Disqus - Latest Comments for Brandon Paddock

Re: http://www.rev2.org/2007/06/05/facebook-follows-up-to-viral-growth-with-official-announcement/

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:01:42 -0000

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.

Re: Hasbro and Mattel: Dumb, dumb, dumb

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:49:07 -0000

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*

Re: The Truth About OS X’s Kernel: It’s Not Unix

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 01:23:32 -0000

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.

Re: At last we find out how the Borg steals from us

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:57:32 -0000

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!

Re: Who wants Windows 7 more, Microsoft or the users?

Brandon Paddock — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:13:35 -0000

This article is pretty misleading.

"Yet, it’s Microsoft’s own fault for that speculation. The company keeps showing off early versions of Windows 7 and other operating system projects — and it’s hardly being secretive about it."

Microsoft has made absolutely no announcements about the next version of Windows, nor talked about or shown anything related to it. There are the supposed "leaks" and that is it. Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want *anybody* talking about anything but Vista for a while to come.

Re: BumpTop gives Windows desktop a much-needed makeover

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:24:44 -0000

"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."

Re: Does Google Apps break Microsoft Outlook? Not anymore

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:18:01 -0000

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.

Re: Search results via RSS now available - Techmeme News

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:08:05 -0000

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

Re: http://www.americansagainstobama.com/2008/08/16/the-obama-nation-get-it-now/

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:28:06 -0000

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

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver. 3

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:52:53 -0000

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.

Re: 2007/04/16/microsoft-adobe-smackdown/

Brandon Paddock — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:34:38 -0000

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.

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:59:00 -0000

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?

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:59:00 -0000

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:52:05 -0000

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.

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:52:05 -0000

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:57:24 -0000

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.

Re: The Ongoing Windows Desktop Search Controversy

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:57:24 -0000

Re: Windows 7 RTM FAQ – All you need to know about Windows 7

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:46:09 -0000

Hey there, just a quick note about the varous Editions. If you just want "all the features included in Home Premium and Professional" - then you should buy Professional, since it is a strict superset of Home Premium (unlike Vista).

Re: Nighttime at Microsoft

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 04:11:37 -0000

Sanaz' team wasn't the only one working late in RedWest!

Re: Nighttime at Microsoft

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:58:04 -0000

Jake, dude, seriously. Don't diss the pizza with pineapple on it!

Re: Nighttime at Microsoft

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:59:59 -0000

Oh, and I know the Toolbar team down in california was up pretty late.

The WDS team certainly kept busy though.

I'm used to staying late when I'm working on something really interesting (Which is pretty much ALL the time). But last night I just had more company than usual =)

Re: Live.com Upgrades in progress

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 01:45:50 -0000

Dan -

An updated version of Windows Desktop Search is available as an optional component with the Live Toolbar Beta. If you were one of the first to download it, it's possible you picked it up before the WDS component was completely live. Normally, WDS should be checked by default in the Toolbar first-run-wizard.

If you install the WDS component (or the seperate, standalone installer), your settings from the previous installation will still be there.

Your index will have to be rebuilt, but that's because the old index isn't compatible wih the new version of the indexer. Unfortunately, in order to make improvements to WDS we had to rev the index version and schema, which necessitates a rebuild of your index.

Please let us know if you don't see Windows Desktop Search as a component in the Toolbar's component manager (it's in the Options dialog), or if you have any problems getting it installed.

Re: Microsoft salaries on display

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:45:09 -0000

I think history has shown times and places where unions had their value.

However, I think most unions these days do more harm than good. It's an opinion, and not one that I am confident in enough to argue about it. But it's what I believe based on what I've seen.

As for hiring in the tech sector - my team is dying to find great candidates for all product development disciplines (Dev, Test, and PM).

Actually, the incredibly fast rate of hiring in the Windows/WindowsLive/MSN division (particuarly in Live and Search) has actually made it difficult to find space for new hires - thus the aggressive office building expansion plans Microsoft is persuing.

It may not be the dot-com era where you could work for two years and retire. But I think our industry right now is starved for talent - and that a smart, motivated, competent geek should have no trouble at all finding a great job doing something they love.

Re: Rewrite of Windows Vista underway? Hogwash!

Brandon Paddock — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:34:51 -0000

Solomonrex -

I think most of us were ignoring that story as you suggested until it got picked up by The Inquirer and posted on dozens of news sites with absolutely zero basis in fact.

Re: Rewrite of Windows Vista underway? Hogwash!

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:30:53 -0000

J. Random Poster -

Six years late? You thought Longhorn was going to ship before XP?

Seriously dude, put down the crack pipe.

Re: The irritant of the non-credible journalists

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 14:51:11 -0000

So... the fact that The Register and The Inquirer are not credible isn't news to me.

They've been around for ages, and people pay attention to them because *sometimes* they get it right. Usually they're stories are either:
A) Completely and utterly wrong.
B) Completely and utterly common knowledge with some worthless commentary.

Once in a great while they'll post a rumor or prediction that will turn out to be true. For all I know, they're just guessing and by chance they're right at least some of the time.

In either case, you're right that they're pretty much tabloids like The National Inquirer and whatnot. I'd rather read The Onion, at least their fake news is funny.

Re: The irritant of the non-credible journalists

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 14:53:18 -0000

Ack... "Their" not "they're" - that's what I get for not proofreading =)

Re: Xbox’s still in high demand

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 02:33:09 -0000

Be sure and add Brandon Live when you get it online :)

Re: Xbox’s still in high demand

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 02:55:27 -0000

anon - you must be talking about the "deals" where you sign up for an internet service package for 2 years or something.

They do the same thing with the DS and other consoles (offer a huge discount for signing those kinds of contracts).

Re: New blogs, best man, and Xbox 360s

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 20:15:47 -0000

Careful with Oblivion, I've lost over 20 hours to it already!

@Devil's Advocate -

I just bought a Mac Mini for that purpose. But I'm encountering one problem replacing my Media Center with it. No 5.1 sound! I suppose I could get a digital cable, but those are lossy and will only give 5.1 from DVDs and such.

I might pick up an Audigy 2 NX, external USB 2.0 sound card. Sadly, that will only work when the Mini is booted into Windows (which will probably be most of the time, but it's still annoying).

Re: New blogs, best man, and Xbox 360s

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:45:14 -0000

J. Random -

No it won't. Only if it's playing a DVD.

I'd much rather be using an analog connection (much better audio quality) and have upmixing like Creative's excellent CMSS working for music. And I want to be able to play my DVD-Audio discs like I could with the X-fi card.

For now I think what I'll be getting is a USB 2.0 PCMCIA adapter and an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook soundcard. It seems that's the best I can get right now that will hook up to the Mini.

For now I'll be fine with stereo since I use my Xbox 360 to play DVDs most of the time.

Re: New blogs, best man, and Xbox 360s

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:41:52 -0000

Francesco -

That's not the best way to set up an HTPC. Using Dolby/DTS encoding is a bad idea. It compresses the signal and usually adds delays. You're much better off getting a card with very high quality 5.1/7.1 analog output, like a Creative X-Fi.

This is especially true if you want to output very high quality signals like DVD-Audio or SACD.

J. Random -

No they don't. If it's like every other S/PDIF out, it can't only output audio that's already in AC-3. It won't encode normal 5.1-channel sound, from games for example. The only cards that can do that are the ones with on-the-fly Dolby Digital encoding, which is not what I want.

Re: New blogs, best man, and Xbox 360s

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:42:49 -0000

That should say "it *can* only output audio that's already in AC-3."

Re: Halfway through my blog vacation (change in comment policy)

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 22:30:19 -0000

That's awesome that Bubba is going to blog on here. Seems like Bubba knows everybody - and I mean *everybody*.

Oh, but I think saying he's on Windows Live Search isn't entirely accurate. But he is doing some wicked cool stuff.

Re: What’s in a Name?

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:51:21 -0000

Learn something new everyday :)

Re: Information Overload

Brandon Paddock — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:05:02 -0000

That hard drive thing reminds me of the integrated hard drive that Audi/VW have offered for a long time now (I think it's called the "PhatBox" or something).

Re: train based blogging

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:20:42 -0000

Regarding data rates - are you using a 1X card or EVDO?

If EVDO, Cingular certainly wouldn't be faster. Verizon and Sprint are the only true high-speed options in the US right now, unless you count Cingular's HSDPA which has virtually nil coverage and offers "near EVDO" speeds.

Re: train based blogging

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 13:37:43 -0000

Well it also depends on where you are and Verizon's coverage. I'm not sure theirs is as good as Sprint's these days.

Re: New Sony, Old Sony

Brandon Paddock — Mon, 01 May 2006 02:15:31 -0000

Welcome to the world of HD, Robert!

I also did a similar financing plan when I bought my Samsung 61" DLP right after I moved out here. I did it to take advantage of a huge sale even though I hadn't been planning to buy one so soon after moving out here. But I got a 12 or 18 month financing plan for about 75% of the cost. I paid about 25% of it in cash and then paid the rest off within a few months.

Re: Microsoft doesn’t support Firefox?

Brandon Paddock — Fri, 05 May 2006 23:30:40 -0000

I think there's a difference between "not supporting Firefox" and "not supporting Firefox from the start."

Frankly I don't think it's a huge deal that some services in BETA don't support Firefox - if they're planning to before release.

AdCenter certainly should have had at least a fallback-mode ready. So I'm with you on this one Robert... that just plain sucks.

Re: Microsoft doesn’t support Firefox?

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 06 May 2006 01:17:47 -0000

Jimbo -

You are wrong. The strategy for Windows Live has been to support Firefox at the earliest opportunity (and to work with Opera and Safari as much as possible).

Re: Bad news gets worse

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 10 May 2006 20:06:22 -0000

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.

Re: Radio UserLand developer joins Microsoft’s Live.com team

Brandon Paddock — Wed, 10 May 2006 20:09:27 -0000

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?

Re: Raymond gives us a code challenge

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 28 May 2006 14:14:50 -0000

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

Re: The geeks on Saturday night

Brandon Paddock — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:05:58 -0000

"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

Re: I’d pay $50 for this iPhone app:

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:57:14 -0000

Why bother?

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

Re: I’d pay $50 for this iPhone app:

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:19:00 -0000

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...

Re: Is Steve Jobs lying about Flash not working on iPhone?

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:37:19 -0000

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."

Re: Why Vista isn’t as good as the Mac

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:43:41 -0000

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.

Re: Story Pitch: Microsoft’s “flattened” Windows 7 team and what it means for business

Brandon Paddock — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:45:16 -0000

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" :)

Re: Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability to turn a corner

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:54:37 -0000

@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.

Re: 10 reasons why Twitter Direct Messages suck (and so do Facebook’s)

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:10:53 -0000

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.

Re: The Truth About OS X’s Kernel: It’s Not Unix

Brandon Paddock — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 01:23:32 -0000

Re: Facebook Spins Out Widgets; Spins Everyone

Brandon Paddock — Fri, 25 May 2007 07:09:52 -0000

Somebody obviously doesn't get it...

Fortunately, Facebook does, in a big way.

Re: Is Barack Obama Orchestrating Fake Fainting Spells At Campaign Stops?

Brandon Paddock — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:03:43 -0000

The "trick" here is not that people are fainting. That happens sometimes at crowded rallies like that.

The "trick" is that he notices and mentions it to the crowd. Call it showmanship if you want. Nothing nefarious about that.

The idea that someone would "fake" faint is just silly.