Microsoft Closing up the operating system API

In the "growth" days of Microsoft, before it was the corporate giant it is today, Microsoft where very keen to get anyone and everyone using their software. One way in which they did this was by providing robust and well supported API's opening up the operating systems to developers and allowing easy extension of existing controls.

Over the last 5 years, Microsoft have been peice by peice clawing back the control of their operating system by slowly and subversively closing off UI accessiblity. This is not an idle claim, review the following examples:

• Desktop Window Manager (Closed / Private API for all but TRIVIAL operations)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (Closed / Private API unless you use / buy their .NET development products. See DirectUIHWND control which is replacing many controls in Windows 7).
• Digital Rights Management (See IP6, Windows Media Player etc)

Now, of course, Microsoft want to still keep customers but at the same time ensure that the customer requires a continuing spend with their organisation. What has changed is they no longer want to keep customers by "giving them a bargin / open development platform". Not happy with the simple continuing spend of O/S upgrades and new technology they want to lock third parties out of certain areas of the operating system (leading to a monopoly control within their own solution with minority access given to the wider development community).

What they are seeking to do, is to tie customers to their product and force customers to use them, and them alone (though this is possibly the goal of most all big business sadly).

Abode I'm sure are partly to blame for this change in behavior. Adobe proved with Flash how a third party could "tie up" a market sector and "force" businesses to pay for their particular solution. The have done this repeatedly, PDF format being another "lock in" technology. Microsoft have tried to "reclaim" this sector with their "Silverlight" like for like solution but its just changing which company your locked into.

Whilst I appriciate all business needs to earn revenue to survive, business which feels it must "shackle" their customers to their solution is at best anti-competitive. Microsoft used to operate based on "incentive", that is, buy in to our solution we offer the best most flexible / simple (best?) solution. They used to do this well.

However, their direction right now is all about tying up the customer. A customer forced to stick to a provider due to artificialy concocted "reasons" (with an engineered technical reason) is not getting the best for their investment (since they no longer have the "power" of choice being locked to a single solution for reasons other than, superior service or reduced costs).

SHAME ON YOU MICROSOFT.

If you really do care about your customers, you will do the following:

1. Provide FULL documented low level API access to WPF and DWM.
2. Find OTHER alternative ways to protect your revenue streams. Ones which are based on serving the customer.

Finally don't just do this for the functions you have earmarked as "low profit" or "last generation". Expose and document the whole API (even if its only a one liner on a blog). Sure, you might mark some functions as not being supported yet or as volatile as sensible.

I susspect noone is listening.

I bought into Microsoft as was, I dislike the direction. Google sometimes seem to be inching in similar directions but so far they seem to have tempered this practice and kept it to an acceptable minimum.

A damn good website!

Still in love with my best friend, still "like a brother" to her. I got absolutely "fed up" today because she told me how I was "acting strange" and "scaring her away" which seemed to be based on me being "clingy". I live a good distance from her and she is sharing a flat with her ex-boyfriend (and not as "ex" as I would wish) so of course I am going to get "clingy" *sigh*. So, I searched for some random "fed up" search terms and came to here:

Straight Talking advice on Romance

I have to say that right now I very much love this straight talking site. Its just tempered nicely between advice and "wake up fool".

I am not actually sure I have any ideas to change my situation but I do feel I might understand it alot better.

I just hope the "content replicators" don't "ruin" it by whoring it about with advertisements.

Too many McGyver's not enough Engineers

I like McGyver's they get things done, they do whatever needs to be done in whatever way it can be done given the resources available and sometimes the solutions are just damn genius! Sometimes.

Mostly though, they are short sighted work arounds leaving increasingly bigger messes for Mc Gyver's boss's to sort out.. unfortunately, they are also trying to be McGyver.

We do need McGyver's in this world. The problem is, most all people are being McGyver's.

We need more people to be patient and consiencious observers of life who test their ideas and come up with theories. People who look forward to whats comming next and design for the future and to be built upon, not just always working in the space of Now.

Now is important (for sure), Now is when things get done, now is when things happen! It seems people today equate "progress" with "happening now". That is to say: people don't want to plan things out today and build tommorow, they want to start work right away. This is possibly an admirable trate, but without planning and understanding whats being built and its need we soon end up in the "then" needing a lot more "now".

Society does not support people to work for a better future, but it does support those in the now.

We need a mix, we need to encourage the genius McGyver's into places where they can help the world but managed so they don't just put off a bigger disaster in the future. We need to somehow train the other MyGyver's (the ones building a poor solution in the now for an even worse problem in the future) to be something "other" but which fits with their ability.

Now, my observation. The reason there are so many McGyver's is that business and government rewards that type of behavior and rewards genius and fool hardy with some level of equality (as much as anything is equal in societies built from a history of slavery and opression).

Whats needed is a clear reward, placed in the future, for following a Engineering path. One that a person can see building day by day and one which they can observe the conciquences of returning to be a McGyver.

I'd like to see more "scolarships", more "government funding" in such a way that it makes sense to do things right (not just to do things "profitable" which is certainly not equating to right). Actually when it comes down to it, this is the core of the problem... "profit" in terms of money does not equal "profit" in terms of society and people. It infact means the opposite.

Lets make "profit" in money to "profit" society.

Do No Reply type emails should be banned.

With the ever rising tide of "phishing" scams why is it that major players are still using "do not reply" email addresses. It seems to me this is basicly saying f**k off to the consumer, your not important enough for us to listen to you but we still want you f**king money now hand it over (even though its worded in the nicest tones possible).

I am making a policy. I am going to generally not deal with any company which emails me anything in the form of a "do not reply to this address" email (that is, anyone I'm not already dealing with *sigh*. I guess you can't change some things).

Say NO to do not reply!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 - less good for hardcore coders

In my last position I worked extensively with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and generally found it to be a good system. Until receiently...

The short version:

When running in debug mode the system changes pointer values at runtime.

This mostly will go unnoticed because the debugging IDE reports the correct values and even does the correct maths. So if you try doing the following:

((size_t)(&FunctionOne)) - ((size_t)(&FunctionTwo))

If you look at the result in the debugging IDE you might get (real example):

((size_t)(0x011ee0e0)) - ((size_t)(&0x011ee050)) = 0x00000090

However, if you try an apply this in your running code you get instead:

((size_t)(0x011d132f)) - ((size_t)(0x011d137a)) = 0xffffffb5

Now, I get what its trying to do here (at least I think I might) its actually adding a call stub to the functions which probably adds a bunch of debug checks to try and help out a poor developer.

Whats majorly annoying is:

1. It does not translate the addresses consistantly! So (like in the above example) addresses which where previously ordered top to bottom are transposed to the opposite effective order.  
2. If you attempted to perform an in memory transfer of this functions data you would copy garbage (or at least not the function proper).
3. Maths carried out on pointers is completely meaningless (e.g. deriving the length by the difference between two pointers is not possible, though arguably this is bad practice anyway).
4. Confusing because the IDE reports the correct values, addresses and maths (e.g. results in IDE will not match results of performing exact same math in code).

DoggyDude96a

Left feeling very negatively towards Disney and Pixar

First off, I think these two companies are great. Producing some fabulous stuff.

What I am left spitting bricks over is their damn, up their own arse self advertising at the beginning of their DVD's.

Firstly, I've bought your damn movie, don't force me to watch promotions of your other movies! >.<

Secondly, and this is the biggest annoyance, I got the Toy Story collection as a Christmas present and on every damn DVD theres a spoiler for the third movie and on the second DVD its PART OF THE INTRO TO THE DVD!

Oh my god! F**king annoying.

So, my "Arse Company of the Day award" suprisingly goes to Pixar and Disney DVD division.

Microsoft Outsource to China

Why should I care? I would feel the same way, but, for Windows Update!

When I worked for an UK Internet Technology Company, whilst working there there where a great number of unsolicited connections comming from Chinese and South African IP addresses.

Investigation into this traffic proved the traffic to be Hacker Activity and specifically Brute Force attempts to gain access to one of the Companies SQL servers.

In my time I have rarely seen attacks comming from English or Ammerican IP addresses. Those countries are probably just too well regulated and locked down and people have much easier ways of making money (aquiring information?).

So basicly the solution was historically to block incomming connections from any unknown Chineese IP addresses (which makes perfect sense, all the companies I've worked for have been UK, Ammerica or NZ based and have little business ties to China).

Until I reciently discovered that Microsoft seem to have distributed Windows Update world wide. Now, your friendly regional updates are sourced (or might be sourced) from China Seems crazy? Its happend to me (I thought I had a virus... maybe I do?). It just seems to be that Windows Update wants to download its latest batch of updates from China.

Just incase there is someone out there why might be able to say "hey, yup.. its a virus" and maybe I'm misjudging Microsoft? Heres the IP address(s) in question:

213.199.149.103

213.199.149.104

Registered to : Beijing Urban Network Co.,Ltd


Being accessed when I run Windows Update for Windows Vista Ulitimate.

Hey maybe its just got f'ed up and can't recognise where my IP is and thinks I'm in China.. I'm open to possibilities?