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I think I agree, yes.
We used to say that Microsoft does it's best when it's the underdog, or at least competing with someone (Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus). But after you've beaten everyone, there's only yourself to consume.
I hadn't thought of the Compuserve comparison. That is pretty accurate, I think, and a good point.
On the Linux/BSD: yes, yes, and more yes. People have forgotten (or ignore) that Apple is just a pretty face on BSD, and Android is mostly a Linux distro. Microsoft could have done the same thing years ago and dominated (more than they do now). Instead, they wasted many years on Vista, and have only now gotten to the MinWin paradise.
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TTFN - Kent
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altomaltes wrote: I can remenber the compuserve issue. When internet started, compuserve saw it as a threat, and fougth against, instead of becoming the biggest USA ISP.
Considering what ended up happening to AOL it probably wouldn't've mattered much in the end. They dominated the dialup era and were moving strongly into offering service over DSL when the FCC yanked the rug out from under all the 3rd party DSL resellers and gave the phone companies the same monopoly rights that the cable cos had. While AOL's got a decent internet content business still running they're a pale ghost of their former self. The same would've almost certainly have happened to CompuServe.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I enjoyed your comment, It has rhythm, and this makes its reading pleasurable.
I think you're absolutely rigth. I'm trying to show how even wealthy groups made big strategic mistakes as well as big strategic hits, and how is size prestige can hide the diference between.
So the CompuServe example if far from perfect, but is a try.
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I keep hearing about the "Post PC" era, but every office I've ever visited seems to demonstrate that this isn't the case.
Office is still pretty well untouched by competition, sure there are other Office suites, but take up in business seems to be minimal. Exchange is a massive part of that, but rarely mentioned in these articles.
Similarly, Windows Server dominates in office environments, Linux may power most web servers, but Windows 8 alone is used more often to access the web than any competitor, let alone when you add in Win7, XP, Vista, etc.
Indeed, more people access the Web from just IE in July this year than all mobile platforms together - and I assume those run on Windows - add in Chrome and Firefox (both of which have more Windows users than all other O/S together) and, it seems to me, the Post PC era is not quite here yet.
I know counting usage is tricky, but when pretty well all measures agree, I think we may be on safe territory:
Wiki[^]
W3 Schools[^]
Stat Counter[^]
I suspect a lot of this is Jounalistic bias - Journalists generally work in media organisations where, indubitably, Apple has a much larger traction than Microsoft. Maybe they should get out more.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I agree with you on this.
Also, have you tried using Libre Office and the like? A few hours of that has driven me towards looking to buy a copy of MS Office.
.-.
|o,o|
,| _\=/_ .-""-.
||/_/_\_\ /[] _ _\
|_/|(_)|\\ _|_o_LII|_
\._. |\_/|"` |_| ==== |_|
|_|_| ||" || ||
|-|-| ||LI o ||
|_|_| ||'----'||
/_/ \_\ /__| |__\
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We're proud to announce the first production release of the Ceylon language specification, compiler, and IDE. Ceylon 1.0 is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. Oh look! A new programming language to ignore.
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After 2016, Microsoft will stop accepting the collision-prone crypto algorithm. A hash not far enough
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We are excited to announce that on Windows Store apps and Windows Phone 8 apps, you can easily integrate Facebook Login. Facebook Login lets users sign in to Facebook only one time across multiple devices. If another app then wants to access the users Facebook account, the user just provides consent and doesn’t sign in again. Oh. Thanks. I'm sure... that will be ... useful to ... someone.
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Microsoft is unveiling a new Cybercrime Center that’s designed to battle malware, botnets, and other internet crime. The new futuristic facility has been built at the company’s Redmond headquarters as an area to combine Microsoft’s researchers, security experts, and lawyers into a central location. Microsoft has been tackling cybercrime for years, including efforts to take down various botnets, but the new secured facility takes things a step further. "I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP address."
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The power of Wolfram Alpha — the intelligent search engine that can answer natural language questions and solve complex math problems — is being built into an upcoming programming language that its founder, Stephen Wolfram, says will be incredibly easy to use. "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."
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Would that be the Wolfram Alpha that nobody uses?
The one that people trip over every 18 months then have a 10 minute game of "let's see what happens if I put this in?" before going back to a normal search engine?
It's going to revolutionize computing, just like the Segway revolutionized the layout of cities and office buildings.
Okay maybe I need some protein.
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IBM's Watson supercomputer is taking a big step towards public use. Today, the company announced plans to open Watson up to developers in 2014, establishing an open platform and API that would let coders build apps on top of the supercomputer's database and natural language skills. Now you can win on Jeopardy
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With never ending news about spying, Internet freedom and such, Mark Nottingham, the web infrastructure developer and the chairman of W3C group, has listed a couple of proposals that relate to the HTTP 2.0 protocol. Secure all the things!
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We’re releasing the Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications. In the two years since we first announced Dart, we’ve been working closely with early adopters to mature the project and grow the community. This release marks Dart's transition to a production-ready option for web developers. Google's other programming language turns 1.0
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Recently there has been a lot of flux in the Microsoft stack, leaving developers and leads wondering which technologies they should focus on. Microsoft's unwillingness to officially deprecate technologies such as Silverlight, instead allowing them to slowly fade away, only compounds the confusion. One way to find out is to review a little known document called the ".NET Technology Guide for Business Applications". Released earlier this year, the Guide offers insight into where Microsoft intends to put its efforts and what technologies should be avoided. /sniff. I'll miss you, Silverlight!
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What a load of bollocks:
Article said: WinForms uses very simple data binding and prefers a classic MVC or MVP approach. WPF, on the other hand, requires the user to learn a complex data binding framework in order to correctly use the MVVP pattern
Well, I never managed to understand / use databinding in WinForm (which I easily used for 4 years) where as in WPF I was convinced and using it in under a week!
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I managed to do it a few times in small parts of a WinForm app and regretted it every time. The level of WTF in the bugs/weirdity it created always ended up dwarfing the pain of writing a bunch of OnControlValueChanged() methods and doing it all manually.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Agreed. The XAML syntax takes time to learn, but any decent programmer should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Once you do, it's light years beyond anything WinForms can offer.
The only reason, as I see it, to stick with WinForms, is to avoid the performance hit from the rendering engine. WPF looks nicer, but renders a bit more slowly and uses more memory. Personally, I think it's more than worth it.
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after success of .NET in 2000 M$ kept screwing us developers making us to learn new API's (WPF, WCF...etc) which didn't really give us an edge in terms of new capability/feature
dont get me wrong, i passed the learning curve - just hope M$ understand they should start think not to screw their developers (there're so many new things you can learn if you just want to learn something - I dont want waste time on anything that dont give me new *capability*, certainly not another dying API like SL, or another winform-like API)
dev
modified 14-Nov-13 3:52am.
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Research from ThreatTrack Security revealed that 40% of security professionals found that a device used by a member of their company's senior leadership team had been infected by malware because of a visit to a pornographic website, and nearly 60% of the security professionals surveyed have cleaned malware from a device after an executive clicked on a malicious link or was duped by a phishing email. What else are they supposed to do to fill their day?
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The easy way to resolve this issue is to have dedicated porn tablets, or virtual machines which serves no purposes than porn.
Those of you who object, why? Exec always get the best gadget.
dev
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Just as long as I don't have to clean it afterwards.
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TTFN - Kent
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that's why I suggested virtual machines
dev
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