Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Is there such thing from MS?

Oh, you mean the snapshot stuff? Sure, that's "Volume Shadow Service". Been 
around since XP or so.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
> some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX", 

There's a bunch of internal stuff, as well as things like Media Center, 
.NET, etc.

> unless it is something in the class of user interfaces, and those tend 
> to be used to "hide" things you don't want people mucking with,

Sounds like One True Scotsman syndrome to me.  Because Microsoft doesn't 
innovate, anything Microsoft does is, by definition, not innovation.

> FOSS has an excuse for this, they don't have thousands of developers 
> working 24/7 on *one* project, trying to make it bloody work right. 

Actually, it's worse. FOSS actually discourages getting projects "finished" 
and easy to use and reliable, unless it's infrastructure for the people 
working on other projects. Apache and gcc work great, because on top of 
*that* people can write code that you can sell without giving it away (like 
google does, in other words). But if you actually turned out a 
professional-quality piece of software that needed what it did and it had to 
work well, you couldn't make money off of maintenance. Hence the dearth of 
games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Hence the dearth of
> games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.

Games are creative endeavours, not programs.  There's a program behind
controlling, yes, but it's the graphics, music and sound effects, level
layouts, story and dialoguing that take center stage.  Hardly something the GPL
can automagically churn out from collaborative efforts.

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Hence the dearth of
>> games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.
> 
> Games are creative endeavours, not programs.  There's a program behind
> controlling, yes, but it's the graphics, music and sound effects, level
> layouts, story and dialoguing that take center stage. 

Ding ding ding!  Congratulations. You understood my point.

> Hardly something the GPL
> can automagically churn out from collaborative efforts.

Actually, you *can* churn out all that from a collaborative effort. See, for 
example, the "Thief 2X" game.

However, there's little "ongoing maintenance" you can contract for, so once 
you release it and everyone copies it for free, you're pretty SOL if you're 
expecting to make a living at it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> I see MS doing lots of new things that aren't on Linux, tho. You don't 
>> stay ahead by not inventing anything new.
>>
> What exactly?

BTW, have you looked at Microsoft's open source OS called Singularity? It's 
pretty darn innovative. I guess if you never actually look at what research 
MS is publishing, you're unlikely to find anything they're doing new, no.

> want at all, or trust, *or* someone goes, "Gee, doesn't GFBunk (or some 
> similarly weirdly named thing) already do that on such an such OS?"

BTW, can you name me perhaps three things that Linux does that's 
distinctively new and innovative? Because I thought about it for a couple 
hours, and I can't think of anything significant I can do in Linux that I 
wasn't doing on Version 7 in 1983 or so, except internet stuff which is new 
with BSD 4.2 about oh 15+ years ago?  Linux doesn't even go as far as Apple 
did and rearrange the file system or fix the X-Windows subsystem.  Heck, 
even NeWS would be better than X.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

> Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
> some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX",

Huh? How many programs have you written using DirectX9 and DirectX10?  Why 
do you think the improvements are a mess?

1) DX10 now allows multiple programs and threads to use the hardware at the 
same time, and is totally integrated with the OS GUI now, unlike in WinXP / 
DX9.  This means that many more fancy stuff can be done with non-fullscreen 
3D apps and multi-threaded programs can use DX without careful programming.
2) DX10 got rid of the fixed function pipeline which has made the API much 
simpler.  Everything must be done with shaders now.
3) Scenes can be rendered to multiple render targets at the same time, which 
makes generating cube-maps and multi-view scenes way faster
4) Geometry shaders have been introduced, which for the first time allows 
the GPU to have some concept of triangles rather than just working blindly 
on vertices and pixels.  This can be widely used to improve performance and 
display quality.
5) Geometry instancing has been much improved, allowing meshes to be 
rendered multiple times without so much overhead as in DX9.  Again, for 
scenes with large amount of vegetation or people etc, this will have big 
speed ups.
6) The usual increase in flexibility of the shaders, including a massive 
increase in the number of registers (like a factor of 1000 increase), 
complete dynamic flow control, unlimited execution length blah blah blah.

Of course some of the above can be implemented using DX9, but it would be 
horrendously complex and very slow.  DX10 is definitely a welcome 
improvement, it will just take a while before game writers can drop DX9 
support and really concentrate on DX10 only games.

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>> Yeah, that's right. Because a faulty power supply *completely 
>> explains* why Word crashes when you open certain documents. Oh, 
>> wait... actually it doesn't. :-P
> 
> I didn't say that.

No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
hardware is unreliable. This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems 
are because they produce poor quality products.

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> No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
> hardware is unreliable.

IME, every time I am called because of a friend/family computer "not 
working", it is nothing to do with MS.  I can give you a long list of 
reasons, mostly due to other software, hardware malfunction or drivers, but 
none MS.

> This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems are because they produce 
> poor quality products.

I use MS products daily on 3 or 4 machines and cannot remember the last time 
one of them crashed or when MS Office behaved badly.

You mention corrupted Word documents, but IIRC we decided that was due to 
everyone using the same template/file that was corrupted and spreading this 
corruption through all your documents.  This is not really a fault of MS 
Office, especially when you didn't even use the "Open and Repair" command 
which would have probably fixed the problem.

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>> No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
>> hardware is unreliable.
> 
> IME, every time I am called because of a friend/family computer "not 
> working", it is nothing to do with MS.  I can give you a long list of 
> reasons, mostly due to other software, hardware malfunction or drivers, 
> but none MS.

Most of the problems I get to look at aren't due to M$ either - but a 
significant number of them are.

>> This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems are because they 
>> produce poor quality products.
> 
> I use MS products daily on 3 or 4 machines and cannot remember the last 
> time one of them crashed or when MS Office behaved badly.

Actual OS crashes are fairly rare, assuming you use your computer in a 
sane mannar.

But I'm not just talking about complete crashes of the entire OS, or 
even crashes of a single application. I'm talking about the whole 
quality equation - how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily 
complicated, poorly documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so 
forth.

> You mention corrupted Word documents, but IIRC we decided that was due 
> to everyone using the same template/file that was corrupted and 
> spreading this corruption through all your documents.  This is not 
> really a fault of MS Office, especially when you didn't even use the 
> "Open and Repair" command which would have probably fixed the problem.

Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

I opened the same file in OpenOffice, and it just opened up as if there 
was nothing wrong with it. I saved it again, and it has worked in Word 
ever since.

Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description 
of the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they 
somehow did a better job than the people who *designed* that file 
format. How can that be right??

(Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
than OpenOffice to start with...)

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> how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily complicated, poorly 
> documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so forth.

TBH I've found MS products to be really well documents, in fact I would say 
better than any other software I've used.  Really, even if you have a 
complicated thing you want to do in Excel, the documentation usually has the 
answer.

> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
> read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
> failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

Yeh, they should just use the code from "Open and repair" for the normal 
"Open" operation, and if there were no faults just act silently.  OTOH maybe 
load times would increase significantly for large documents?

> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
> can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description of 
> the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they somehow 
> did a better job than the people who *designed* that file format. How can 
> that be right??
>
> (Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
> than OpenOffice to start with...)

I think you've answered your own questions there anyway, MS has to make 
money so they have all sorts of constraints that OpenOffice doesn't.  If an 
OpenOffice update is delayed by 6 months because they are fixing the 
loading-corrupt-files code, nobody can complain. But if MS attempts to delay 
Office 2013GT by 6 months because they want to fix the loading-corrupt-files 
code, they will likely be forced to release it anyway by the financial 
people.

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