Tech talk, cold comfort.

Posted: **2014-12-05 19:08**

One of the biggest problems with Bing is its name. Even though it's shorter than saying "Google" and takes less effort, it doesn't work well if you use it in the form of a verb. Everybody knows to "Google" something, or knows what it means to have "Googled" something. But, how does it sound if you say that you've Bing'd something?

"Hey honey, look at all these vacation spots I Binged for our upcoming trip". It just sounds stupid. How is MS going to get out of this one? By changing the name from Bing to something else. I like how Bing is a fast search engine and seems promising in terms of the results it gives, but the name...it's awful.

Posted: **2014-12-06 04:47**

It's not just a stupid name. It's nothing more than a cheap ripoff of Google. Microsoft was, many years ago, an innovator. Now they just imitate. Windows phone? Windows 8? Bing? All shit :lol:

When I "Bing'd" Microshit I got this:
http://i.4cdn.org/h/1416725214000.jpg

Well if I did get that I might be more inclined to use it.

Posted: **2014-12-06 05:02**

woose,
You can upload pictures in the posts here. External URLs tend to die.

Back on topic... YES, I HATE THE NAME. I also hate "Azure" name, so much that I won't touch it!

Let them eat... bing! :mrgreen:

: 1416725214000.jpg (164.9 KiB) Viewed 7265 times

: Chandler Bing from Friends.jpg (40.69 KiB) Viewed 7265 times

Posted: **2014-12-06 07:30**

Microsoft has never done a damn thing that was innovative. Not once.

If people are truly honest with themselves they'd have to admit that the only innovators in the computer industry, if we stick to the Personal Computer, are Bell Labs, Xerox and Intel.

Think about DOS and what it is. It's nothing more than a half-assed clone of CP/M, which in turn is nothing more than a poor attempt to clone Unix. Microsoft didn't even "invent" DOS, they bought it from Seattle Computer Works.

Windows was an attempt to get something similar to what Apple was offering, which in turn was all ideas taken from Xerox. Much of the stuff in Windows was bought or licensed from other companies, HyperTerminal comes to mind. Much of their software is look-we-have-one-too stuff. The web browser, office suite and even DotNet.

IBM's work on the PC was just standardizing a bunch of stuff around Intel's chip. I don't want to diminish that, but it could have easily gone in another direction.

Microsoft is where it is as a result of poor decisions by Xerox, IBM, Apple, various PC clone makers and a number of good decisions made by Gates and his company. A younger generation is starting to get the fact that Microsoft is essentially just shit. It's the corporate and governmental blowhards that keep it going.

Heh. After my rant, I should ask myself how I really feel. :lol:

Posted: **2014-12-06 18:04**

As much as I criticize Microsoft about Windows in my write-ups, Bing is actually a really good search engine. I sometimes find results that I don't find on Yandex or Google which are important sites. So, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Microsoft has innovated before; for instance, the NT kernel's roots came from VAX, kind of how Linux was designed to be unix-like. As much as Windows deviated from the VAX design and did things completely wrong (like privilege separation and the not very interesting or exciting NT filesystem, they did innovate in certain areas. Believe it or not, VAX has a registry, although it was probably nowhere near as fucked up as the one found on any Windows system. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/wh ... chnically/

Microsoft has a habit of buying out companies, then keeping however many of the employees from said company and having them continue writing code. There's nothing wrong with that, as that's no different than hiring those same (or similar) people off the street and having them sit down at a desk and write code. These new "bought" employees can continue improving whatever they were working on before working within MS's walls. It's all the same shit, just a different day. The problem on MS's hands now, is that it seems as though Satya Nadella is the wrong man for the position. MS needs another Bill Gates, and I don't know if that even exists.

Things in the computing sector are really difficult right now. It's kind of like, how do you improve a washing machine from 2014? A lot of our technology has gotten to an "appliance-like" state. Touch and voice to me are just annoying. It's way easier and less effort for me to type, than it is to talk to a computer. I hate phone systems that don't let you use touch-tones.

Posted: **2014-12-07 04:14**

I agree with you completely regarding Bing. Its search results can actually be pretty good. There has undoubtedly been a lot of good minds go through Microsoft.

I have to disagree though regarding Microsoft being innovative. Even what you're stating-- that Windows roots are based in VAX, but Microsoft did a poor job of implementing part of it. That does not really make much of case for MS being innovative. I just read through that link you gave and noted this:

Well the good news is the Registry is obsolete. The bad news is that Vista has introduced another, incompatible way to store application data, in AppData/Local and AppData/LocalLow directories, but that Windows Vista and Windows 7 continue to rely on the Registry for all sorts of critical data, and it doesn't look like this mess is going to go away any time soon.

So now they've decided to be more Unix-like in a fucked up kind of way. That's actually apparent in other ways too, but not really relevant here. I guess the point is that they were the first on the market with a product that tied many disparate pieces together and was barely good enough, were smart enough to see the cheap commodity hardware coming, but none of it was innovative. Most of the work since then has been incremental improvements or evolution, trying to make the products actually good enough.

they did innovate in certain areas

Cite some examples. I'm open to hearing things out and pondering on it for a while and have been known to change my views.

Posted: **2014-12-07 19:30**

Mr. David A. Wheeler wrote this in 2001 when Jim Allchin was "trying to convince the U.S. government that open source software (or at least the General Public License) is a threat to the U.S. and to intellectual activity".

http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html

BASIC: This was the original Microsoft product, a simple programming language. Microsoft's BASIC was released in 1975, but BASIC itself had been invented back in 1964, and it was only one of many programming languages available even then.
MS-DOS: In 1981, Microsoft published MS-DOS. MS-DOS was Microsoft's new name for QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products in 6 weeks not long before. Paterson developed QDOS by buying a CP/M manual and using the manual as the basis for his own program, so QDOS itself wasn't innovative. When IBM approached Microsoft looking for software for its to-be-announced PC, Microsoft quickly bought QDOS and renamed it so it could make a deal with IBM. Of course, the notion of an operating system was old even by 1981, so MS-DOS was in no way innovative either. Later on, Microsoft did add features such as directories to MS-DOS, but these were intentionally copied from another operating system (Unix).
Windows: In 1983 Microsoft announced that it would be developing Windows. Windows 1.0 was finally delivered November 1985 (two years late), but it performed poorly and had little in the way of applications. It wasn't until May 22, 1990, when Windows 3.0 was released, that the system gained widespread third-party support. Windows was clearly inspired by Apple's Macintosh (which, in turn, had been inspired by Xerox PARC, which had been inspired by the original 1968 inventions of Doulas Engelbart for a GUI with a mouse). Since Windows was essentially a copy of the Macintosh, which was based on earlier work, Windows cannot be considered fundamentally innovative.
Windows NT/2000: Microsoft's Windows NT finally provided (limited) multi-user capability and protected memory in a server operating system, but it did this by liberally borrowing ideas from the pre-existing VAX VMS and Unix systems (which were not the first such operating systems either).
Word: This is simply another word processor, which Microsoft began in 1983. Lexitron and Linolex developed the first screen-oriented word processing system before Microsoft existed (in 1972), and WordStar preceded Microsoft's efforts as well (1979).
Excel: A spreadsheet, implemented long after the original VisiCalc (1978) and Lotus 1-2-3.
Access: Yet another database system. Since it's relational, the primary innovation it embodies are Codd's models, which were developed in 1970 (before Microsoft even existed).
Internet Explorer (IE): Internet Explorer wasn't originally developed by Microsoft; it is an extension of the older NCSA Mosaic web browser. On at least Internet Explorer 5.5, selecting "Help About" shows that it is "Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM) was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc." Again, web browsers (and IE) are not a Microsoft innovation.
Active Directory: Active Directory is basically a re-implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), with Microsoft's proprietary variant of MIT's Kerberos often being used for identity authentication. LDAP is in turn a subset of X.500's Directory Access Protocol (DAP). That goes back to the late 1980s, long before "Active Directory" existed. Again, no serious innovation here.

COM/DCOM: These are the fundamental communication mechanisms in Windows, enabling programs to find and call each other and supporting "component programming." However, these are just another remote procedure call (RPC) implementation, certainly not the first one, and COM originally couldn't even work over a network!
SMB/CIFS: Microsoft shares files and printers using the SMB protocol... but they didn't invent it. For more information, see Just what is SMB?
Direct3D: Direct3D is an application programmer interface (API) that lets people develop applications with 3D graphics to take advantage of hardware acceleration. But OpenGL was already a standard, and it wasn't the first 3D API either (other specifications such as PHIGS predated both). Instead, Direct3D was started after Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in 1995. It appears that Microsoft's motives were to try to create its own incompatible specification, to lock people into their product, instead of letting OpenGL be a standard used by everyone. Microsoft may also have wanted to justify the purchase of RenderMorphics. It certainly wasn't because Direct3D was better than OpenGL of the time; John Carmack's .plan 12/23/96 explains how inferior Direct3D was when it came out. Today, OpenGL and its derivative OpenGL ES 2.0 (adapted for Javascript!) runs on almost every embedded device these days; from iPhones, iPads, Androids phones, Set Top Boxes, and even TVs now.
.NET: It's often difficult to even get people to agree on exactly what .NET is, making it more difficult to analyze. The best description I've found is Sean Wilson's ".NET - So What?". He says .NET is a "branding formative", that is, a single name applied to a large number of different initiatives by Microsoft, and that it has several areas: development tools, servers, clients, XML web services, and .NET "experiences." Applications are to execute within the ".NET framework", which is essentially an infrastructure very much like Java (supporting downloading of portable code using an intermediate format). The .NET framework is intentionally designed to support multiple computer languages; while this wasn't a goal of Java, Java's infrastructure also supports multiple languages, and older technologies (such as UCSD p-code and ANDF) were specifically designed to do this (in the same way) many years ago. Early in his article he says ".NET isn't even particularly innovative... Many of the concepts have been previously realised and are well-understood."
Spreadsheet pivot tables: In 1986, Pito Salas came up with the idea of pivot tables in spreadsheets while working in Lotus Development Corporation's Advanced Technology Group. It was demonstrated in 1987, and the program that implemented it (now named Lotus Improv) was released on the NeXT in 1988. Lotus Improv was released on Windows in 1993. Excel didn't add pivot tables until its Excel 97 release. (Source: "Pivot Table Data Crunching" by Bill Jelen and Michael Alexander).

I'm surprised WinG wasn't mentioned as the predecessor to DirectX, but the larger point stands. I also see that I mistakenly said that Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer Works, which should've been Seattle Computer Products.

Posted: **2014-12-08 22:37**

Where I think Microsoft innovates is in offering software suites which work well together. I don't think they innovate very much on each individual product so I agree with you there, although there obviously have been certain innovations in the .NET family of products and in DirextX. There's a reason the Mono software project was started. That article you linked to seems written by somebody with an agenda, and he's probalby wrong on a lot of points, not that a lot of points aren't valid as well. That's the problem with many people in general -- it's either black or white and no grey, and I really don't think like that.

A company can get a Windows network up and running with Exchange, lots of tools for development, etc., and everything just works nicely together. With Linux, a more inexperienced I.T. admin is either going to have a complete failure or very difficult time getting things up and running. Where Microsoft wins is ease of use in terms of setup. Now, I can get a Linux server up and running with just a terminal and no GUI but that's me and I am a small percentage of people who have that kind of knowledge and experience.

You can also say Microsoft innovated in the sense of their business strategy which made them successful. Innovation isn't necessarily a term only applying to the technical side of things. In this link I've linked to before, you can see one of the Microsoft developers commenting that he thinks NT is better in some ways over Linux. Maybe he's right?

Look: Microsoft still has some old-fashioned hardcore talented developers who can code circles around brogrammers down in the valley. These people have a keen appreciation of the complexities of operating system development and an eye for good, clean design. The NT kernel is still much better than Linux in some ways --- you guys be trippin' with your overcommit-by-default MM nonsense --- but our good people keep retiring or moving to other large technology companies, and there are few new people achieving the level of technical virtuosity needed to replace the people who leave.

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74

Microsoft has a checkered history and engages in bad business policies as far as their embrace, extend, extinguish practice, and I also believe they voluntarily handed over whatever data NSA wanted about anyone through the PRISM program. I also think they tip NSA off about security holes in Windows before they're patched, and there also may be a possibility that Windows has built-in backdoors. What's funny to me is the level of information people need to be flooded with until they believe something to be true. For instance, Mark Klein, William Binney, and Thomas Drake apparently weren't enough to convince the masses of any spying program until Snowden came along. And even now, people are more interested in playing Pot Farm. Microsoft's innovative business strategy, at least as far as Windows is concerned looks to be facing a major uphill battle. Even though there are a ton of desktops out there, a lot of people are complacent with older versions of Windows. By the time security patches run out for Windows 7, Linux may start to be seen more often on the desktop, and more people will be switching over to tablets.

Posted: **2014-12-09 03:58**

I figured a definition of terms was coming.

I agree they're good at integration and making their products work well together. Integration also including using existing protocols in their products. In the truest sense of innovation, introducing something new or novel, they really don't meet the mark, not in my book anyway. Of course, there's the flip-side to that integration. Our products work well with our products, but not so well with the competition. You brought up Microsoft history, remember the phoney error messages when trying to install Windows 3.1 on DR DOS? So, while part of it can be good (the ease of getting things working) another part of it is used to lock consumers in to the platform and inhibit any competition. The dirty deals with PC manufacturers come to mind too. Given all we now know, I'm not sure that "checkered past" is the term I'd use. It's not as though the company has changed in any real ways unless forced to. Heck, look at what they tried to pull with the Xbox One. I give the 'gamers' credit for showing Microsoft that it's not the '90s anymore, they don't own gaming and that their bullshit ain't gonna fly.

There's probably several way in which the NT kernel beats Linux, that would hardly be surprising. I do actually like older versions of Windows and DOS and even some of Microsoft's other products. I agree that there's still talent at Microsoft, but from the looks of things it is slowing disappearing.

Tech talk, cold comfort.

The Problem with Bing

The Problem with Bing