed to be Young Earth Creationists and it drives me nuts. If for no other reason than I can't understand why God would give us brains and senses and reasoning that all lead pretty conclusively to a much older earth, with a variety of self corroborating(sp?) observations (U238 dating, astronomical phenomena, etc) only to have it be a big sham.
IOW, if you beleive God designed the universe and its rules, our sensory perception, and our minds, and only violates the understood rules of the universe for spiritually relevant occasions (i.e. "Miracles"), then you have to ask God:
"Why would you stack the deck with evidence that points to something that isn't true?"
Some people would say "any science that appears to contradict the bible is clearly evidence planting/manipulation by the Devil"
To which i say "if the devil can influence our senses and minds so completely that we cannot to some extent trust what our senses tell us, what's the point? Do we really have free will? If every peice of data we have must be treated as suspect, how can any possible decision be made? no decision exists without inputs, and if the inputs are suspect, its game over"
The Bible doesn't spend a great deal of ink specifying the details of the creation story, leading me to the following conclusion:
the details of, or reaching consensus on, the exact nature of the creation story isn't instrumental to the faith. People that make this the central issue of Christianity "don't get it".
Cached exchange mode showed up several versions back - either XP or 2003, i don't recall which.
One could say that the stock market is a well understood system. We know that for an individual security, lots of buying drives the price up, lots of selling drives the price down. Generally, the price of things goes up.. the market, taken in average, goes up. We understand that it is a complex system, and we have lots of models that predict aspects of its behavior very predictably. We can do experiments on a small scale to verify our models our correct. We can look at past market data to validate our models further. There is no guestimating about what happened to the market in the past - our past market data is essentially perfect (i.e. the manner of interpreting the closing share price on a given date for a given security is not in dispute.. unlike reading geological evidence, ice cores, etc)
:)
:)
We know a lot about the complex system called the stock market. But nobody knows what it will do in 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years. As good as our models are, they're just models, and while we can make them line up with past observations, its harder to make them accurately predict the future.
Do you think the climate of the earth is more or less complex than the stock market? Do you think the rules governing it are understood better or worse than the stock market? Do you think there are more individual actors who's decisions are difficult to accurately model in world climate or the stock market?
People that understand the advantages of models also understand their disadvantages. And a common attribute of models of complex systems is that their utility falls off drastically the further into the future you ask them to predice. Which is what beyond a week or so, temperature forecasting is no more accurate than just seeing what the historical average temperature was. At least that's what a meterologist told me a while back
The problem I have with a hysterical call to arms about climate change is that it combines everything humanity is bad at:
1) accurately predicting the future
2) creating public policy or legislation that acheives a desired result
2a) also without horrible unenvisioned side effects, often worse than the original problem
3) calls for statist/authoritarian control by the few at the expense of the many
I don't mean to sound like the ostrich, but humanity is much better at coming up with distributed solutions to pressing in-your-face problems. Some will argue that by the time Joe Sixpack figures out that climate change is a problem, it will be "too late". I call shenanigans.
Preventative measures are a good thing. But the cost of the prevention has to be considered in light of our confidence that the problem is as bad as we fear, and that the prevention is better than the cure. Even amongst people that beleive that climate change is happening, and may be a problem, convincing people that any particular course of chemotherapy is worth the price in reduced cancer later is tenuous.
As much as I think the guy is a dork, and as much as I dislike the wedding of hollywood and politics, I appreciate someone trying to contribute to discourse on a topic. Everyone should be heard - they're either self evidently an idiot, or they're worth hearing. Just because this movie doesn't convince me I need to live in a grass hut covered in solar panels doesn't mean the next one won't
1. Cached Exchange Mode. All versions of outlook without this are absolute unusable garbage. This feature was what allowed me to stop using PINE+IMAP at work.
:)
2. RPC over HTTPS. This is _huge_ for mobile workers.
I happen to really like Outlook 2007. I've not noticed any speed problems with it. They've done a good job since OL2k of removing possible high-latency calls on UI threads, making the client much more interactive in a variety of situations. In 2000 Outloook+Exchange were unusable. I remember the exchange team having an "SP1 ship party" and thinking I'd run over there and choke all of them, perhaps screaming "get back in your f@#$king offices and fix this bullshit until i can read email as quickly and easily as me and _50000_ other students could using pine+sendmail on a 2 proc dec alpha"
Outlook and Exchange have gotten _much_ better since then. I can use them without wanting to kill people, which has left me free to be angry about other Microsoft intolerables, like DRM, windows stealing focus, and long path name support
I wish I could disagree with you (I'm an anti-DRM Microsoft employee), but I'm not sure that I can.
Based on conversations I've had with "the people that know", content protection features in some of our products go above and beyond what is strictly required by the letter of the law. What I cannot get a straight answer on is if it is because of contractual obligations we have or for some other reason.
It is very frustrating because the people involved (and some of them are lawyers) are not especially helpful or forthcoming when it comes to explaining their decisions. MS is a relatively open company internally - you can candidly ask any employee about what they work on, challenge their judgement, etc. Usuaully you find out they're pretty smart and had good reasons for doing what they did. It's a good system - 90% of the time I can agree with a point of view or a decision I didn't initially agree with, because I replace my (incorrect/incomplete) assumptinos with real data/knowledge from the people that directly attacked the problem. But that hasn't always been the case when trying to understand why certain content-protection behaviors are the way they are. There's a growing undercurrent of employees that are at least as ugly as some slashdot trolls anytime some new person says "i was trying to do thing X with my media and i can't.. why not?". We'll spout off answers like "because MS is the bitch of hollywood, not the company that cares about its customers" and the baiting goes pretty much unanswered/unchallenged.
I've been barking up a lot of trees in my internal anti-DRM crusades and the answers sound a lot like "we're not talking to YOU about this". I wonder if it is just me, but the people I've tlaked to that aren't quite as obnoxious as I am get about the same treatment.
So yeah. Some of it, maybe even most of it, is us trying to cover our asses legally. But not 100% of it. And that non-zero amount really pisses me off.
I don't know what is public knowledge about vista SKUs and Vista licensing, but I'll say a few things
- it is NOT expected that large organizations will be deploying the Ultimate SKU on their desktops. There are business focused SKUs, and those are what most business desktops will be running. Do you want Media center on all of your employee machines?
- there has been a lot of new feature work in key/activation/whatever handling for the enterprise desktop scenario. AFAIK, this work only applies to the business focused SKU(s). It's what microsoft will be using internally and it has over 100k PCs to manage (not including unmanaged assets like lab hardware)
Based on what I know (and I don't know everything, nor am I an authority on these specific areas) you can safely assume the following:
- imaging is a supported and important scenario
- assuming the right SKUs / supporting infrastructure, individual employees will not need to worry about product keys or activation.
The claim goes, for every 1 drug that a company brings to market after years of painful research failures, there are a bunch that didn't pan out, and the one that did took years of people working tirelessly to create.
If the drug companies weren't granted monopoly distribution rights via protectionist government intervention, this basic drug research would not be possible because the basic investment would never pay back - generics would undersell the "inventor" of the drug everytime.
How sure are people of this?
Is intellectual property law really acceptible? Does it really get "goodness" into the hands of the public sooner?
Would basic drug research and development continue without intellectual property protection?
What things can and cannot be intellectual property, and why? Isn't it possible to patent a process that has business value? Suppose that someone had patented the process for doing a heart transplant and refused to allow other hospitals to do heart transplants?
The current model of IP protection is _one_ model. I'd argue that it has been badly twisted and perverted by content organizations like the MPAA/RIAA, and by brand holders like Disney, and by many others.
There may be other models that do NOT rely upon the government-sponsored artificial construct called "intellectual property", yet still allow people that work hard to be fairly compensated and still allow good contributions to be made to society.
The road that the US (and by extension, the world) is headed down is not sustainable. Soon it will be illegal to create new inventions or content without infringing on something else pre-existing, and more and more, intellectual property owners will attempt to maximally monetize their intellectual property in a direction orthogonal to or even opposite of the path of ethics and societal responsibility. And because the whole scheme is artificially created by government, no market correction can exist or happen.
I currently enjoy my livelihood because of "today's model" but I am pretty frustrted with some of the things my employer is doing because of "today's model". It's got me thinking about other ones.
Any discussion about intellectual property starts and ends with the problem of drugs - society measurably suffers because of IP protection for drug designs. The only question is - does society measurably suffer without IP protection for drug designs? The people might be willing to try "the grand experiment". But the companies that bought our legal system won't hear of it.
No Comprendo.
Verzeihung. Viederholst, bitte.
sumimasen, wakarimasen.
all i can figure is that you are making some pun/joke about setting language preferences, in which case, i'll elaborte.
Haali Media Splitter lets you set audio/subtitle language sets in a prioritized list, so soft subbed content in MKV or OGM containers can display the right streams according to your preferences.
If i can get it, i like japanese audio with english subtitles, but if i cant, i like english audio with no subtitles. Haali contains all of the stream mathcing/selection logic to encode my preferences so that i dont need to hit any buttons to get the right language/subtitle tracks, assuming the MKV is authored with language tags on the streams. If not, MKVToolnix can add the tags and re-encode the media (without actually doing a decode/re-encode of any streams... it just updates stream metadata)
The CCCP is a great project, and i've dropped into their IRC channel before with bug reports / problems / questions. CCCP works on Vista and lets you get softsubs, mkv support, etc under Media Center on both XP and Vista.
I've only found a small sampling of content that doesn't "just work" with CCCP, in which case, VLC usually suffices. To be fair, to get CCCP playing how i want in MCE i usally set Haali to always load VSFilter, and i set ffdaudio to SPDIF passthrough for ac3/dts, which means i can only mute/unmute those audio streams with the MCE remote. Also, I configure the Haali splitter for my language preferences so that i don't have to try and get WMP/MCE to talk to the stream switchers in those formats (it doesn't).