mbennett

Finally, and most importantly for the future of the company, Bill Gates hired the architect of the industrial-strength minicomputer operating system VMS and put him in charge of the OS/2 3.0 NT group. Dave Cutler’s first directive was to throw away all the old OS/2 code and start from scratch. The company wanted to build a high-performance, fault-tolerant, platform-independent, and fully networkable operating system. It would be known as Windows NT.

A couple of decades later, Dave Cutler is still around at Microsoft and worked on the hypervisor for the Xbox One at the ripe young age of 71, allowing games to run seamlessly beside apps.

From http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/8/5075216/xbox-one-tv-micros...

Underneath it all lies the magic — a system layer called the hypervisor that manages resources and keeps both platforms running optimally even as users bounce back and forth between games, apps, and TV.

To build the hypervisor, Multerer recruited the heaviest hitter he could find: David Cutler, a legendary 71-year-old Microsoft senior technical fellow who wrote the VMS mainframe operating system in 1975 and then came to Microsoft and served as the chief architect of Windows NT.

It appears his work bridging the two sides of the One has gone swimmingly: jumping between massively complex games like Forza Motorsport 5, TV, and apps like Skype and Internet Explorer was seamless when I got to play with a system in Redmond. Switching in and out of Forza was particularly impressive: the game instantly resumed, with no loading times at all. "It all just works for people," says Henshaw as he walks me through the demo. "They don’t have to think about what operating system is there."

The writer does not seem to be a paid journalist and they helpfully provide the raw data.

Perhaps someone will make a better chart and post it.

Reminds me of when CNET was blacklisted by Google for publishing Schmidt's personal info that was available on Google searches after he downplayed privacy.

http://boingboing.net/2009/12/09/google-ceo-says-priv.html

That doesn't help companies like Skyhook(and Mozilla if Firefox too is banned by the agreement) because almost all OEMs are current members who are bound to the agreement:

HTC

LG

Sony

Samsung Electronics

ASUSTek

Garmin

Huawei Technologies

Sony Mobile Communications (joined as Sony Ericsson)

Toshiba

Acer

ZTE Corporation

Alcatel Mobile Phones

Compal Communications

Dell

Foxconn

Haier

Kyocera

Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd.

NEC

Sharp Corporation

Saygus Corporation

Care to guess the marketshare of Android handsets not shipped by one of the above?

More and more things are being moved into Google Apps with each Android release. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

Anyway, I don't begrudge Google doing this, I only have an issue with the bastardization of the word "open". AOSP and Android are very different, and when people say Android is open, they actually mean AOSP is open, since Android as shipped on devices is very different and contains a lot of proprietary things.

If only there wasn't an agreement prohibiting such replacements.

Bonus points for calling it the "Open" Handset Alliance agreement.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

When I saw the comment, the story had 6 points i.e 5 upvotes.

Even making the huge assumption and leap that it was all MS employees and no one else voted on it who thought it was interesting news, I don't know if 5 counts as a "large contingent".

To be clear, I am not in favor of this campaign and I did not upvote the story.

Same with almost all smartphones with cameras and microphones that people have with them 24/7 and even take to their bedrooms and bathrooms. Even on Android, the baseband and many drivers are closed source. I fail to see how this is any worse.

IIRC, the biometrics profile is stored locally on the device, just like the iPhone 5S, and is never synced to the cloud. If you sign in on two consoles, you have to go through the biometrics setup process twice.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

Here is one real person driven to tears by the forced Google+ integration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

The article did say that 40 comments is the minimum cut-off before the flamewar penalty is applied.

However, the flamewar detector seems to be throwing the baby with the bathwater in many cases, with legitimate stories going off the front page(and then some posters mistakenly assuming it was because of flagging).

Here's a very good post about the chilling effect of the flamewar detector.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6597049

The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.

Sure it does, but when some of the profit increases are made by deliberately decreasing contrast of the background of the ads and avoiding borders to increase ad clicks, especially from old people who are unable to see contrast [0][1], that's when it crosses the line into "decline" of the user experience. They(along with other search engines) got smacked by the FTC [2], it's an interesting read.

That plus shoving Google+ down the throat of people and making them literally cry [3] (yes I mean literally) in an effort to compete with Facebook at any cost leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and reminds me of how Microsoft got it's M$ moniker.

[0] http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it

[1] http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...

[2] http://www.ftc.gov/os/2013/06/130625searchenginegenerallette...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

Also, since it attempts to show how much the values of the shares change, it should be adjusted with the dividends paid out during that time.