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Comment: Re:After your personal info... (Score 5, Informative) 171

by pyrbrand (#37417804) Attached to: Microsoft Previews Compiler-as-a-Service Software

No, you're not getting it right, this is a service as in a process always running on your computer, not as in a cloud based compiler. The point is your program can dynamically call the compiler with additional source code to be compiled so your program can modify itself even though it's in a relatively static language like C#.

Comment: Re:Nokia is dead (Score 1) 212

by pyrbrand (#35275864) Attached to: First Alpha of Qt For Android Released

Every organization that has ever partnered with microsoft has lost, big time

I don't know, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Lenovo and a large number of other companies have done quite well over the last 30 years selling hardware for MS software.

(standard disclaimer: as my profile states, I work for MS, but not on anything related to phones)


by pyrbrand (#33181968) Attached to: DRM-Free Game Suffers 90% Piracy, Offers Amnesty

Here in reality-land, what would have been is irrelevant. What matters is how statistics like this will effect developer and publisher behavior. The answer is exactly what the grand parent poster said - they'll begin abandoning the PC as a platform except in specialized cases where they can induce onerous or clever DRM like storing content on servers and come up with other mechanisms that require authentication.

You can't expect people who make, sell, advertise, distribute games for a living to sit back and say "Oh, 90% of our users are pirating our game, I bet they wouldn't have bought the game anyway if they couldn't have gotten it for free," even if that were the obvious logical conclusion to come to (which it really isn't). They're going to say "Oh shit, 90% of our users are pirating our game, let's stop that and hope even a couple percent of them end up buying it and that will give us 10, 20, 30% greater sales," even if it's not necessarily possible to prevent a most of the piracy.

Comment: Re:Dear Microsoft (Score 4, Informative) 497

by pyrbrand (#32586586) Attached to: Miscreants Exploit Google-Outed Windows XP Zero-Day

You mean like the one mentioned in the article? 'The next day, it [Microsoft] posted a "Fix it" tool that automatically unregisters the HCP protocol handler, a move Microsoft said "would help block known attack vectors before a security update is available."'

As far as pushing this to users automatically, people get angry when you break shit without asking them.

Comment: Re:Servers (Score 1) 262

by pyrbrand (#32265850) Attached to: Microsoft Warns of Windows 7 Graphics Flaw
For most server uses you're right, it doesn't make sense to use Aero, which is why it isn't turned on by default. However, aside from running a terminal server for your users to connect to (for example with a nightly build of an app you're building for testers to use), a lot of devs use WS as their desktop OS for development. This was even more common with WS2k3 as early versions of WS2k8 made it hard to do, but they've added back in optional "desktop services" to make it possible to do again. Think about it, if you're hosting a local dev version of the site you're developing it makes things much easier than running a second box. That way your staging server can run only builds checked in to source control and each dev runs their own version with their local changes. There were also some cool virtual machine technologies that came only with WS2k8 before Windows 7 came out. Still are probably.

Comment: Re:IE9 on SVG Test Suite (Score 1) 152

by pyrbrand (#31641088) Attached to: Microsoft Adopts SVG For Internet Explorer 9

A skeptic, that is to say, anyone who can recall Microsoft's behavior over the past 20 years, might wonder if Microsoft ran the official SVG test suite on all competing browsers to find areas where they failed. They then built a second test where they know the others will fail.

You mean like Hickson did with Acid3? Whatever set of tests you're using, if they're incomplete (and they always will be), they will be biased in terms of coverage. Some test suites like Acid3 are meant as a bludgeon to wag the dog of a competitor or certain organization, some are designed to ensure that features you care about are supported in they way you believe they should be, and others are just QA guys doing their best to make sure their product works. In any event, whichever set of tests you code to, you will have the highest passing rate on those tests, it doesn't need to be malicious.

Comment: Re:Why not wireless? (Score 1) 608

by pyrbrand (#31193196) Attached to: Suggestions For a Coax-To-Ethernet Solution?
Because wireless is slow and unreliable, especially in a big house? Because you've got interference at 2.4Ghz (microwaves, wireless phones and toys, lots of neighbors, other signals etc)? There are a lot of scenarios that even with good signal don't work so well over wireless - media streaming, file backup, gaming if the connection is even a little wonky. In an ideal scenario where you're getting about ~50mbps (and I don't really see even 802.11n getting these speeds in my 2BR apt) on wireless, you're still 20x slower than 1gbps, which can still be frustratingly slow to copy files over.

Comment: Re:I blame the IE 'mentality' (Score 5, Informative) 406

by pyrbrand (#30814692) Attached to: France Tells Its Citizens To Abandon IE, Others Disagree
Actually, any add on can be enabled for only a specific set of pages. For instance, to restrict the use of Flash in IE8, to go Tools->Manage Add-Ons then under the Adobe published by section, double click the "Shockwave Flash Object" (I don't know why Adobe can't just call it Flash), then under the text field titled "You have approved this add-on to run on the following websites:", click the button "Remove all sites". Now you'll get a gold bar on every site that uses flash in which you can allow the site to run flash or not. Not quite as nice as Flashblock, but still pretty good.
