Channel 9 - Discussions by Ovidiu.Platon

Coffeehouse - 419 College

Ovidiu.Platon — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:53:20 GMT

Stitch 2.0 wrote:

It helps to read other threads aswell.....

My apologies I searched the forum using Google but didn't bother to check the first page first. Sorry!

Coffeehouse - 419 College

Ovidiu.Platon — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:13:12 GMT

Sorry to resurrect a thread, but I just wanted to let you know that I've received an email with the Nigerian scam today. The weird thing about it is the Subject line: "Channel 9 user email: Dear Sir,From John Mark". In case anyone would like to have fun with the spammer, I would be more than glad to provide the headers of the email

Coffeehouse - Anyone seen Beer28?

Ovidiu.Platon — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:12:10 GMT

I know I'm being a jerk, but I'm surprised that someone is missing Beer.

Coffeehouse - MS Promises Pony for Upgrade

Ovidiu.Platon — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:57:04 GMT

Rossj wrote:

I thought Beer, we were going to stop with the Linux sales pitch?

I think Beer is some sort of bot. When bashed, it admits being wrong, then resets itself and starts all over again. I've seen such an experiment on http://nonsense.sourceforge.net/ and they are able to imitate slashdot quite well for instance.

A "ignore user" filter would come in handy at this time.

Coffeehouse - .NET can be fast - Today I was surprised

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:29:43 GMT

Senkwe Chanda wrote:

VS.Net is a C++ application.

The host is unmanaged, but there are plenty of managed plugins in there. Have you ever thought how it's possible to have WYSIWYG Windows Forms/ASP.NET/Web Service/component designers? Or how come you write a visual component and test it in Visual Studio? (And the example list is long)

Coffeehouse - do we need user rankings?

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:11:51 GMT

It might be interesting to have some form of statistics about C9 activity. Many communities have a vast silent majority and a vocal minority. Maybe the "casual, drive by" poster has been reading the forum for a while and got sick of useless junk posted constantly by some.
By statistics, I mean initiated threads and replies, on the one hand, and threads read/last login/login count/login frequency on the other hand. The star system might be a good way of ranking individual posts, but it's also highly subjective (I don't read every single post around here and I certainly won't rank each).
Besides, there's the risk of people replying indefinitely just to increase their activity stats, and there's one last question: Beside your ego being hurt by some "drive by" poster's opinion, what would the final purpose be?

Coffeehouse - .NET can be fast - Today I was surprised

Ovidiu.Platon — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 20:30:47 GMT

If you want better performance figures, you might be interested in implementing a performance counter. Take a look in the System.Diagnostics namespace, you'll find everything you need in there.

Off-topic: I already knew that .NET rules, both in terms of speed, and of memory footprint. I fired up NetBeans 4.0 today and it takes about 70 MB of RAM just to boot up. Compare that to about 15-20 MB used by Visual Studio. After editing a simple Hello, World form (one label, one button) and compiling the project, NetBeans reaches 140 MB of RAM (that darn GC is very lazy in Java). Try doing it in VS.NET and measure

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:52:16 GMT

sbc wrote:

So those that are paid to work on the Linux kernel aren't real developers?

I'm sure that even the Linux kernel developers know that their software is not perfect. Every once in a while you see security advisories regarding the Linux kernel and there's even anecdotic evidence about the fact that building software isn't easy regardless of the platform you're working on (http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/). Oh, and the first Linux kernel came out a while after the first NT kernel.

sbc wrote:

People will ask for more features, but due to its easy extensibility, they don't need to ask Mozilla. The Firefox team will not add everything people ask for. It should stay as a small download (<6MB) - Opera is the smallest download at the moment, but the next version of Firefox may be smaller than it is now (4.7MB).

Firefox is meant to be a very basic browser, with only essential features used by most people (it does not even have mouse gestures even though people have asked for them - a third party extension can do that). It has something that Internet Explorer will never have - works cross platform, rendering pages the same, even extensions generally work no matter your OS.

I'm sure there are extensions that are used by companies internally, and they don't have to worry about spending a lot of money to buy a certificate.

Assuming you agree with me that bugs happen, you're essentially saying that pushing bugs away from Mozilla to third party developers will make everyone's life better. I bet that in 5 years from now you'll see things in a different light.

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:45:13 GMT

The "(I need to watch my language)" filter is cool I used a word designating "sites containing explicit sexual content" above I hope I haven't broken any forum rules. Sorry!

Coffeehouse - Firefox Auto Update

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:33:45 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

That error is caused by 3rd Party extensions with poorly authored update files, Mozilla Foundation has nothing to do with it.

...

Only download from reputable sites!

...

"Blue screens are usually caused by faulty drivers, not by the Windows kernel"

"Only install IE plugins from trusted sources"

We really need a reality check here:

1. Once you turn a product into a platform and allow other people to plug their own bits into it, it's no longer secure. (Unless you do it in .NET and you do it properly. It will take years until people learn this)

Most people get spyware in their computer after visiting warez/porn sites or forums with insecure server side software, or when they receive scam emails and are naive enough to believe what they're told (although, I admit, checking an email's authenticity is no easy task for a regular user). If they really want to get in there, they'll just click "Yes" when they're told to do so. They also run as administrator because they know what they're doing.

2. Even if you completely lock down a product, no software is perfect. This stands true for IE/Mozilla/Firefox/anything you wish. Check out http://secunia.com/multiple_browsers_idn_spoofing_test/ for instance (and the three advisories related to IE below ) Except for the noisy open source crowd (where's Beer, btw...), no real developer believes in perfect, free (as in speech, or as in beer, or whatever) software.

The tiny code base and functionality Firefox has is the only reason it hasn't had its share of exploits so far. Wait until it gains some more popularity and people start asking for more features and then we'll see (unless IE 7 will be released in the mean time). Things went the same way with IE years ago. But wait, most people never learn from bad experiences, it was other people's fault anyway.

Coffeehouse - Channel9 built on Slashdot technology

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 19:21:50 GMT

Maurits wrote:

DylanGreene wrote: using Slashdot's code

I didn't mean to imply that Channel9 was using Slashdot's code. But it is using technology that was developed for Slashdot, and later released.

No, it uses a communication standard called RSS which has nothing to do with Slashdot.

Coffeehouse - What sucks about multimedia on your PC?

Ovidiu.Platon — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:55:28 GMT

My main complaint about Windows Media Player would be its performance (especially the working set).

I used Winamp from version 0.x to this day. What I particularly enjoy about it is the fact that it really allows you to "pay as you go". In Winamp 5, if I disable all the shiny features, I get a working set as small as the one in v1 or v2.xx (I can prove that with vadump logs or perfmon logs if you wish).

That never happened with WMP (I'm still evaluating v10 though). V9 sucked big time, it's painful to get rid of all the useless shiny features and you get no real benefit, the working set is about the same.

The second complaint would be about usability. Previous posters have made a good job complaining about this so I won't do it again.

Coffeehouse - .Net(C#) vs Java

Ovidiu.Platon — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 20:30:45 GMT

Present tense:

I run Visual Studio.NET 2003, IIS + ASP.NET Worker Process on Windows XP Pro, SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition and I'm able to build, test and debug ASP.NET apps on a 2-year old laptop (P4 @ 1.6 GHz) with 512 MB of RAM without a headache.

Now you try loading IBM WebSphere on a machine with 512 MB of RAM.

Coffeehouse - .Net(C#) vs Java

Ovidiu.Platon — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 13:57:48 GMT

Beer28 wrote:

geekling wrote:

Beer28 wrote:

Much of .NET is wrapped on platform SDK. DirectX/DirectDraw are part of platform SDK. So is netshow, Direct Show, WMP, ect...

I think that's good. I'd rather .NET be invoking native libraries from the operating system for speed rather than having to emulate everything just for the sake of looking ugly and slow on every platform.

I guess if you can't call functions directly that's the next best thing.

War story: Back in early 2000 I was a happy Visual C++ 6 developer with 64 MB of RAM on my machine (Windows NT 4.0 Workstation). One day I decide to play around with the Swing thingie and install Forte. Forte sucks on 64 MB so I add another 64. Things still suck. Big time. Once every 3-5 minutes or so, the machine would stop to a complete freeze until the Java GC would do its whatever.

Some time later (a year?), the first Visual Studio.NET beta appears. I install it on a machine with 128 MB of RAM but with a slightly faster processor (the rest of the configuration was pretty much similar to the initial one). It rocks. Then, a while later, I get my hands on Forte 3.0 and try it on the same machine and, to my amazement, it's almost usable. I turn on JNI tracing and I figure out that much of Swing and of Forte seems to be written in C.

Bottom line:
(1) Even Sun seems to think invoking native functions is good.
(2) I have yet to see a pure .NET desktop application behaving so badly as the first Forte.

Coffeehouse - Minesweeper, Solitaire, Pinball, ...

Ovidiu.Platon — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 19:24:03 GMT

Speaking of Solitaire, I remembered a nice story I read about quite a while ago.

Folklore says that during development of Windows NT 4.0, Solitaire was used as a benchmark for the new GDI subsystem. In NT 3.x, the GDI subsystem (the entire Win32 subsystem, if I recall this correctly) was implemented out-of-process, as a user-mode process. Issuing graphics calls from a process was a slow task, given the fact that it took interprocess communication and at least two context switches to get things done.

To improve performance (in terms of speed, memory footprint, context switches, IPC and other aspects), most of Win32 was moved to the kernel, resulting in the Win32.sys module today. But, at some point, some developer playing Solitaire is said to have noticed that the final show of cards falling around was way slower than in the previous version. The GDI team has set its performance bar accordingly and tuned the core until Solitaire performed as expected. (Maybe someone from Microsoft who was actually a part of this story can confirm this myth or correct me in case I was wrong in some way.)

Btw, in order to test the falling cards, you don't have to finish a game. It's enough to press Alt+Shift+2. Worked flawlessly on every single version of Windows NT I ever tested on! I wonder whether Managed Solitaire keeps this tradition.

And, finally, two links about the technical details of going from NT 3.x to NT 4.0. The really funny thing is that everyone predicted that NT 4.0 would crash horribly and die every once in a while because of this move. It turns out they were half right: I have never seen a Windows kernel function to blue-screen the system, but damn those amateur video driver writers!

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/ntwrkstn/evaluate/featfunc/kernelwp.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/archi.mspx

Coffeehouse - .Net(C#) vs Java

Ovidiu.Platon — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 09:10:58 GMT

Beer28 wrote:

Ovidiu.Platon wrote:

Beer28 wrote:

If I use the default SDK libraries for .NET, I can not run it anywhere but windows.

But you don't use them anyway. Why do you keep whining? You've been complaining for several days about not being able to run DirectX and WinForms and whatever on any platforms. We get the picture. Now go have a nice big cup...

I used to use them with C++, with the windows platform SDK CD.

BTW, I lost my cup and used yours, you don't mind do you?

I'm back... This guy can't even tell the Platform SDK libraries from the .NET Framework library. IMHO people should stop answering to someone who appears once every couple of posts or so and hasn't managed to say a relevant thing so far. Sorry for being that rude and personal, but I got bored of seeing every single thread hijacked by a penguin begging for attention.

Coffeehouse - .Net(C#) vs Java

Ovidiu.Platon — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 20:39:51 GMT

Beer28 wrote:

If I use the default SDK libraries for .NET, I can not run it anywhere but windows.

But you don't use them anyway. Why do you keep whining? You've been complaining for several days about not being able to run DirectX and WinForms and whatever on any platforms. We get the picture. Now go have a nice big cup...

Coffeehouse - whats after #

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:46:59 GMT

Come on, people, it's obvious: C9

Coffeehouse - Bigtop - A few questions...

Ovidiu.Platon — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 15:31:47 GMT

Funny, my degree project is a P2P framework built on .NET Framework 2.0.

The coolest thing about it is that you can send .NET assemblies along with the work item parameters, so you have truly mobile, self-contained tasks, while also having great security (.NET Code Access Security + the built-in Windows support). No deployment issues, no security issues (and it runs just like other similar frameworks, on idle CPU power and unused physical memory).

The worst thing about it is that it's not finished yet and that it's built on the beta version of Whidbey so far. I'll have stuff up & running in mid-April (if all goes as planned ). Maybe I'll resort to c9ers' help for beta testing

Coffeehouse - Windows is fragile

Ovidiu.Platon — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 13:50:03 GMT

As far as I know, replicating machines with Ghost is useful when you have identical machines. I've never had any trouble at all when doing so.

For machines with different hardware configurations, Remote Installation Services might be a good solution (but I've never tried it, I know from others).

As for driver certification... During my early kernel-mode programming endeavours in Windows, I tried to put a checked version of Windows XP inside a virtual machine. It worked perfectly in Virtual PC; in VmWare, after installing the VmWare (unsigned) graphics drivers, the machine crashed because the driver had triggered an assert inside the Windows kernel. I have yet to see a signed driver to trigger an assert in a checked version of Windows. I also wonder how many of the driver "developers" out there use checked builds of Windows for development.

Coffeehouse - How to Hate Microsoft?

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:40:46 GMT

I don't hate Microsoft. The way I see things, one has got to learn from what Microsoft has done well, discard what Microsoft has done wrong (from both a business and technical perspective) and one still has got to go a long way to achieve something similar.

However, there are quite a lot of things that went wrong and keep going so. Many years ago, Microsoft went to the market with lousy products and great marketing (does anyone remember Windows 95? ) and conquered the world. Many years ago, Windows was THE buzzword. I remember passionate kids upgrading their computers' hardware and software like crazy just to keep the pace with the latest 9x release.

These days, Microsoft has great products and lousy marketing. No product name from Microsoft is the word of the day anymore, although many are technical jewels, especially compared to the junk from a decade ago. Even worse, misunderstood transparency gets Microsoft a bad image - for example, I think that announcing the Longhorn features and then cutting them back was a HUGE mistake. Features have been cut before, but never in front of the public...

The way I see it, Microsoft is a big fat guy standing on top of Mount Fuji with a gun pointed to his head (DOJ, in case you were wondering. And maybe the EU Court of Justice). If it wants to keep itself from going downhill, Microsoft has to lose serious weight and become really slim, get off Mount Fuji and find the next big thing, and when it climbs its top, make sure the press is there to take pictures. The way Microsoft looks right now, it can't even tie its own shoelaces without a contractor's help.

One of the most amazing things about Microsoft is that it has these marketing logos like "Your potential, our passion", but it never manages to fully exploit its own potential.

Microsoft had the desktop and it failed to introduce a desktop search tool for years. Amazingly or not, the MSN Toolbar (in beta currently) uses a technology that's been there since NT 4 (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm not - Indexing Service has been in there for ages).

MS had MSN ages ago, and yet it failed to develop a search engine, for instance, although it had the resources to do so. Not mentioning other types of online applications that are just beginning to shape right now on MSN.

Sandboxing code (for running attachments from Outlook, for example), had been possible for years, yet it took several major viruses and Windows XP Service Pack 2 for someone to realize that those features are actually useful.

I don't know for XP with SP2 preinstalled, but by default, the first user account all other XP variants create after installation is an admin account. Just making that account a limited one would have prevented countless hours of tech support and frustration.

Many development teams within Microsoft end up developing similar features at different levels. Isn't it striking that Outlook has a file format for storing emails that's a filesystem in itself? It supports encryption, compression, folders (object oriented ones you can store emails, contacts, notes and a lot of other stuff in there). Why didn't those people build a better NTFS, name it WinFS and ship it two years ago?

When it comes to managed code, it gets even worse. Many apps from Microsoft and from third parties are being developed the way they would've been developed in C++, without running the platform at full throttle. Sometimes it seems to me that you really can't teach an old dog new tricks...

The examples could go on forever (or at least a few pages or so )...

And then there's R&D. Whoever is managing those kzilions of dollars spent on this probably knows that the 'R' part means 80% of the projects fail and say "it can't be done at this time" and the other 20% will be marketable in well over 10 years from now (the time it takes to do the 'D' part). You can't advance without doing it, but heck, if you spend so much and are proud of it, better show the world some nice results every once in a while, what do you think?

And speaking of which, how much do you think the research & development of the iPod cost? Even though it's a tiny product compared to Microsoft's mammoths, it's the word of the day. Microsoft doesn't get any good press because it's plain old boring. And then there are Open Source Software and iPods to talk about...

That about concludes my rant. I wish I also had some solutions for the problems above, but I'll leave that to the board of directors

Maybe it takes a smart kid to build a managed web browser, based on Avalon for the graphics part, more secure (with .NET CAS, for instance), about as performant, fully standards compliant and with a good compatibility layer to prove that the holes in IE can be covered. Or maybe Microsoft is waiting for everyone to seek out alternatives, move to other peoples' platforms and applications and then prove once again that it can take over the market again, who knows... The way I see it right now, Microsoft is too focused on Fortune500 partners and forgot about the basics (heck, I'm not even the first one to say it ). But remember, if a decision maker uses Linux at home and sees that it works just fine, (s)he will start using it at work as well...

You have the chicken with the golden eggs, a goldfish and a whole bunch of genies in there. Now put them to work, lose some weight, get a haircut and call in a press conference!

Have a great year, everyone!

Coffeehouse - Teams Start Hitting Beta 2 ZBB

Ovidiu.Platon — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 13:22:35 GMT

Any hints on when to expect the Beta 2 bits in the MSDN subscriptions?

Thanks,
Ovidiu