While reading this, something jumped into my mind.
Sony is like the kid who plays Monopoly and always loses because he spends the entire game trying to get boardwalk. Meanwhile, the other players drain him dry with their countless (but less expensive) properties.
Sony seems to be obessesed with formats. Every chance they get, they introduce a proprietary format (Betamax, Minidisc, Memory Stick + 18 incompatible variations, UMD, and so on). They’re willing to sacrifice anything “for the format.“ Yet, they never succeed. They seem to have this mindset that if they could just win a format war once they will be undisputed kings of technology, heralded far and wide for their genious creation.
Based on their record alone, I’m predicting BluRay to fail (and peaceful coexistance would constitue failure from Sony’s perspective).
No one wants a proprietary format owned and exclusively produced by Sony. No one except Sony.
The MVPs are in town!
Today I had the pleasure of hosting the MSN Search booth at the MVP Global Summit’s product expo here in Redmond. A dev on my team and I got there around 3:30 and demo’d MSN Search and the next releases of the MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search. We were more keen to demo the WDS stuff, since that’s what we both work on =)
It was great to meet so many enthusiastic members of the community. What I really mean by that is: it’s fun to talk with other geeks.
Oh, and I noticed Scoble showing off Channel 9 at a nearby booth, but no other familiar faces.
Were you there? Drop a note in the comments section. Maybe I’ll get a chance to crash some more MVP events tomorrow or Friday.
Happy 20th, Windows!
We celebrated the 20th anniversary of Windows at the Company Meeting this week. Check it out!
We’ve also been celebrating Microsoft’s 30th year, and MSN’s 10th.
Following the trend… what’s going to be 2005’s big contribution to the glorious Empire =)
Via BoingBoing,
The head of the IFPI in Finland (record industry shills) has told government that it’s fine that the new Finnish copyright law may make it impossible to move music to your Mac or GNU/Linux box, since this is a “privilege” and those people can just buy CD players.
“Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos”, says Kyyrae and continues; “If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.”
I’m just… speechless.
Mozilla’s Nitot missed the point.
A report came out today from Symantec (by way of CNET) that says Mozilla browsers are more vulnerable than IE. I’m not here to say they’re right or wrong (I think the web browser is the most obvious attack surface for internet-based attackers, and no popular web browser will ever be 100% secure).
However, ZDNet just published a response from Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot in which Nitot completely missed the point of the article.
Symantec used data from the first half of 2005 to demonstrate that because of its gaining popularity, Mozilla is being attacked more frequently and more ferociously than in the past. Nitot responded by claiming the following:
In the period 2003 to 2005 Secunia have issued 22 security advisories regarding Firefox 1.x, and rate it as “less critical”. In the same period Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x had 85 Secunia advisories, and is rated as “highly critical”.
What he neglects to mention, is that Firefox 1.0 was released in the Fall of 2004, meaning that in reality, Firefox had fewer advisories in 1 year, than Internet Explorer had in all of ’03, ’04, and ’05. Hardly a fair comparison.
But an even bigger concern is that Firefox didn’t gain its current relative popularity until 2005. So he’s claiming that Firefox is better because it used to have fewer vulnerabilities. By Nitot’s logic, it was very secure when a few people used it, and UBER secure when it didn’t exist yet.
I wonder how long before he tells Firefox users to stop using it, so that it can be secure again.
A lot of buzz has been made about this article.
To give you an idea of just how bad it is, read this little gem:
“If you move from 32 to 64 bit, you basically need to at least double your memory. 2 gigs in 64 bit is the equivalent of a gig of RAM on a 32bit machine. That’s because you’re dealing with chunks that are twice the size… if you try to make do with what you’ve got you’ll see less performance.
It’d be hilarious… if people didn’t take it seriously. But some people did!
To be clear, for the non-technical among you… A 64-bit machine will not make your data “fatter.” It means the addresses where your data is stored will be longer. But just because my address is 64 Wood Lane and yours is 4326 East Ocean View Parkway NorthWest Extension – doesn’t mean your house is bigger than mine. Likewise, a Word document is going to take up the same amount of memory on a 64-bit system as it will on a 32-bit system.
In fact (at least on Windows) – x64 OSes are generally better at memory management. So if anything, you’ll get more effective use of your memory in 64-bit Windows.
Yes… you will be able to use larger amounts of memory than before, although there are still limitations. They are:
1) Price
2) The available sizes for memory modules
3) The number of slots on your motherboard
4) The configurations supported by your motherboard’s BIOS and chipset.
x64 helps to remove a software limitation. Although in the Windows world we’ve had PAE for years now… which allowed the use of up to 64GB of memory on 32-bit Intel/AMD systems with 32-bit OSes.
But that was a hacky way to do it – by shifting the virtual address map around for different applications. Each app could still only address as much as it could before (theoretically 4GB, though in reality more like 2 or 3GB). That’s kind of how Apple does it on their “64-bit” systems I believe.
x64 removes the limitation for 64-bit apps, and allows much more efficient use of memory in general.
Don’t let me undersell 64-bit though. There are other advantages besides memory. For example, iAMD64 systems have twice as many General Purpose Registers as i386 systems. And if there’s anything x86 needs… it’s more registers.
Technorati has a Blog Finder
Today Start.com launched their latest version (an update to the start.com/3 site) and made it available on www.start.com!!!
Check it out!
MSN also launched the MSN Phising Filter add-in for the MSN Search Toolbar. This is a great little add-in for protecting yourself and other users from falling for “phishing” scams and website spoofing.
You can get the add-in here:
MSN, AIM, Google Talk, oh my!
Sorry Yahoo, your name didn’t fit.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about Instant Messaging lately. I think Chris got it right in his post last week.
Since I just wrote a lengthy response over on Scoble‘s blog about this… I’m just going to cut and paste it here. Yeah, I’m lazy… but it’s 9pm and I haven’t left the office yet. So forgive me.
I think what the IM companies are trying to figure out is… if we don’t tie the client to the service, how does the service make money?
As wonderful as it would be for some graciuos company to “donate” instant messaging servers to the world… I don’t see it happening.
Right now AOL and MSN make money by showing ads in the IM client. If people use different clients, you don’t get paid for the ads. I think Google thought of a different way.
I don’t think Google would have used the Jabber protocol if they didn’t think they could use the Google Talk service (not just the client) as a way to drive revenue.
You see, Google may tout their new IM service as being “open” because they use an open source *protocol* – but it doesn’t address the most significant isssue with IM’ing today… It still has to go through a central server.
The moment you require me to connect to talk.google.com in order to communicate with my Google Talk buddies, that’s when you become a closed system.
I think the solution isn’t to let other clients connect to your server. Nor is it to make people use the same server (ie. the current arrangement) to talk to each other.
I think the solution is to get the servers talking to each other. If I sign in to MSN Messenger, and my buddy signs into Google Talk… we should be able to chat. The MSN server should talk to the Google server and say, “Hey Google, Brandon is online. Are any of his Google contacts online?” And Google should say, “Why yes, Chris and Jon are online”.
Then MSN could say, “Hey Google, tell Jon that Brandon says hello.”
I mean… why not? We do it with e-mail. Why can’t we append a domain to our “Screen Names” and agree on a standard with which to resolve and forward them?
I work for MSN. But I like Google. If I saw MSN and Google agree to work together to accomplish something like this (interoperability between our IM networks), I would be ecstatic. If AOL didn’t want to join, I think they’d suffer. At some point they’d have to. Then we could stop running 2, 3, or 4 IM clients (and by “we” – I mean those of you that haven’t discovered Trillian). Then we could connect to *one* server and be done with it. Then we could actually choose based on the *product* – and not based on what our friends use.
I’m not sold on WinFS.
First off, let me say that I am very impressed with the work the WinFS team has done and that they’ve already won a great deal of respect from me. That said, I’m not 100% sure I see the need for their product. This opinion is certainly not set in stone, but from what I’ve seen and what I understand so far… I’m not sold.
Why is that? Well maybe it’s because I watch videos like this one and I think… why is that different from what we already do? You can tell that these guys are super fired up about the fact that they’ve matched parity with the basic Windows filesystem. And I’m sure it wasn’t easy, and as a developer I was impressed. But as a user I thought, “Great. You have parity with the current system. Now what are you offering me that makes your effort worth while?”
And that’s where WinFS runs into trouble, in my mind. I see it as a great technological feat, but one with few or no rewards. I think Everything I saw so far from a user perspective can be done today, without WinFS. Some of it hasn’t been done… but it could be. I sat here watching the video with some other members of my team and several times one of us would say “Looks like our stuff,” or “Yeah, we could do that.”
The way I see it, the fundamental difference between WinFS and the Windows Desktop Search “platform” is that they embed the actual file data inside the database. Whereas, we have a database with all of the item’s data, and then we have a reference or URL to the item (be it a file, an Outlook e-mail or contact, something from Thunderbird, etc).
The other differences are just implementation details. They implement their types as CLR-types. That’s pretty cool, but I don’t see why we couldn’t do that in theory.
But as a user AND as a developer, I don’t really care where the actual data is stored. I don’t care if it’s in a file under some folder. I don’t care if it’s a MAPI item stored in a PST or on a server. All I care about is that I can query the system for this data regardless of where or what it is, and sort, group, view, or manipulate those results however I choose.
So in the video, they demonstrate an app that displays all your “stuff” on a timeline, and divides it into bands based on tags or properties. You could do that today using our WDS APIs. They show creating “relationships“ between a group of photos. We do that today in Vista beta 1 with tagging.
They show an X1-like app that lets them filter results. So they do a search for all the meetings he’s had in the last 30 days. We can do that today. Then he gets a list of all the attendees from in that list (meetings from the last 30 days). We can do that (even if it’s not completely exposed in our UI so far) – and Vista does it all over the place. Then he saves the query. We can do that today.
Now, the next thing he does is cool, and it’s my favorite part of the demo. He starts a new query for emails, and filters the From field by the results of that original query (people he’s met with in the last 30 days). So now he has a list of emails from people he’s met with in the last 30 days, using the saved query from before as a source for the From filter. Sweet.
But again, I think this is something we could do without WinFS. In fact, I’ve already started some discussions around here about different ways that we could accomplish these same goals.
The key is that WinFS and our index are both databases. And we have access to the same metadata that they do. The only difference I see is that when a program asks us for the result file or item, we give them a pointer to it, instead of actually returning the item directly. That… and we can index things that aren’t on the local hard drive.
We can index objects without having to consume them entirely.
We can go out to the object and say “Give me all the useful information you can about yourself” – and then remember it. If something changes, it can tell us. Why would I care if the object actually lives in the database. Why not let Outlook store data where it wants… in PSTs or on an Exchange server. With something like WinFS… you’re trying to get Outlook to use the WinFS way of storing items. And if I want to index e-mail that’s on a server, my guess is that the server has to have its own WinFS implementation for it to federate queries to. But what if my server doesn’t run WinFS? Can I plug in a protocol handler and have WinFS pull just the metadata to my local machine? What if my e-mail server runs Unix and can’t run WinFS?
For all I know, they have good answers to those questions.
I just haven’t heard them addressed yet. And it’s not like they’re pressed for time… It sounds like they have plenty of time left to convince me that my all my team’s work is going to be obsolete =)