10 ms·

It is great to see Microsoft taking many steps to court hackers these days. What would convince me they have turned the corner ? 1. Windows playing well with o

It is great to see Microsoft taking many steps to court hackers these days. What would convince me they have turned the corner ? 1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux 2. Dont use patents to stifle free software [1][2] 3. Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux and offer immunity for projects like Wine for reimplementing Windows API. Do not change APIs unreasonably to sabotage these projects. Let Windows compete on its own merit ( speed, performance, stabilty, backwards compatibility, hackability etc ). [1]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/microsoft-235-patent-specific-patent-infringements-in-linux/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/microsoft-235-pat... [2]http://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-android-licensing-agreements-revealed-by-chinese-gov/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-a...

raverbashing 12y ago
About 1 I kind of understand, you're installing/upgrading so something might be broken and it overrides this (not sure how it works with UEFI though), there should be an option "don't override the MBR" (or the modern equivalent) But yeah, I am skeptical about this "New Microsoft"
archagon 12y ago
For me, #1 would be to allow Metro apps for Windows to be developed outside the App Store.
dghf 12y ago
> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux Office maybe, but is there any demand for IE on Linux?
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  Web development, but you can try to use a few virtual machines to run IE 11 & 9
  - dghf 12y ago
    Wouldn't you still need to use VMs even if IE were available for Linux? Aren't sites supposed to be tested for browsers and platforms? E.g., a site may show an undesired behaviour under Chrome for Windows but not under Chrome for Linux (or vice-versa). N.B. not a web dev, so please put me straight if I'm wrong.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    You can actually just go grab the wms from MS of modern.ie the only limitations is that they can't run for more than one hour.
- zqfm 12y ago
  If the new IE any good, I'd be willing to try it on my Linux box.
- lozf 12y ago
  Both times I booted in to Windows over the last ~18 months were to apply for Visas on sites that wouldn't work properly with either Firefox, Chrome or Opera in Linux. With most sites I'd just move on, but for a visa application with no viable alternative... Sure, that's a problem that ought to be addressed by those sites, but it's still a possible use case.
- Spivak 12y ago
  If you assume the goal of the IE team is to just have as many users as possible then porting IE would be a huge step forward. If you use anything in addition to Windows then you're going probably going to limit your browser choices to ones that are cross platform which right now basically means Chrome or Firefox.
higherpurpose 12y ago
> Do not change APIs unreasonably to sabotage these projects Forget about Windows. That's a malicious thing they've always done with Office, even after promising to adhere to a "standard". It's so ridiculous even their own different Office versions aren't properly compatible with that "standard".
- emodendroket 12y ago
  That's because it supports a ton of features which the standard doesn't mention. I'd imagine the standard has more to do with being able to make documents Office can handle with a subset of its features than enabling feature parity.
emodendroket 12y ago
I'd say the Windows API is rather stable, to be honest. Mostly because MS is big on backwards compatibility. Is this really a problem for WINE?
papaf 12y ago
1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux I hadn't used Windows for about 12 years when it came on a new PC that I bought. I installed Steam and played games on it for about 2 months. Then when I upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 it offered to repair one of my Linux partitions. Thats nice I thought. It was really inconvenient when it overwrote my root linux partition and I had to waste an hour repartitioning and replacing Windows with something a little less aggressive. Maybe in another 12 years things will have improved and I will be able to try it again...
xtrumanx 12y ago
Off-topic, but have you figured out a solution to your first point. I went deep into the rabbit hole and learned a whole lot on how booting my computers works at the time but I gave up and have to spam F8 when I turn on my computer now so I don't boot into Windows.
- simula67 12y ago
  I had to reinstall GRUB uefi. Afterwards, I followed the advice from here : http://askubuntu.com/a/371589 http://askubuntu.com/a/371589 Edit : Care to explain why this is getting downvoted ?
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    Thank you so much for the link. Running bcdedit on Windows did the trick. Who knew it was possible to let Windows fix the issue it caused. I can now finally press my power button and walk away knowing it'll boot into Ubuntu in peace.
- pix64 12y ago
  It sounds like you have two different hard drives. You should change your boot drive in BIOS.
diminoten 12y ago
> Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible.
- thrownaway122 12y ago
  > You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible. Yet is is. It is a consequence of the fact that windows overwrites things like the master boot record that live outside of it's partition on a hard drive without asking the user first. Yes dual booting is possible. But as always installing windows second makes everything else unbootable (until fixed).
  - joenathan 12y ago
    >without asking the user first You must be kidding.
    - hackmiester 12y ago
      Why would she be? Care to actually write a small bit about your opinion so that we can have a discussion?
      - joenathan 12y ago
        Well last time I checked operating systems don't install themselves, a user has to download the setup or insert a disk and there are quite a few user agreement prompts before anything installs.
        hackmiester 12y ago
        Yes, but the thing is that, when you do this with many other OSes, they install in a manner such that the other OSes on the machine still work. There's no warning that this isn't the case with Windows.
dragontamer 12y ago
> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux Linux is not a platform. At best, Microsoft can port IE and Office to Ubuntu or Red Hat. But "Linux in General" is a horrible misnomer that needs to be eradicated. Just because a piece of software works in one configuration of Linux does NOT mean it will work on other configurations. "Linux" is a horrible platform. You have to build on top of actual platforms (ie: Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu). Beyond that, IE is DirectX rendered now IIRC. Porting IE implies porting DirectX, which will probably never happen. (DirectX relies on specific hardware drivers...).
SloopJon 12y ago
4. Don't ram a half-baked document format through ISO.
josteink 12y ago
> 1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux It does, as long as you use UEFI boot, since this was specifically designed to allow clean booting from multiple OSes without creating conflicts. If you're using legacy MBR/BIOS boot, supporting multibooting involves so many unreliable hacks, you can't realistically expect it to be supported by anyone.
- michaelmrose 12y ago
  Except every linux distro on earth...ever. Its sufficient just to NOT overwrite the mbr with your own bootloader if you see one is already there. Pretending this is hard is pretty disingenuous.
  - josteink 12y ago
    And how do you separate a "good" Linux/BSD Bootloader from random bits? What about private/custom grub-builds? A single false positive here means a valid windows 8 install will fail to boot because a Bootloader was not written. Do you think Microsoft is willing to take that risk? Just leave MBR behind. UEFI does what you want. UEFI is nice.
    - anonbanker 12y ago
      Except for that whole "secure boot" business, where I have to half-install a fedora or Ubuntu install in order to get a proper signed key, so that I can wipe the drive and install gentoo or arch.
      - josteink 12y ago
        Secure boot is optional in the UEFI spec. You don't need to enable it if you don't want it. And a compliant UEFI firmware should let you provide your own trust keys. Which by default makes it more reputable and secure than the internet CA-model everyone else is willing to put their trust in. So tell me what your problem is. I'm genuinely curious.
PopsiclePete 12y ago
I don't think they're courting the hackers. I think they've realized they're on a slow and steady path towards irrelevancy. They have the office market. Yay. I bet that's growing at, what, 2% a year? Maybe? They have home pc's as well. Great. But where it matters? Mobile, cloud, start-ups - all the new, cool, exciting, future stuff - they're basically absent. And the new CEO knows that. So they open-sourced .NET, the compilers, everything. First-class support for OS X and Linux. Is that because they like it? No, I doubt it. It's to stay alive and relevant in the next 10-15 years.

raverbashing 12y ago

About 1 I kind of understand, you're installing/upgrading so something might be broken and it overrides this (not sure how it works with UEFI though), there should be an option "don't override the MBR" (or the modern equivalent) But yeah, I am skeptical about this "New Microsoft"

archagon 12y ago

For me, #1 would be to allow Metro apps for Windows to be developed outside the App Store.

dghf 12y ago

> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux Office maybe, but is there any demand for IE on Linux?

Zardoz84 12y ago
Web development, but you can try to use a few virtual machines to run IE 11 & 9
- dghf 12y ago
  Wouldn't you still need to use VMs even if IE were available for Linux? Aren't sites supposed to be tested for browsers and platforms? E.g., a site may show an undesired behaviour under Chrome for Windows but not under Chrome for Linux (or vice-versa). N.B. not a web dev, so please put me straight if I'm wrong.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  You can actually just go grab the wms from MS of modern.ie the only limitations is that they can't run for more than one hour.
zqfm 12y ago
If the new IE any good, I'd be willing to try it on my Linux box.
lozf 12y ago
Both times I booted in to Windows over the last ~18 months were to apply for Visas on sites that wouldn't work properly with either Firefox, Chrome or Opera in Linux. With most sites I'd just move on, but for a visa application with no viable alternative... Sure, that's a problem that ought to be addressed by those sites, but it's still a possible use case.
Spivak 12y ago
If you assume the goal of the IE team is to just have as many users as possible then porting IE would be a huge step forward. If you use anything in addition to Windows then you're going probably going to limit your browser choices to ones that are cross platform which right now basically means Chrome or Firefox.

higherpurpose 12y ago

> Do not change APIs unreasonably to sabotage these projects Forget about Windows. That's a malicious thing they've always done with Office, even after promising to adhere to a "standard". It's so ridiculous even their own different Office versions aren't properly compatible with that "standard".

emodendroket 12y ago
That's because it supports a ton of features which the standard doesn't mention. I'd imagine the standard has more to do with being able to make documents Office can handle with a subset of its features than enabling feature parity.

emodendroket 12y ago

I'd say the Windows API is rather stable, to be honest. Mostly because MS is big on backwards compatibility. Is this really a problem for WINE?

papaf 12y ago

1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux I hadn't used Windows for about 12 years when it came on a new PC that I bought. I installed Steam and played games on it for about 2 months. Then when I upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 it offered to repair one of my Linux partitions. Thats nice I thought. It was really inconvenient when it overwrote my root linux partition and I had to waste an hour repartitioning and replacing Windows with something a little less aggressive. Maybe in another 12 years things will have improved and I will be able to try it again...

xtrumanx 12y ago

Off-topic, but have you figured out a solution to your first point. I went deep into the rabbit hole and learned a whole lot on how booting my computers works at the time but I gave up and have to spam F8 when I turn on my computer now so I don't boot into Windows.

simula67 12y ago
I had to reinstall GRUB uefi. Afterwards, I followed the advice from here : http://askubuntu.com/a/371589 http://askubuntu.com/a/371589 Edit : Care to explain why this is getting downvoted ?
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  Thank you so much for the link. Running bcdedit on Windows did the trick. Who knew it was possible to let Windows fix the issue it caused. I can now finally press my power button and walk away knowing it'll boot into Ubuntu in peace.
pix64 12y ago
It sounds like you have two different hard drives. You should change your boot drive in BIOS.

diminoten 12y ago

> Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible.

thrownaway122 12y ago
> You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible. Yet is is. It is a consequence of the fact that windows overwrites things like the master boot record that live outside of it's partition on a hard drive without asking the user first. Yes dual booting is possible. But as always installing windows second makes everything else unbootable (until fixed).
- joenathan 12y ago
  >without asking the user first You must be kidding.
  - hackmiester 12y ago
    Why would she be? Care to actually write a small bit about your opinion so that we can have a discussion?
    - joenathan 12y ago
      Well last time I checked operating systems don't install themselves, a user has to download the setup or insert a disk and there are quite a few user agreement prompts before anything installs.
      - hackmiester 12y ago
        Yes, but the thing is that, when you do this with many other OSes, they install in a manner such that the other OSes on the machine still work. There's no warning that this isn't the case with Windows.

dragontamer 12y ago

> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux Linux is not a platform. At best, Microsoft can port IE and Office to Ubuntu or Red Hat. But "Linux in General" is a horrible misnomer that needs to be eradicated. Just because a piece of software works in one configuration of Linux does NOT mean it will work on other configurations. "Linux" is a horrible platform. You have to build on top of actual platforms (ie: Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu). Beyond that, IE is DirectX rendered now IIRC. Porting IE implies porting DirectX, which will probably never happen. (DirectX relies on specific hardware drivers...).

SloopJon 12y ago

4. Don't ram a half-baked document format through ISO.

josteink 12y ago

> 1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux It does, as long as you use UEFI boot, since this was specifically designed to allow clean booting from multiple OSes without creating conflicts. If you're using legacy MBR/BIOS boot, supporting multibooting involves so many unreliable hacks, you can't realistically expect it to be supported by anyone.

michaelmrose 12y ago
Except every linux distro on earth...ever. Its sufficient just to NOT overwrite the mbr with your own bootloader if you see one is already there. Pretending this is hard is pretty disingenuous.
- josteink 12y ago
  And how do you separate a "good" Linux/BSD Bootloader from random bits? What about private/custom grub-builds? A single false positive here means a valid windows 8 install will fail to boot because a Bootloader was not written. Do you think Microsoft is willing to take that risk? Just leave MBR behind. UEFI does what you want. UEFI is nice.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    Except for that whole "secure boot" business, where I have to half-install a fedora or Ubuntu install in order to get a proper signed key, so that I can wipe the drive and install gentoo or arch.
    - josteink 12y ago
      Secure boot is optional in the UEFI spec. You don't need to enable it if you don't want it. And a compliant UEFI firmware should let you provide your own trust keys. Which by default makes it more reputable and secure than the internet CA-model everyone else is willing to put their trust in. So tell me what your problem is. I'm genuinely curious.

PopsiclePete 12y ago

I don't think they're courting the hackers. I think they've realized they're on a slow and steady path towards irrelevancy. They have the office market. Yay. I bet that's growing at, what, 2% a year? Maybe? They have home pc's as well. Great. But where it matters? Mobile, cloud, start-ups - all the new, cool, exciting, future stuff - they're basically absent. And the new CEO knows that. So they open-sourced .NET, the compilers, everything. First-class support for OS X and Linux. Is that because they like it? No, I doubt it. It's to stay alive and relevant in the next 10-15 years.