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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
09/17/09
haha. Omg. nice opening sentence.
"The other week, we did this amazing article about how fucking amazing apple is. So since some of you complained that fucking amazing apple weren't the only computer company out there, we decided to do a follow up article on Microsoft, which is the biggest rotting turd on top of the decaying compost pile that is called the computer industry".
09/17/09
09/17/09
... and Giz, can you axe the alcohol ads on the main pages? I got kicked out of a lab today because of our zero-tolerance towards alcohol and other drugs.
09/17/09
Granted, there's still tons of debate about it. But for Microsoft's part, putting in their support of the video and audio tags for the HTML5 standard is at least a step in the right direction. I wouldn't expect a patch to come out for IE8 next week, but, according to them, whatever issues they have with the multimedia tags, they intend to work through it.
All the better, I say.
09/17/09
I feel like it should be "Dear Giz, can you give me a few reasons or examples why Microsoft is more closed and stupid in regards to standards than Apple?"
09/17/09
It may be less exciting to paint Microsoft as a good guy once in a while, but they are directly responsible for a lot thanks to their long partnerships with IBM and Intel: DOS, FAT, USB, DirectX, etc.
09/17/09
09/17/09
A lot of what Microsoft has done over the years came from the fact that most standards bodies are far, far too slow to keep up with market demand - and that for the most part, there really isn't much of a penalty for not complying with standards if there's no interoperability issues.
Microsoft doesn't care if you want to interop Word - that's not really their problem: it's the file format for their word processor - why on earth would they have a need to let other apps work with it? That's just helping the competition.
The Web really was the first (and in some ways, is the ONLY) case where interop really becomes an issue. But while we're on it: how come no one dumps on Adobe for not opening Photoshop files? Or for having made Postscript and to a lesser degree PDF files licensed technology for so long?
And how about Apple with Firewire (which IS a standard) and their now infamous 25c per device fee?
It's easy to cherry pick but the fact remains that this is a common practice across all companies. Microsoft just happens to be the biggest and most visible one.
09/17/09
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09/17/09
It's funny how, even to this day, people accuse Apple of using proprietary technology and think MS is more "standard", when historically the exact opposite is true.
09/17/09
Shamoon? *suspicious look*.....Do you know anything about this?
09/17/09
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09/17/09
Historically the opposite is true... what planet are you from?
All I've got to say is AppleTalk...
As a unix person who dealt with LDAP way, way back when (10 years ago against Irix 6.2 machines) I've never really messed much with AD but I can say historically there's a reason. X.500 didn't support a lot of features (features especially needed compared to Novel) that were needed. MS was trying to push into Novell networks against their directory server, which also is a bastardization of X.500 but Novell was used pretty much everywhere in business and X.500 was used hardly anywhere. MS did the same thing and extended X500.
Here's what Microsoft does, if a standard doesn't do all the stuff they want it to do, they make it close and extend it. Other people (often grumpy unix guys like myself) after a while finally get a new standard out that does what MS has extended but often in a different way that is more efficient/cleaner. Instead of switching to that new method, MS continues doing their own thing.
Apple just does things to do them, doesn't even try to be close to an original standard and extend it they go do their own thing... which sometimes is pretty damn good (OSX) and sometimes is completely annoying (AppleTalk)
09/17/09
But in all fairness, back then there wasn't really a network protocol standard. Sure, TCP/IP existed, but this was before in-house networks were connected to the internet. Everyone had their own protocol back then: Unix had TCP/IP, Novell had IPX, MS had Netbeui, and Apple had AppleTalk.
09/17/09
Then IE became the dominant player and W3C/IETF decided to finally get off their butts and implement some of the extensions in the HTML standard - but did it differently than the dominant player.
That left Microsoft in a weird position. Do they break compatibility with all the sites who used their extensions or do they ignore a standard that at the time, no one used?
Fastforward to today and we have a lot of people who have no clue as to the history of these events who are yelling at MSFT do to it *their* way.
09/18/09
But combine appletalk + localtalk and you have an unholly alliance, where (at the time I was working with them) 10base ethernet was a common standard. If I remember right you also had to use some crazy specialized serial cable because you of course couldn't use a standard rs232 like everybody else for modems
09/18/09
09/17/09
03/26/09
But if I can't use ffdshow in those in Win 7... forget it. It's no longer useful as an OS to me.
03/26/09
If this turns out to be some method of protecting users from potentially hazardous codecs, I say forget it. There's no need to nanny people in such a fashion.
03/26/09
Boohoo, when I play a video back it uses a built in codec that works and I can't alternately choose to render it with a third party codec that does exactly the same thing...? Can someone explain to me why I should care? What compelling reason is there for me to say "I want to view h.264s with a third party codec that I install instead of the built in one"?
This isn't forcing a user to use IE over Firefox, where there may be a clear user preference or reason to provide options.
I have no knowledge or information about this, but I wonder if baking certain codecs right in is part of a performance movement... If it were a requirement to be able to decode h.264 video on a low end netbook I could see all corners being cut to boost performance, even at the cost of some flexibility.
03/26/09
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03/26/09
RTFA fail. on myself. ouch.
12/19/08
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12/19/08
Remember, though - all it takes is one clued in guy to rip the stream and Joe Blow can download it over Limewire forever. This is why DRM really doesn't work.
12/19/08