DISQUS

Well, the "normal Outlook search feature" in Outlook 2007 is built on WDS... so on 2007 you had no search at all! Glad to see they resolved this problem though.

"But the Mac OS already incorporates plenty of 3-D features and so isn’t in as desperate need of a makeover as Windows."


Wait, what? The Mac OS doesn't have a single 3D feature on the desktop.

Beyond being blatantly wrong, that comment adds nothing to the article. BumpTop would be just as welcome on the Mac as it is on Windows. If you want to know why there isn't a Mac version yet, you should ask the developers - I doubt they're going to say "because the Mac doesn't need it."

Completely agree about Twitter's useless DM feature.

But Facebook's I actually use, generally for quick personal correspondence that I don't care about archiving or finding later.

I think Facebook's works better for me for several reasons:
1) I don't approve any Facebook requests from people I don't actually know, and I try to keep my Facebook circle of friends fairly small (I have "only" 306).

2) Facebook messages come to my cell phone via SMS. Basically nothing else does except a direct SMS or tweets from a select few people I used to work with.

3) There are lots of people for whom the only e-mail address I have is a work one, and I generally prefer to send them an FB message (that until recently at least would tend to show up in their personal e-mail) instead of an actual e-mail.

@Public*Relations -

I have to disagree with you there. There is tons of innovation in Windows 7. Even my own feature, the Explorer, is loaded with it. Show me another OS with Libraries. Show me one with the kind of rich metadata views we showed off this week. Show me one with rich search federation using OpenSearch and RSS/Atom right in the shell, no client code necessary.

And that's just one component. Jump Lists are innovative, as are several other features of the Windows 7 taskbar, including the "peek" functionality, progress bars, etc.

I don't see how you can look at Windows 7 and claim that Microsoft isn't innovating.

Borlock -

I'm a dev on the Windows Find & Organize team. I came from outside of Windows around the time Sinofsky took over. Previously I'd been in a very small, very agile group that rode the border between Windows Live and Windows.

It took some time to get used to things in Windows, and to a differently structured org. I still think there are some advantages to the PUM model or at least to organizing offices based on feature teams, some of which you touched on.

At the beginning of the Win7 project (my first Windows project) I was uncertain about a lot of things. A lot of people who got re-orged into windows didn't like it and complained a lot then eventually left. A lot of people who had been in Windows left because they felt like the "culture" of Windows was going away.

And you know what I say? Good riddance. Frankly, I think the culture and leadership responsible for Vista was in need of a kick in the pants. After the re-org it took some time for me to find my place and get comfortable in Windows and with basically an entirely new team of people. But in the last year or so I've become a very big fan of Sinofsky and the WEX leadership, and the management of my own team.

One reason I say I'm a big fan is because of how excited I've become, not just about my own work, but about the entire product. I don't think the project would be anywhere near what it is today if we were stuck with the culture or leadership of the last release.

// Just my opinion
// But if Scoble's post is to believed it sounds like there are others
// And no, I'm not one of his "sources" :)

Wow, what a sham. People actually pay money fo that?

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there is a bug in the Foxconn BIOS's code. However, investigation has revealed the bug is in the Linux kernel itself.

Recent Linux kernels already report themselves as being Windows during the OSI check.

You should add OpenSearch support as well :) Just need a description file and some Start / Count parameters.

Robert - that's a hardware issues, not a Windows vs Mac OS issue.

I run Vista on my Macbook. It never fails to resume from sleep. Never.

Leopard resumes slightly faster when I open it (although partly this may be deception because I don't resume to a login screen on Leopard, but do on Windows). It takes about a second to resume to Leopard, and about 2-3 seconds to resume to Vista. Very small difference.

Vista goes to sleep faster, though. Leopard sometimes sits there for up to a minute after I close it before the light on the outside goes into its "sleeping" heartbeat mode.

All I read out of what Jobs said was, "Adobe's Flash versions are either too slow or too crappy for our device. They lack a version appropriate to the iPhone."

In my mind, I read that with one additional smug-filled sentence, "So we went and wrote our own, because we're just that awesome."

I think my job is safe =)

If it were a huge secret that Microsoft did competitive analysis, there'd be a lot of bloggers and half of Channel 9 in trouble. Besides, those shots mostly serve to remind us how lucky we are that we don't have to run OS X!

That's a disingenuous argument and you know it. You aren't driving to Mattel headquarters and taking something from them. You aren't even stealing their sales with a clone in the same market.

A somewhat better analogy might be that you have decided to build a BMW driving simulator for the PC without licensing the brand.

Or better yet, you have decided to build BMW-style go-karts for kids in your neighborhood. They caught on fast, so more people started asking for them, and you started painting sponsor logos on the sides of them so that you could afford to continue the project. Somebody from BMW notices, and has you shut down.

Yeah it's within their rights, but it's a bad PR move. They'd be better off negotiating a license in return for turning the whole thing into a TV ad or something.

The real problem isn't right or wrong. It's dumb and smart. Dumb is making Scrabble fans everywhere have conversations like:

Fan A: "What happened to Scrabbulous? I loved that game!"
Fan B: "Mattel sued and had it shut down."
Fan A: "****ers*

Indexing Service should definitely be disabled. Running both is not a supported configuration and known to cause problems.

They do both honor the "Not content indexed" flag on drives / folders / files, which is probably why you were unable to choose that drive for indexing.

Kirk - WDS has a very tiny resource footprint, and definitely won't make your hard drive I/O any greater while you're using the computer. WDS, by default, only indexes when your system is idle (no mouse + keyboard usage, low CPU usage, and low disk I/O). WDS was designed to run well on much older systems than what you described (tons of enterprises running it on 1ghz 512MB machines, for example). Tests have shown the impact on system performance is roughly the same as Copernic, and less than GDS.

If you are experiencing any noticeable impact on performance, it is likely you're encountering a compatibility issue. Otherwise, it's probably something other than WDS causing the problem.

Further, the XP built-in Indexing Service *did* cause disk trashing, largely because it didn't back-off on user activity, though also because it's a much older version of the indexing technology and not optimized for desktop use.

WDS does NOT depend on the built-in Indexing Service.

Regarding the Live Photo Gallery issue you mentioned - that's still a BETA offering right? Perhaps you should clarify that in your post, as the user experience there is not final.

Further, Photo Gallery has a technical dependency on the Windows Search property system - which is only redistributed to XP via WDS. It's definitely not trying to "sneak" anything anywhere, it just needs that in order to function on a pre-Vista system. Countless applications do this with DirectX, XMLLite, SQLLite, MSDE, hotfixes, .NET Framework, C++ runtimes, etc. Though I agree that the user experience here needs work, I wouldn't call it a "violation" of your computer for an application to install a system update that it depends on.

Also - if you install Photo Gallery by itself, is the experience better? Perhaps this is just an issue with the combined Live Installer tool?

That's interesting that people are saying Facebook's TOS prevents that. I haven't looked myself, but at first glance that seems like a mistake on their part. They are MY contacts, so I should be able to export them.

On the flip side, you (or they) could argue that the information in fact belongs to the people in my network / friends list... and that by removing it from Facebook, they can no longer guarantee that their users have control over where their data goes.

Of course, that's a tough argument to make, since I can easily print that information, or write it down...

Why bother?

Just use Facebook Mobile and send a text to Facebook (32665) with the name of a person in your network.

Says the Twitter user (ie. one Facebook feature ripped out with no context).

Facebook and MySpace aren't even playing the same game. If anything, Facebook is the revival of Hailstorm, with a few twists.

What does the article mean when it says that Adobe's new player is the "the only major desktop media player that will support Flash."

Does that mean treating Flash-based videos like local videos or something?

I'm pretty sure WMP uses embedded Flash (via hosting IE) for some of its online stores / media guide / etc.

cji - it's a "hybrid" because it's actually, well, two kernels. At least from what I remember when I last looked at the OS X architecture. As I recall, it's the Mach microkernel (which actually shares a lot of history / influence with the Windows NT microkernel that powers modern Windows OSes) with a FreeBSD kernel running on top of it in some Frankensteining arrangement. As I understand it, the convoluted threading model that arises from this design is one of the more annoying things about programming on OS X.

cji - it's a "hybrid" because it's actually, well, two kernels. At least from what I remember when I last looked at the OS X architecture. As I recall, it's the Mach microkernel (which actually shares a lot of history / influence with the Windows NT microkernel that powers modern Windows OSes) with a FreeBSD kernel running on top of it in some Frankensteining arrangement. As I understand it, the convoluted threading model that arises from this design is one of the more annoying things about programming on OS X.

"I wouldn't have left if I didn't think Channel 9 and Microsoft weren't in awesome hands."


Shouldn't that say "WERE in awesome hands"? =P

Yeah, and it was done in true Raymond Chen style =P

Kent -

Actually it is an Ajax page. How do you think they do the scrollbar and other fancy stuff?

Safari doesn't support the necessary standards to work with Live.com. The Live.com team worked with the Mozilla and Opera folks to get everything covered (including improvements to Opera 9). But the Safari team wasn't interested. So maybe you should raise your complaints with them?

Robert, I'm so sorry to hear about your mom. I wanted you to know that you and your family are in my thoughts. Take care of each other.