blowdart said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Ah yes, the if you don't like it rewrite it argument of open source. What a crock, I mean really. How many companies have developers skilled enough to redevelop a language, or something like Apache?

I am not a user of Ruby on Rails, so I do not understand what you find to be wrong with it under Windows, but I think just about every possible option that could be made available to rectify your complaints is available.

If you are such a fan of how it operates on Linux and you do not want to touch source code, you can run it under cygwin on Windows. It should work just as well.

Bass said:

Wait what? Microsoft is trying to selfishly gain profit at the expense of the rest of the industry? They have a word for that I think. "Competition"

 

Don't try to assign human qualities of purpose to public corporations. They all exist for only one purpose: accumulation of wealth.

Talking about data portability, standards, etcetera is nice only when it is applied consistently. It is a truly vulgar to expect your competitors to adopt practices that help your business without reciprocation commitments.

If Microsoft is serious about data portability, standards, etcetera, then it can start by modifying Microsoft Office to depreciate the current .docx format in favor of a standard implementation of OOXML. Microsoft can continue by making the DRM components of .NET available to the Mono project. Then Microsoft could depreciate Direct3D, DirectAudio, etcetera for their OpenGL, OpenAL, etcetera counterparts. Next Microsoft could modify the software for which it charges a fee that is separate from the cost of Windows to be available for the major UNIX-like operating systems and not dependent on any version of Windows. Such software would include things like Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, the games it publishes, etcetera and they would need to run under major Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Finally, Microsoft could produce versions of Windows for ARM processors.

blowdart said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Well it depends. Data storage is pretty portable. However once you start coding for the cloud, well, as ever, if you're writing ASP.NET (Mono aside) then you're going to have to use IIS. PHP gives you options of linux/bsd/windows. Rails, well, rails doesn't work that well on Microsoft, so now you're locked into Linux, and that's only a little better because you might have more linux cloud suppliers.

Ruby on Rails is available for Windows, it is MIT licensed, and there is nothing stopping people from running it on Windows under cygwin if they do not like the Windows version. If people do not like the Windows version, there is nothing stopping them from modifying the source code to produce something that they do like.

JoshRoss said:

PaoloM said:

*snip*

Paolo, you're into D&D, right? You need to find a nice profile picture for Shining Arcanine.  Is there such a thing as a level 20 troll?

 

 

-Josh

I think I have a valid complaint. At the same time, your ad hominem attack is invalid.

PaoloM said:

Sure, but you certainly didn't mean "migrate people to some version of Windows", because that has nothing to do with data portability; standard based technologies; ease of migration and deployment across cloud networks; and developer choice, right?

Actually, it does. Cloud computing is a market dominated by Linux and Microsoft wants it get into it, so Microsoft promoting things that make it easier for them to get people to migrate away from Linux, which benefits Windows. If this convinces people to migrate, Microsoft will attempt a vendor lock-in as people switch by introducing them to a ton of Windows-specific things with no intention of providing them to other platforms and every intention of having them use it, making developer choice go only in one direction.

Paoli's recent work involves a new Microsoft initiative to promote interoperability among the key components of cloud networks. The initiative, described in July at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, is attempting to promote data portability; use of standards-based technologies; ease of migration and deployment across cloud networks; and developer choice.

Am I the only one who notices that Microsoft is enthusiastic about promoting standardization and data portability on other people's platforms, but when it comes to promoting standardization and data portability on their own platforms, their enthusiasm quickly fades? Is this Microsoft's way of saying "we want you to help us move people to our platform so that we can lock them into it"?

It seems to me that developer choice only goes in one direction with Microsoft. Can anyone demonstrate an instance where Microsoft has not tried to migrate people to some version of Windows?

exoteric said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Aside from the fact that the code does not fix it (not valid C#), I'm pretty sure Sven is aware of the solution to this problem.

I have been around so much Java that I am beginning to mix and match Java and C++. In my mind, that was valid C++ code.

AndyC said:

The RAM disk is intended for special case scenarios (embedded devices, WinPE) when writeable disk is needed but difficult / expensive to provide.

It's not going to improve your system performance. If anything it will degrade it as it is nowhere near as efficient as the Windows cache manager.

It depends on how much RAM you have. If you have say 2TB of RAM, it should make things faster, although copying the file system to it and then doing redirection might be an issue.

Could antivirus APIs be used in a program to detect changes to the disk while it copies things to the RAM drive? Could a junction point be used afterward to do redirection? When you want to shut down the system, could the changes be merged back into the filesystem without causing problems as it is done? These questions probably need to be answered before doing this kind of thing.

Sven Groot said:

Why is this symptomatic of optional parameters? I can run into exactly the same problem without them:

 

enum SomeEnum{One, Two};
class SomeClass
{
  private SomeEnum someEnum;

  private DoWork(SomeEnum someEnum)
  {
    someEnum = someEnum;
  }
}

 

No optional parameters, same problem.

enum SomeEnum{One, Two}; class SomeClass { private SomeEnum someEnum; private DoWork(SomeEnum someEnum) { this->someEnum = someEnum; } }

That should fix it. Although I have never tried it, ::someEnum or SomeClass::someEnum might also work.

rhm said:

Jesus, how many more threads for this exact story do we need?

I did not realize that the other thread was on this topic. I thought it was of a philosophical thread on the merits of game consoles.

The suggestion is that even mediocre PC gamers were superior to the best console gamers, but honestly, when I try playing console games, specifically First Person Shooters, I get killed before I know what hit me. With traditional PC-based first person shooters, at least I can see what is shooting at me before I die. It would have been nice to have some payback.

Anyway, since this is Channel 9, is there any chance that we could get an official story on what happened to this project?

I took some time this past weekend to figure it out and now my monitors are calibrated again. It is literally a night and day difference and I was so happy with the result that I decided to calibrate the LCD TV in my family's living room too. Now all of the LCD screens in the house are calibrated and I am very happy with the results.

Anyway, that lead me to the question: Does anyone else here calibrate their monitors or am I the only one?

Is there anyway that I can do this?

MasterPie said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

Think Different?

 

Okay, they don't really say it so much anymore. But...I'd argue that most of Jobs' advertising one liners do the effect of a slogan. "World's most advanced operating system" "Most brilliant piece of engineering" ... they give the effect that Apple is leagues ahead of everyone else.

Those two slogans do not make sense without criteria by which they can be independently verified. They make Apple's marketing department seem ignorant to me.

Microsoft's new slogan seems to be "Be What's Next". Does anyone have any idea what it is intended to mean? Is it meant to be something that the imaginative are supposed to fill-in with whatever they consider to be positive or does it have an actual predefined meaning?

Charles said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

How do you know? We haven't announced what browser will be in the shipping product...... Speculate all you want. I would recommend that you not listen to the blowhard who wrote the InfoWorld article proclaiming WP7 will fail. He's full of sh#!.

 

Again, you don't know what version of IE will ship in WP7. Don't base your judgement on what you don't know.

 

Native code will not be supported in WP7 V1. Can we move on? I've sent plenty of emails regarding this fact. The fact is, this is the fact: no native code. Want me to write that again? I'm tired of typing the same thing.

 

rhm, WP7's architecture and underlying OS is not the same as iOS. Why are you making comparisons bewtween them? What's the point?

 

Let's wait until the thing ships, you play with it, build some apps and then send us feedback based on real world usage, not theory, not speculation, not hypothesis. OK?

 

I'd imagine that if lack of support for native code kills adoption by the developer community, well, you'd think we'd react and deliver accordingly. For now. it's clear the direction is managed-only. Let's see what happens in the real world.

 

C

Charles, it is easy to infer from your post that the browser that ships in Windows Mobile 7 will be Internet Explorer. If you had not said that "you don't know what version of IE will ship in WP7", then Chrome or Firefox could have been possible too, but that comment narrows it to Internet Explorer.

ZippyV said:

Charles said:

*snip*

We need native code to get other browsers on WP7. The built-in browser is not up to par with the current standards and is therefore useless.

Strictly speaking, native code is not necessary for such a thing, but it would mean that you would have to write your browser from scratch and it will be difficult to predict how it will perform. Either that, or someone will need to figure out a way to compile native code into MSIL.

Charles said:

rhm said:

*snip*

Irrelevant? Really? WP7 is making a bet on a "closed" platform model, on .NET. The argument for native support is moot. It's not going to be supported in V1. WP7 team believes SL + XNA should provide a rich set of capabilities for application developers targetting WP7 who also already use VS and .NET.... It's not rocket science. The company is making a bet on managed code + mobile devices. It could be that managed code will find it's soul mate in this context. Who knows? The phone isn't out yet..... Let's give this a chance. Why not?

 

C

It looks to me that Microsoft is not making a bet on managed code so much as it is trying to fabricate a new platform into which it can lock developers before the rest of the world becomes compatible with its existing platform. Then after that, the new platform will mature, at which point the cycle will repeat.

Microsoft has been advertising .NET as the greatest thing ever since around 2002, but I would not be surprised if Microsoft switches to a purely functional programming model in about 10 years and then proceeds to advertise that it is the greatest thing ever to get the world to switch, not because it necessarily is the greatest thing ever, but because Microsoft is trying to continually lock people into a platform that allows them to indefinitely charge fees at their discretion.

I know that I am affirming the consequent by saying this, but everything Microsoft has done has been consistent with such an intention. Considering that the law of gravity is an affirmation of the consequent, I think that this kind of reasoning can be useful when a large number of observations are all consistent with it, which is true in both the case of Microsoft and the case of gravity.

I think the resistance Microsoft has faced in terms of new versions of Windows demonstrates that people want stable APIs and mature programming models, that are supported by more companies than just Microsoft.

W3bbo said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Microsoft doesn't give Office free to students anywhere, the best you can hope for is a nice discount only if your university has arranged it already.

 

You can get Office Visio and Project on MSDN-AA, however.

I have to pay a technology fee whether I like it or not and that fee covers a Microsoft Office license. I already paid for it, although I prefer not to think that I did.

gogogadget said:

Android started out with a lot broader API then apple, but the platform is only now becoming stable.  I'd rather have fewer features, but have them actually not crash the phone.  You know, do it right or not at all.  They are probably finding that things like the blur effect are not implemented in an efficient enough manner to run on a 1ghz machine.  Keep in mind that as powerfull as these phones are today they are only roughly equivelant to a 10 year old desktop in computing power. 

 

I am sure that they have had to do a LOT of optimizing to get silverlight to run quickly on a 1ghz processor.  And... I am very glad they did, because developing in silverlight is definitely a lot nicer then developing in the cryptic java based mvc model offered by google, or the objective c that apple is so proud of...

 

That being said, I know how frusterating it can be when you hit a wall, and lets face it we allways do when developing an application!

I believe that google offers two models for GUI programming on Android. They offer a tradditional MVC model, or a XML-based model:

http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html

They also support native code development in C/C++:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

They even support "codeless development":

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/07/google-demos-codeless-android-development-tool-for-students.ars

While I am certain that Apple's iPhone requires all code to be written in Objective-C for Apple specific APIs, I am not certain about Windows Mobile 7. Does it require that you do programming with Silverlight, or does it offer other options?

PaoloM said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Oh yes. While Apple is busy diverting resources and effort into the iOS devices, Windows 7 is selling seven copies each second.

 

I'm not saying that Apple is doing badly, au contraire, but Linux is pretty much dead on the desktop and reeling back on the server, and OS/X is dramatically failing to capitalize on the runaway success of the iPhone and iPad.

 

Vista was a necessary technological step to pave the way for the current Windows generation. And still managed to outsold every other OS on the market.

Are you sure that those are all Windows 7 sales? Many companies today seem to be buying Windows 7 licenses because it allows them to obtain more copies of Windows XP. Micorsoft is more than happy to advertise such sales as being Windows 7 sales, but in reality, the only thing that was being purchased was Windows XP.

Not to mention, the 7 copies a second is not a constant rate. It is likely represents some average over time, most likely picked in such a way that the figure was as high as possible. I consider it highly improbable that the graph of sales per second with respect to time is  y = [0.65, 0.75).

elmer said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

I suspect more to the point... if they release an SP4 then they would be locked into extending support by another 5 years.

I can think of two things:

1. This is a good thing. It will keep Microsoft's customers happy.
2. Microsoft need not extend support every time they release a service pack. I think that they are the only software company in the world that does this and it has never made sense to me.

PaoloM said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

So they can wipe out the competition with the successor of WP7, like they did with the successor of Vista?

 

Sounds like a good strategy to me!

Has it? I think that Microsoft is too busy with its own forced obsolescence initiative to worry about its competitors. After all, it has been trying to kill Windows XP for a few years now as part of it and that has not worked very well. In the mean time, Mac OS X has been siphoning significant marketshare from Windows and other UNIX-like operating systems have been growing in popularity too, although they have been growing at a slower rate than Mac OS X.

CKurt said:

Shining Arcanine said:

*snip*

Windows Mobile is dead, they started from 0 with the new OS about a 1,5 years ago...

 

7 is just a name

That sounds like what Microsoft did with Windows Vista. Do you know why they did it with Windows Mobile?